A Cultural History of Hair in the Modern Age by Geraldine Biddle-Perry;

Author:Geraldine Biddle-Perry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

FIGURE 6.8: The punk trend continues. Punk Girls with shaved heads and dayglo Mohicans, Morecambe, United Kingdom, 2003. Photo: de:Benutzer:Calzinide—Own work, Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

Riot Grrrls articulated a sense of agency over the cultivation and meaning of women’s bodies by parodying feminine artifice, using outrageous makeup, and coloring their hair with vegetable dyes. Punk DIY (do it yourself) fashion and hair styling were aligned with a growing natural hair movement to expose the commercialized nature and limitations of gender norms. The style challenged hetero-feminine definitions of appropriate womanhood that situate women as ideally desirable to cismen.56 Through a gendered bricolage of studded leather gear, “girly” bows, and cheerleading skirts, Riot Grrrls reclaimed the playfulness of girlhood in ways they felt were missing from second “wave” feminism and those who viewed fashions in clothes, hair styling, and makeup as oppressive to women.57

THE GENDER POLITICS OF THE GLOBAL HAIR INDUSTRY

Hair is uniquely malleable, and so its cultural significance and symbolic power are various. Ethnically, racially, and ideologically diverse, old and young, heterosexual, gay, bi, and transgender men and women have appropriated oppositional hairstyles and hair practices. However, while “fashion and dissidence may combine,”58 Butler makes it clear that an identikit of fashions, including hairstyles, cannot just be “freely” selected from a range of possible options and then “tried on” for size.59 Rather, performativity is a system of overlapping tropes of social revelation and disavowal that reveal the compulsory rather than arbitrary means of its production. We are engaged in cultures with symbolic codes that are difficult, if not impossible, to avoid. This sort of compulsion is easy to see in modern western religious, or otherwise ritualized, hair-styling practices that have indeed rippled out globally in the modern age.

Contemporary fashions in the global north, particularly in cosmopolitan contexts, show that it is sometimes acceptable to indulge in seemingly contradictory hair regimes. New trends such as dyeing Black hair platinum blonde or the “man bun” are ambiguously raced, gendered, or sexed.60 These hairstyles suggest autonomy from and resistance to proscriptive body norms and the hegemonic structures of oppression of which they are a part. However, structures of inequality do not easily disappear. When white women wear hair extensions, for example, this is generally to accomplish length—think reality TV celebrity and heiress Paris Hilton—rather than when Black women use them to change the texture of their hair. How women wear hair devices reflects historical race, class, and gender hierarchies.

As the brightly colored, intricate, and towering art pieces seen on the streets and in Black hair shows reveal, hair additions are a vehicle for Black cultural innovation, creativity, and commercial enterprise (see Figure 6.9). Grammy nominated rapper/singer Nicki Minaj, for example, plays with pastel-colored weaves and sculptural wigs, mainstreaming working-class Black women’s hair culture, and asserting the right to be both a Barbie and a “bad bitch” in the male dominated hip-hop community.61 But for many Black women, hair texture and its influence on hair-styling practices can still determine one’s access to upward mobility via access to

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