Care / Condition / Control
Humans are obsessed with hair. And hair is never just hair. Intensely personal, it is quite literally how people frame themselves to signal their desired appearance to others. Individuals use hair as an expressive language to convey both their individuality and collective affiliations, and societies in turn regulate hair as a means to enforce and maintain social control, allegiance, and order. Be it conforming or rebellious, hair reflects and negotiates the social contracts between individuals and gender, racial, subcultural, and religious identities. Hair can elicit polarizing responses鈥揻rom envy to repulsion鈥揳cting as a nimble proxy for culture, time, place, age, identity, growth, and vitality.
As Paul C. Taylor states in Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, 鈥淭he aesthetic implicates and is implicated by the political.鈥� In other words, the aesthetic becomes an arena where political struggles and controversies are actively played out. In the contemporary United States, hegemony is enforced through discriminatory grooming policies, proposed state laws and executive orders targeting gender expression and identity, and compulsory military and prison buzz cuts. Often, those attempting to suppress personal autonomy regarding appearance cite cleanliness as their logic. In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva observes that 鈥淚t is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.鈥� Given the historically compounded nature of repressions, hair can carry painful intergenerational trauma. Yet, collective resistance to these systems of oppression sparks kinship, joy, and homage. Through hair, people build spaces of community, intimacy, and specificity.
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Humans are obsessed with hair. And hair is never just hair. Intensely personal, it is quite literally how people frame themselves to signal their desired appearance to others. Individuals use hair as an expressive language to convey both their individuality and collective affiliations, and societies in turn regulate hair as a means to enforce and maintain social control, allegiance, and order. Be it conforming or rebellious, hair reflects and negotiates the social contracts between individuals and gender, racial, subcultural, and religious identities. Hair can elicit polarizing responses鈥揻rom envy to repulsion鈥揳cting as a nimble proxy for culture, time, place, age, identity, growth, and vitality.
As Paul C. Taylor states in Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, 鈥淭he aesthetic implicates and is implicated by the political.鈥� In other words, the aesthetic becomes an arena where political struggles and controversies are actively played out. In the contemporary United States, hegemony is enforced through discriminatory grooming policies, proposed state laws and executive orders targeting gender expression and identity, and compulsory military and prison buzz cuts. Often, those attempting to suppress personal autonomy regarding appearance cite cleanliness as their logic. In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva observes that 鈥淚t is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.鈥� Given the historically compounded nature of repressions, hair can carry painful intergenerational trauma. Yet, collective resistance to these systems of oppression sparks kinship, joy, and homage. Through hair, people build spaces of community, intimacy, and specificity.
