Search Results: Chelsea Johnson
The discussions about natural hair and culture are not only happening on NaturallyCurly, but at colleges and universities across the country. Anthropology, sociology, history and journalism professors have written deep analyses about the race, class, and gender symbolism of hair styling in society. I mined my dissertation bibliography to compile a list of 10 of my favorite scholarly books on hair. Thank me later!
1. Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us about Women’s Lives by Rose Weitz
In Rapunzel’s Daughters, sociologist Rose Weitz theorizes the power hair holds in society, especially for women. This theoretical tour de force takes the reader from the ancient world to the late twentieth century, examining the relationship between women’s hair styling and sexuality, race, religion, work, health, and aging. Rapunzel’s Daughters encourages the reader to turn a critical eye to her own hair journey and to reflect about what hair says regarding identity, inequality, and culture.
2. Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America by Lori Tharps and Ayana Byrd
For over 15 years, Hair Story has been the go-to text for those curious about the significance of hair in the African American community. In the newest edition of Hair Story, journalism professors Lori Tharps and Ayana Byrd tell a broad, overarching story about Black hair–from West African hairstyling cultures in the 15th century to the emergence of the natural hair movement in the 2010s. Accessibly written and thoroughly researched, this book is the ideal start for learning about the history, politics, economics, and culture of Black hair.
3. Permanent Waves: The Making of the American Beauty Shop by Julie Ann Willett
What does the racial segregation of the beauty shop say about American culture? How does the gender segregation of beauty shops from barber shops shape the social relations that occur within them? In Permanent Waves, historian Julie Willett describes the parallel conversations that white and black women were having in their salons during the 20th century. As women of all shades and backgrounds begin to embrace their curls, Permanent Waves may invite the reader to contemplate what it may mean to come together around texture in the future.
4. Doing Business With Beauty: Black women, Hair Salons, and the Racial Enclave Economy by Adia Harvey Wingfield
In Doing Business with Beauty, Adia Harvey Wingfield turns a sociological eye to the processes that attract large numbers of African American women to the hair care industry. Wingfield parses out the differences between race and ethnicity to describe how racism in the job market pushes Black women to start their own businesses, and how ethnicity shapes the relationships and services offered within salons owned by West African women. The interviews presented in this book will be of particular interest to the aspiring entrepreneur.
5. Plucked: A History of Hair Removal by Rebecca Herzig
Plucked is so valuable because it brings visibility to the increasingly invisible: women’s body hair. In this book, professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies Rebecca Herzig traces the evolution of our ideas about body hair on women. In recent times, body hair has become symbolic of women’s political extremism, laziness, or deviance. However, in the midst of a natural hair movement that emphasizes loving yourself just as you are, Plucked forces the reader to consider what expanding the natural hair movement from head hair to the rest of our bodies might mean.
6. Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry by Tiffany M. Gill
In Beauty Shop Politics, historian Tiffany Gill describes how beauty shops fostered Black feminist activism and sisterhood during the Jim Crow era. Beauty salons are often segregated by race and gender, enabling Black women to critique patriarchy and racism with one another in a safe space. Gill analyzes how beauty salon owners, or beauty culturists as they called themselves, presented an image to the world of Black women as entrepreneurial, fashion-forward and characteristically American during the Cold War–a time when Black women were immensely marginalized by race, class and gender at home. Beauty Shop Politics is a rare project that features Black women’s contributions to shaping international, national, and local political affairs.
7. From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women’s Hair Care by Lanita Jacobs
Written by a professor and the daughter of a hairstylist, From the Kitchen to the Parlor analyzes how African American women talk about and style hair to articulate their racial, gender, and professional identities. Lanita Jacobs finds that Black hair stylists liken themselves to physicians in order to construct themselves as skilled experts on Black hair over and against their clients, kitchen beauticians, and non-Black women. Those interested in what the terms “good hair” and “bad hair” tell us about race, gender, and cultural relations will enjoy this linguistic anthropologist’s deep discussion on the topic.
