The Hair Down There: Untangling Pubic Hair Politics

Still Political" explores the politics of hair. Through interdisciplinary exploration and diverse methodologies that interweave and span personal narrative, autoethnography, performative writing, and collaborative performance, the pieces in this forum meditate on and question body/hair politics. Individually and collectively, through the sites of their bodies and experiences, the authors probe themes that include history, the academy, intimate and stranger relations, transnational and local politics, individual and collective resistance, and more. Grounded in an intersectional approach, each piece interrogates the body/hair and the body/hair in relation.

Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2013

Women's and men's bodies and sexuality can be understood as socially situated and socially produced. This means they are affected by, and developed in relation to, patterned sociocultural meanings and representations. We aim here to understand a recently emergent, and potentially gendered, body practice-pubic hair removal-by examining the meanings people ascribe to pubic hair and its removal. Extending the widespread hairless bodily norm for Anglo/Western women, pubic hair removal is an apparently rapidly growing phenomenon. Men, too, are seemingly practicing pubic hair removal in significant numbers, raising the question of to what extent pubic hair removal should be understood as a gendered phenomenon. What we do not yet know is what people's understandings and perceptions of pubic hair are, and how they make sense of its removal. Using a qualitative survey, the current study asked a series of questions about pubic hair and its removal, both in general and related to men's and women's bodies. In total, 67 participants (100% response rate; 50 female; mean age 29, diverse ethnically, predominantly heterosexual) completed the survey. Thematic analysis identified five key themes in the way people made sense of pubic hair and pubic hair removal that related to choice, privacy, physical attractiveness, sexual impacts, and cleanliness. Meanings around pubic hair and its removal were not consistently gendered, but it was still situated as more of an issue for women. With potential impacts on sexual and psychological well-being, sexuality education provides an important venue for discussing, and questioning, normative ideas about pubic hair.

Pubic hair removal, now common among women in Anglo/western cultures, has been theorised as a disciplinary practice. As many other feminine bodily practices, it is characterised by removal or alteration of aspects of women's material body (i.e., pubic hair) considered unattractive but otherwise ''natural.'' Emerging against this the-orisation is a discourse of personal agency and choice, wherein women assert autonomy and self-mastery of their own bodies and body practices. In this paper, we use a thematic analysis to examine the interview talk about pubic hair from 11 sexually and ethnically diverse young women in New Zealand. One overarching theme – pubic hair is undesirable; its removal is desirable – encapsulates four themes we discuss in depth, which illustrate the personal, interpersonal and sociocultural influences intersecting the practice: (a) pubic hair removal is a personal choice; (b) media promote pubic hair removal; (c) friends and family influence pubic hair removal; and (d) the (imagined) intimate influences pubic hair removal. Despite minor variations among queer women, a perceived norm of genital hairlessness was compelling among the participants. Despite the articulated freedom to practise pubic hair removal, any freedom from participating in this practice appeared limited, rendering the suggestion that it is just a ''choice'' problematic.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021

Hair, primarily a vestigial structure, is a regenerative appendage of the skin. However, hair is no longer sensed as a trivial physical attribute or as an adornment that adds to human beauty. Although a physiological phenomenon, hair—a major source of information about an individual‟s genetic make-up—is also socially and culturally significant as an object of intense elaboration and preoccupation in almost all societies and cultures. Modern critics and sociologists view hair as a powerful and substantial cultural artefact, and hairstyles are often employed as a staunch tool to convey a person‟s attitudes, beliefs, allegiances, liabilities, ideologies, modus operandi, principles, sexual orientation, political perceptions, religious views and, in some cultures, even socio-economic or class status.

asianfem.sookmyung.ac.kr

In a society where the majority of women (and, increasingly, men) participate in processes to eliminate body hair -whether shaving, depilating, waxing, bleaching, electrolysising -The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair asks why, in contrast, there is an absence of critical work in this area; speaking of or about women and body hair seems to be invisible. This collection of essays, engaging with literary and critical theory, art history, anthropology and psychology, is concerned with the relationship between the making invisible of body hair and a culture of silence about women's body hair it diagnoses as a "taboo". In referring to this silence as a "taboo" the contributors suggest a cultural anxiety around speaking about, and the visibility of, women's body hair. The "taboo" is, then, a silence -critical and otherwise -Karín Lesnik-Obertsein, editor and lead contributor to the volume, claims serves to ward off a threat the visibility of body hair on women poses to traditional binary gender categories. The claim is that patriarchal capitalist values have served to oppress the visibility of, and speech about, body hair as a means of promoting restrictive definitions of "woman" and the "feminine" which the hegemonic order relies upon to sustain its power. This is, then, a collection concerned with the important political implications opened up for feminist discourse through speaking about women and body hair. Lesnik-Oberstein's leading chapter demonstrates the way in which discussion of body hair has, up until this collection, been branded trivial or insignificant, unworthy of academic attention and distanced from a form of criticism that markets itself as a site for potential significant political reform. In contrast, this volume claims that speaking about women and body hair is indeed significant. However, the significance The Last Taboo attributes to the visibility and speaking of body hair is not a significance formulated in opposition to the kind Critical Theory at the University of Reading. She is an active member of the Centre for International Research into Childhood: Literature, Media, Culture (CIRCL) and her research interests include psychoanalysis, childhood and sexuality. She can be reached at [email protected].

2004

2011

Abstract Research on bodies and sexualities has long debated ideas about choice, agency, and power, particularly as women conform to, or rebel against, traditional social scripts about femininity and heterosexuality. In this study, I have used responses from 34 college women who completed an extra credit assignment in a women's studies class that asked them to reject social norms and grow out their leg and underarm hair for a period of 10 weeks.

Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, 2015

In the past two decades body hair has fast become a taboo for women. The empirical data of sociological and medical research reveal that the vast majority of women remove most of their body hair since the beginning of this century. Body hair is typically a marker that polices significant boundaries: between human–animal, male–female and adult–child. Removal or refusal to remove body hair places the female body on either side of the boundary, thus upholding and displacing binary oppositions between fundamental categories. The new beauty ideal requires techniques of control, manipulation and self-improvement. This article first assesses how empirical studies map and confirm existing trends of body hair removal, and then explores in-depth the cultural reasons for the development of the normative ideal of a hairless female body. While body hair functions socially as a taboo, it refers psychologically to the realm of the abject. One line of argument places the taboo in the realm of abjection, while another argument attempts to demystify the Freudian anxieties surrounding the visibility and invisibility of the female sex organ. While the hairless body connotes perfected femininity, it simultaneously betrays a fear of adult female sexuality. The hairless body may be picture-perfect, but its emphasis on visual beauty runs the risk of disavowing the carnality of lived life. The hair-free trend of today’s beauty ideals affirms that the twenty-first-century body is a work in progress.

The literature on pubic hair removal (PHR) practices primarily focuses on women in Western societies and attributes recent increases in PHR to product marketing, pornography, and pop culture. Here, we explore PHR and retention practices outside the cultural West through content coding of societies in the Human Relations Area Files' database, eHRAF World Cultures. Thirty-one societies noted distinct PHR or retention practices. Descriptive data on 72 societies provided additional context to the perception of pubic hair and reasons for its removal or retention. Results indicate that women practice PHR more commonly than men cross-culturally and practices are often tied to concerns about hygiene and sexual activity. Findings show that some features of PHR cross-culturally resemble those of the cultural West in which these practices have been best characterized, though these practices cannot be attributed to the same suite of factors such as exposure to pornography or product marketing. We interpret these findings within cross-cultural and evolutionary perspectives.