Body Hair Battlegrounds

The Consequences, Reverberations, and Promises of Women Growing Their Leg, Pubic, and Underarm Hair

Breanne Fahs

Dangerously Crazy about Body Hair

I often remark to students and colleagues alike that hair is "crazy making." Perhaps because we spend such an enormous amount of time managing and containing our hair — making sure it does not get too unruly or wild; trimming and shaving and plucking it into submission; cutting, dyeing, waxing, and styling our hair — it becomes impossible to truly assess how strongly we cling to ideas about "proper" and attractive hair and, by association, "proper" femininity and masculinity. Hair brings out deeply personal notions of morality, cleanliness, beauty, attractiveness, and status. In my career as a woman and gender studies professor and a practicing clinical psychologist, I have spent a rather large amount of time thinking about, studying, exploring, and provoking others to experiment with their body hair. This has offered me many insights into "doing gender" but has often come at great cost to me both professionally (as many have labeled this work as too "trivial" or "silly") and personally (as my work on hair has inspired others to act in irrational ways toward me). And yet, each time that these reactions unfold, and each time the price of the work becomes clear, I feel renewed inspiration about the importance of these body hair battlegrounds.

In her now-seminal essay, "Thinking Sex," Gayle Rubin (1984) said about the necessity of thinking seriously about sexuality, "To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality. ... Disputes over sexual behavior often become vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity" (267). In this chapter, I argue that hair, too, makes us dangerously crazy, wildly incapable of direct and self-reflexive conversation, infused with the most panicky and anxiety-ridden sense of danger. Like Rubin, I argue that feminist scholars should approach the study of hair with the most seriousness we can muster, seeing it as a vehicle for social control, displaced anxiety, intense emotional energy, and cultural distress. Hair is at once a marker of social class and "respectability," a highly racialized site of inequality and difference (particularly for African American women), a deeply gendered signifier of beauty and gender (non)conformity, and a form of artistic and cultural expression; it is messy and complex and always-already laden with stories about power.

This chapter extends my earlier work on a pedagogical exercise about body hair (Fahs and Delgado 2011; Fahs 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014), in which I outlined the ways that female college students characterized the temporary experience of growing out their body hair, by revisiting the question: What do women's overt body hair rebellions provoke in others? Drawing from an extra credit assignment I give to students that asks them to engage in nonnormative body hair behavior (women grow hair on their legs, underarms, and pubis while men shave hair from these areas) and write about the experience, I revisit the question of what this assignment teaches students and the sorts of things that they learn from challenging traditional gender roles. Instead of only looking at the specific individual experiences of students in my courses who have chosen to grow out their body hair, in this chapter I also examine the ongoing public media attention (most intense in 2014) that this assignment received in the (mostly conservative) news media. In order to imagine what women's body hair rebellions have provoked — both individually, collectively, and, now, culturally — I first trace the most recent literature on body hair, including an examination of my own work on women's body hair rebellions. I then examine the chaotic experiencing of watching my work "go viral" — often with negative consequences for me and this work — as an example of why hair deserves the utmost attention in times of social stress, and why body hair rebellions matter. I conclude the chapter by looking at four recent semesters of women's studies students who participated in this assignment and lay out some of the more interesting patterns of their reports on the experience.

Recent Literature on Body Hair

Despite accusations that research on body hair is "trivial" and that contemporary women live in a "postfeminist" society that gives them freedom to do whatever they want with their bodies, several scholars have continued to research women's relationship to body hair removal and its meanings. In Plucked (2015), a large-scale examination of the cultural practices of hair removal, Rebecca Herzig argued that hair removal for women shifted from a "mutilation" practice (largely disdained in mainstream culture) to a mandate for women (where hairy women were seen as politically extreme, sexually deviant, or mentally ill). Herzig's work, by outlining the forces that have driven this recent mandate for women to remove body hair, offers a major contribution to the task of...