8. Styling Masculinity: Gender, Class and Inequality in the Men’s Grooming Industry by Kristen Barber
As the “metro-sexual” term evidences, straight professional men are increasingly engaging in beauty culture. In Styling Masculinity, sociologist Kristen Barber focuses on the newly emergent high-end men’s hair salon. Styling Masculinity describes how clients work to protect and project their masculinity while getting facials, manicures, and coiffed hairdos. We also hear from women salon workers, who face unique obstacles due to their close, physical interactions with clients. Styling Masculinity is an excellent pick for readers interested in men’s grooming and gender relations.
9. Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom by Douglas Bristol Jr.
Written by historian Douglas Bristol, Jr., Knights of the Razor reveals how barbering was a rare trade that enabled enslaved and free Black men to become entrepreneurial businessmen during the antebellum period. Though their close contact with white elites, Black barbers learned the limits and possibilities afforded by accommodating white middle-class masculine social etiquette. Armed with sharp razors, these men even enjoyed temporary power over white clients during a time where Black Americans in the South had very few civil liberties. If you’re interested in how men fit into the social fabric of the beauty industry and race relations from the 19th to the mid-20th century, Knights of the Razor is a great place to start learning.
10. Resistance and Empowerment in Black Women’s Hair Styling by Elizabeth Johnson
In this book, American Culture Studies Ph.D. Elizabeth Johnson unpacks the relationships between exclusionary media advertising, the racial ownership of cosmetics companies, and how Black women choose to style their hair. This book turns a critical eye to dominant media messages that kinky-curly hair is unmanageable, ugly or unprofessional, and analyzes advertisements that challenged those stigmas. Centering generation Y Black and multiracial women in the early 2000s, Resistance and Empowerment in Black Women’s Hair Styling contextualizes the natural hair movement that was just about to emerge.
What are you and your curlfriends reading? Tell us below!
Photo courtesy of @jaxynharlem
Natural hair reveals a lot about the wearer’s identity.
In fact, there’s an entire academic field dedicated to analyzing what physical bodies communicate to others.
Scholars of an embodiment, like me, examine the body as a medium for expression. We see human bodies as the physical and symbolic form through which social hierarchies, control, and etiquette manifest. How bodies look, how bodies are worked upon, and how bodies are treated by others can all be a starting place for discussing the broader dynamics among a group of people. After all, we move through the world within our bodies, and our most meaningful interactions occur in physical space.
Sociologists, anthropologists, and historians focusing on the body research a gamut of practices, like plastic surgery, violence, reproduction, sports, beauty, and fashion. Each of these topics has much to tell us about our relationships to one another and to ideologies. Examining hairstyling can be especially revealing of social dynamics because hair is the most malleable part of our physical selves. Hair can be cut, colored, dyed, covered, gelled, waxed, plucked, lasered, dreadlocked, braided, relaxed or any combination of the above. Hair also signifies age (through greying”>, health (through hair loss or overgrowth”>, race (through texture and color”>, and gender (through the presence or absence of secondary sex-characteristics and hair styling“>. Because of this versatility, hair is the body’s ripest material for creative self-expression.
Examining hairstyling can be especially revealing of social dynamics because hair is the most malleable part of our physical selves. Hair can be cut, colored, dyed, covered, gelled, waxed, plucked, lasered, dreadlocked, braided, relaxed or any combination of the above.
The way someone wears his or her hair communicates much about that person’s stance towards the world. For a familiar illustration, the collective celebration of natural hair has become a symbol for self-acceptance and self-love in the face of broader stigmas that deem curly hair ugly, unprofessional or exotic. Since hair length is tied to femininity, big chopping in a patriarchal society expresses a radical self-love. And, since hair texture is tied to racialization, wearing natural hair can be used to embrace one’s heritage.
Beyond natural hair, other hairstyles are taken up to express political commitments and identities. At the peak of the women’s suffrage movement, young women flappers wore short haircuts in resistance of Victorian gender ideals that their generation was coming to see as limiting and outdated. For another example, middle-class African American beauty culturists advocated for hair straightening as a strategy for assimilating into mainstream white culture and uplifting the race in the 1930s. Later, as the United States increased activity in Vietnam in the 1960s, hippie men wore long hair as a performative critique of capitalist imperialism and military culture. Subcultures like goths and punks also use hair to express their anti-establishment orientations.
