Performance, Practice and Phenomenon

I'm toying with using bits from performance theory, practice theory and phenomenology in my dissertation. And it's been a little more trying than I'd have liked, so I'm going to get some thoughts down here.

I like the idea of phenomenology--exploring the sensory world of past cultures. And this is a little more grounded for my project than for others, since I'm talking about things that were in physical contact with the body. But at the same time, this problematically assumes that the physical experience hasn't changed, and I'm not entirely sure how helpful it's going to be in actually talking about anything new and different. Yes, the physical experience of wearing something that limited movement can impact the possible work one does, but can I actually tell how much/ how often an item was worn? If it only restricts movement when worn and was only worn for special occasions, that's not really a significant impact, is it.

Performance theory also has its pros and cons. Judith Butler talks about how people 'perform' their gender, but she's talking about an unconscious performance. I think it's a more subtle action than that, a performance that is both conscious and unconscious. When we interact with other people, we are always performing ourselves--the face I present to my best friend is not precisely the same as the one i present to the chair of my committee, or my mother, or my boyfriend. This isn't lying or acting, and these faces aren't hugely different from each other, but there are always little status signals or emphases on this personality aspect over that one that make a difference. This is especially visible (to me, having studied linguistics) in the register shifts that lead to different word choice and pronunciation depending on who's around you. And all of this is slightly unconscious, but it's also something that you're aware of. You know that you can't hug your boss like you would your mom, and so you carry your body differently, you feel its physical relationship to their body differently, which informs your movement and your thinking and your speech. This is both conscious and unconscious, and as you can tell, I'm having a lot of trouble articulating it! Looking into actual writing on acting, perhaps they discuss this explicitly.

Practice theory is still a little confusing for me. It all comes from Bourdieu and his theory of practice, but it's gone so many places since then- basically, the way you always do something comes to shape the way you think. So the fact that you have to move around the table to get to the door influences the way you think about the door. Your practice is influencing your thought. But I feel like this works really well for spatial analyses, for architecture, and not necessarily so well for clothing. If the clothing you habitually wear is influencing your thought, isn't that more likely to be due to its physical contact than to its mental influence? Are the two separable?