Abstract
Reviewed by: Kathy Davis, VU University, the Netherlands
Hair is a perfect topic for feminist analysis. Gender identities are constructed through hair. Hair plays a role in the politics of race, sexuality and nation. Hair can be mobilized for acts of resistance and subversion, just as it can be a vehicle for signalling compliance to cultural and religious norms. As one of the authors in Feminist interrogations of women’s head hair notes, “hair is never just hair. It has consistently served as a second, nonverbal language to express critical sentiments, telling the story of women’s lives like nothing else does” (Maine, 2018, p. 122).
This book brings together contributions on a wide variety of meanings and practices around women’s hair. While there has already been much written on the subject of hair, there is, as the editors set out in the introduction, a lacuna in the literature which has often focused on body hair (and its removal) or compared men’s and women’s hair practices. What is needed, in their view, are more studies devoted to women’s head hair (p. 6). To this end, they have invited contributors to address the private and public meanings associated with women’s hair from a feminist perspective. Topics range from red-headed girls in children’s literature, biographical changes in lesbian hair styles, and the problems of going grey, to how hair straightening products affect black women’s health, the wearing of wigs in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and representations of hair on album covers. The contributions come from different disciplines – psychology, sociology, media studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and performance studies. The theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives are different, although there is a clear preference for online research, notably chat groups about different kinds of hair and hair practices. What the chapters share is a concern with how hair can be a symbol of women’s oppression as well as an opportunity for agency or even rebellion or – as the title puts it – hair as women’s crown of glory or shame.
Like many collections, this one is uneven. It has several excellent essays that made me think about women’s head hair differently. For example, Margo Maine, a clinical psychologist specializing in eating disorders, shows what hair means to her patients, often providing their salvation, as the “only body part they ever liked” (p. 113). Hair was something that helped them manage their despair with their bodily flaws and imperfections. She provides several clinical vignettes of patients in which she shows the complex “interconnections between the hair on our heads and the deepest emotional experiences of our hearts” (p. 121). This is, in my view, embodied feminist theorizing at its best. Another provocative essay is Shiri Aloni Yaari’s exploration of how women artists have used head shaving as a way to express their distress (e.g. the Mexican painter Frieda Kahlo’s cropped hair following her turbulent separation from Diego Rivera) and their rebellion (e.g. the Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo shaving all her body hair and walking naked and hairless along the canals of Venice during the 2001 Biennale). She shows how these ‘tonsorial acts’ transcend the boundaries of geography, race and gender, confronting audiences with the vulnerability of the body, with shame, pain and ugliness, but also with defiance and empowerment (Yaari, 2018, p. 50).
Aside from these occasional jewels, many of the essays were disappointing for different reasons. First, many of the authors did little more than summarize work that has already been done on women’s hair and hair practices without adding anything new. The most egregious, in my opinion, were the essays on the politics of black hair. There has been so much excellent scholarship on how racism has affected women’s experiences with their hair and their hairstyling practices, including nuanced discussions about the complex politics of hair straightening versus ‘natural’ hair (Mercer, 1991; hooks, 1992; Collins, 2009, just to name a few). I would have liked to have seen hair straightening embedded in a more careful history of African American women’s hair practices, including the rise of hairstyling as a profession for black women as well as a more historically accurate discussion of the connection of hair-straightening and hair products to ‘racial uplift’ ideologies of the 19th century. In a similar vein, the negotiations between generations of black women who grew up in an era where hair-straightening was desirable and hair salons a space for support and empowerment and the ‘Black is Beautiful’ generation sporting their liberating Afros is much more complicated than it appears in this book (see Rooks, 1996, for a nuanced discussion). I found the assumption that hair can ever be ‘natural’ misleading and theoretically untenable since many of the so-called ‘natural’ hair styles, including Afros, can require considerable care to maintain, and hair has by virtue of the ease by which it can be manipulated been a perfect vehicle for expressing a wide range of identities throughout history and across cultures. ‘Natural hair’ is more about political ideology than the realities of women’s lives. For all of these reasons, the essays on black hair practices in this book had little new to add to what has already been written on the subject and, more problematically, left out many of the nuances and contradictions in black hair politics that have been explored so adeptly in previous work.
Other essays were superficial, partly – in my view – because of their over-reliance on online research (Facebook, Twitter). While this is a legitimate form of research, its focus is on opinions and attitudes. Indeed, many of the essays used quotes from online chats without analysing them in any substantial way. In order to explore processes of meaning-making and to show how individual women make sense of the contradictory meanings, problematic practices, and the contested politics of hair, face-to-face interviews would have been better.
Last but not least, I should mention stumbling over a footnote which I found offensive enough to deserve some attention. One of the Israeli authors explained her decision to exclude Palestinians from her study on curly hair with the following statement: “Because Moslem and Christian Arab citizens are so fundamentally different [sic.] from Jewish Israelis in nearly every conceivable aspect, the scope of this study cannot take into account the former two groups” (Okavi-Parush, Kam, & Barak-Brandes, 2018, p. 91). While the intent of this statement may have been to explain a methodological decision concerning selection, the way it is formulated hovers dangerously on the border of biological or cultural racism. Since when are bodies ‘fundamentally different’? Certainly curly hair is not limited to Jewish Israelis. Indeed, the authors of this essay had no compunction about comparing Jewish Israeli curly hair to the hair of black African American women, so why did Arab women’s curly hair need to be excluded so explicitly? If the professed commitment of this book really is to show how women universally are the targets of discipline through their hair, regardless of their culture (p. 5) and that the fact that the meanings of hair are constantly being negotiated and, therefore, inevitably thwart attempts to essentialize women’s identities through their hair (p. 12), this footnote should not have been allowed to stand.
In conclusion, Feminist interrogations of women’s head hair: Crown of glory and shame is a book which takes up an interesting topic for feminists, but does not always manage to do justice to its richness and complexity. Sadly, it is a missed opportunity considering that women’s head hair can provide insight into so many issues of relevance to women’s lives.