Hair is also incorporated in various spiritual rituals to express one’s commitment to faith, modesty or humility. In Hinduism, tonsuring, or head shaving is often performed to signify a right of passage or when grieving the loss of a close loved one. In the Old Testament of the Bible, Samson’s hair was the physical root of his God-given strength. This parable forms the basis of the way many groups think about the power of hair, as in Rastafarianism, where dreadlocks are worn in both reverence to scripture and to Afrocentricity. For another religious example, Orthodox Jewish women wear head coverings called snoods or wigs to demonstrate modesty after they get married. Similarly, some Muslim women choose to wear hijabs in public spaces to practice modesty or as an outward cultural-religious expression.
In sum, hair is more than just hair. How we wear it says much about who we are, our historical context and what we value. Take a look at your grandmother, your favorite celebrity or an old photograph of yourself from middle school through the eyes of a sociologist of embodiment. What educated guesses can you make about what life is or was like for the person you chose? What do they believe in? How are they seen by others?
Share some of your thoughts with us below!
We are bombarded with more media today than during any other time of human history. Unfortunately, most of the media images we see adhere to a narrow beauty ideal. A cursory walk through the magazine aisle at any grocery store shows that the most valued women in our society are supposed to be tall, thin, have long hair, and blemish-free. These images can take a toll on anyone’s self-esteem.
These advertisements require women to engage in constant self-scrutiny, because beauty ideals are unachievable by definition. The labor that goes into creating, editing, and curating what we see in the media is almost always invisible to the end viewer. As a result, onlookers can wrongly assume that there is a caste of “perfect” women out there that we should emulate, or could become if we only worked harder.
By design, media images leave women feeling inadequate, self-conscious, and wanting. Beauty ideals are maintained by corporations that rely on women as consumers who seek to embody them. When we scroll past Instagram models posing with products, it is important to think critically about the feelings these images inspire in us. Sponsors exploit the perceived distance between the model and the viewer to sell their products. But always remember–you’re perfect exactly as you are right now.
Why does beauty capture so much of our attention and insecurity as women? Naomi Wolf, feminist author of the canonical text The Beauty Myth, argues that while the second-wave women’s movement of the 1970s successfully deconstructed most fictions of femininity like domesticity, motherhood, and chastity, it left beauty myths largely intact. Despite gains in women’s political, sexual, and economic empowerment, modern women paradoxically face greater pressures to be thin, young, and demure. Beauty myths undermine women’s self-esteem in order to undermine our empowerment.
The good news is that things have begun to change since the time during which Wolf was writing. We no longer must rely on established media outlets to produce images that reflect the diversity of real life. Women are using the agency and opportunity provided by social media to demand more and better media representations. Social media networks allow individuals to create and disseminate affirming images for their own communities. The natural hair movement and the body positivity movement, for examples, both have online and grassroots origins. Seeing everyday women post photos rocking their curls, waves, and coils inspires the next person to love themselves just as they are.
Communities of women celebrating alternative standards of beauty have grown so much that established companies and marketers have been forced to take notice. Even pop culture’s most iconic symbols for feminine beauty are responding to women’s calls for transformation. In 2015, after decades of demands for more a realistic Barbie, Mattel introduced new dolls with darker skin tones and coily hair. That same year, Angolan model Maria Borges made headlines for walking the Victoria’s Secret runway with her natural hair—a huge departure from the flowing extensions she wore in the last two shows and the brand’s signature long, wavy haired look. And in 2016, Ashley Graham became the first plus-sized model to grace the coveted cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.
Graham has now become the face of America’s body positive movement, promoting women’s self-esteem at any size. Importantly, she has used her supermodel status to advocate for even more diversity in the fashion industry. In a recent interview for New York Magazine, Graham expressed, “To not see black or Latina women as famous in my industry is crazy! I have to talk about it. I want to give those women kudos because they are the ones who paved the way for me.” As Graham’s comment acknowledges, we still have a long way to go.
In the future that I imagine for our next generation of daughters, the media will celebrate all women’s beauty. I hope to see dark skin, fleshy bodies, wrinkles, and all types of curly hair when I turn on the television. Contributing to NaturallyCurly’s community StyleNook page is one way you can help us make a step towards creating that future. Share your confidence, style, and self-love with the world! The more we see of you, the more representative our beauty ideals become.
Do you see progress in how women are portrayed in the media? Has the natural hair movement impacted your self-esteem?
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The natural hair movement is a global phenomenon with fascinating local meanings. As part of my doctoral dissertation in sociology, I’ve spent the past four years speaking with bloggers, entrepreneurs, and everyday women about what natural hair means to them. In the fall of 2016, I traveled to South Africa to gain a richer understanding of the social, cultural, and historical significance of hair texture there. I learned just how complex the movement to celebrate kinky-curly hair is.
To understand what natural hair means in South Africa, you must first unpack the country’s unique racial history. Unlike many other places, South Africa has four main racial categories: black, coloured, Indian, and white. Most coloured South Africans are the multi-ethnic descendants of European colonizers, sub-Saharan African tribes, indigenous Khoi Khoi and San tribes, and formerly enslaved people from Southeast Asia. Their hair textures range from gladdes (straight/sleek”> and krulle (curls”> to kroes (kinks”>—often in the same family—while most black South Africans have kinky-coily hair. This was particularly interesting to me, because I am easily read as black in the United States but more likely to be considered coloured with kroes hair in South Africa.
As an intermediate group in an apartheid racial hierarchy that privileged whiteness and denigrated blackness, coloured people stood to gain the most by appealing to white-centered ideals for long, straight hair. No person was ever legally reclassified from black to white during apartheid, but some coloured people successfully legislated their way to whiteness through the “pencil test” that rewarded gladdes hair. The significance of hair texture in the coloured community can be observed through insults like bossiekop(Afrikaans for “bushy head” in English”>, used to tease women with kinky hair. Natural hair influencers like Amanda Cooke of Cape Town Curly and Eleanor Barkes of Eleanor J’Adore are working to reclaim bossiekop in much the same way black women in the United States are reclaiming the word nappy.
South Africans are still reckoning with the aftermath of apartheid, which reserved elite institutions for whites only. Many black and coloured millennial women I interviewed felt pressured to assimilate into newly accessible spaces by straightening their hair. However, the “born-free” generation is more outspoken in fighting white-centered norms for professionalism and beauty. For example, in August 2016, students at Pretoria Girl’s High successfully protested school rules that banned them from wearing their hair in Afros and large braids. The activism I observed around the natural hair in South Africa was truly inspiring, and a model for naturalistas around the world.
Wearing natural hair in South Africa is both a personal and political act. Even though coloured and black women often remain spatially and socially segregated due to the legacy of apartheid, they participate in natural hair movement spaces together. Some women I spoke with felt that the natural hair movement has become a racial bridge that undermines divisions rooted in European colonization. In addition, several coloured women told me that embracing their natural hair allowed them to proudly embody their African heritage for the first time.
As we learn about “Curls Around the World,” it is important to acknowledge that there is global inequality within the natural hair movement. Natural hair influencers in South Africa compete with American and European women who enjoy greater access to start-up capital and affordable Internet. Most products for natural hair at convenience and beauty-supply stores in South Africa are manufactured by Western companies. However, a budding natural hair meet-up scene is giving local entrepreneurs more opportunities to shine. The product lines by Nubian Nature, The Perfect Hair, Natural Moisture and Naiobi’s Olive have much to offer, featuring ingredients indigenous to Southern Africa like aloe and mongongo oil.
South African women are determined to define their natural hair movement for themselves. I sat in on the lively collective of Capetonians responsible for creating naturalhair.co.za, an online platform that will help South African women find natural hair influencers from their own communities. Bloggers @AishaandLife, @LifeAsLeslin and @CurlyKristenite are women to watch. I picked up many tips during my trip, so I can tell you from personal experience that the South African natural hair movement is one to follow—wherever you are in the world.
Are you living outside of the U.S. and have natural hair? Share your experiences with us below!
