Abstract
This chapter examines hirsutism and the idea that reading a woman as hairy is a form of social control, and as such, is a disabling force. First of all, I describe some of the ways in which hair has been read and written about in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Then I look at some recent work linking Crip and Queer Theory, highlighting the idea of the policing ‘stare’, which Inckle argues ‘constitutes disabled experience’, and radical embodiment in particular.1 I chose most of these texts because they critique Sally Munt’s appropriation of the disabled toilet facility as a queer space2 and because they talk of a ‘politics of hope’3 describing the possibility for ‘queercrip alliances’:4 an embodied challenge to normative assumptions in the spaces of everyday life. I go on to describe the production of hirsutism in two typical medical texts and argue that there is no fixed definition of normative female hair distribution. I relate this to the idea of looking queer, which is also the title of one of the texts I examine, and the problematic normative assumptions that are used to police women’s bodies, particularly when facial hair is in evidence. In one of the examples I look at I find a reluctant lesbian hero, in the other a ‘heroic’ gender deviant who has found a way of at least partially defying the controlling ‘stare’. I finish by examining the ‘bathroom problem’ and the ways in which the texts I have chosen critique Munt’s work, the narrator of which is a self-proclaimed lesbian hero.
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Notes
K. Inckle, ‘A Lame Argument: Profoundly Disabled Embodiment as Critical Gender Politics’, Disability and Society, 29: 3 (2014), 388–401, at 393.
S. Munt, Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1998).
A. Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 155.
I. Banks, Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2000), p. 4;
citing S. Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, in S. Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18, ed. and trans. J. Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955 [1922]), pp. 273–275.
E. Leach, ‘Magical Hair’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 88: 2 (1958), 147–164.
G. Obeyesekere, Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
K. Battle-Walters, Sheila’s Shop: Working-class African American Women Talk about Life, Love, Race, and Hair (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
J. Harris and P. Johnson (eds), Tenderheaded: A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
P. Jolly (ed.), Hair: Untangling a Social History (Saratoga Springs: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2004; catalogue to an exhibition of the same name, 31 January–6 June 2004), pp. 58–73.
V. Sherrow, Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006).
M. Toerien and S. Wilkinson, ‘Gender and Body Hair: Constructing the Feminine’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 26: 4 (2003), 333–344.
M. Tiggemann and C. Lewis, ‘Attitudes toward Women’s Body Hair: Relationship with Disgust Sensitivity’, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 28: 4 (2004), 381–387.
S. Basow, ‘The Hairless Ideal: Women and their Body Hair’, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 15 (1991), 83–96;
S. Basow and A. Braman, ‘Women and Body Hair: Social Perceptions and Attitudes’, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 22 (1998), 637–645.
J. Ferrante, ‘Biomedical Versus Cultural Constructions of Abnormality: The Case of Idiopathic Hirsutism in the United States’, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 12 (1988), 219–238.
A. Keegan, L.-M. Liao and M. Boyle, ‘Hirsutism: A Psychological Analysis’, The Journal of Health Psychology, 8: 3 (2003), 327–345.
S. Hildebrandt, ‘The Last Frontier: Body Norms and Hair Removal Practices in Contemporary American Culture’ in H. Tschachler, M. Devine and M. Draxlbauer (eds), The EmBodyment of American Culture (Münster: LIT 2003), pp. 59–71.
P. Jolly, ‘Hair Power’, in P. Jolly (ed.), Hair: Untangling a Social History (Saratoga Springs: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, 2004; catalogue to an exhibition of the same name, 31 January–6 June 2004), pp. 58–73.
K. Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘The Last Taboo: Women, Body Hair and Feminism’ in K. Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
L. Tondeur, ‘A History of Pubic Hair, or Reviewers’ Responses to Terry Eagleton’s After Theory’ in K. Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 48–66.
Ibid., 391, citing C. Sandahl, ‘Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer? Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance’, GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9: 1–2 (2003), 25–56, at 33.
R. Burgess, ‘Feminine Stubble’, Hypatia, 20: 3 (2005), 230–237, at 235.
K. Browne, ‘Genderism and the Bathroom Problem: (Re)materialising Sexed Sites, (Re)creating Sexed Bodies’, Gender, Place and Culture, 11: 3 (September 2004), 331–346, at 339,
citing J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 21.
For example, L. Tondeur, ‘Elizabeth Siddal’s Hair: A Methodology for Queer Reading’, Women: A Cultural Review, 22: 4 (2011), 370–386;
L. Tondeur, ‘Reading Hair Queer’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading, 2007).
Ibid., 389–390; citing J. Butler, Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004).
R. McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006), p. 2.
F. Montagna and W. Camacho (eds), Trichology: Diseases of the Pilosebaceus Follicle (Basel: S. Karger AG, 1998).
R. B. Greenblatt, V. B. Mahesh and R. D. Grambrell (eds), The Cause and Management of Hirsutism: A Practical Approach to the Control of Unwanted Hair (Carnforth, Lancs and Park Ridge, NJ: Parthenon, 1987).
M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 44.
L. Tondeur, ‘Patrolling of the Cultural Borders of the Body: Is Hair a Second Skin?’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 10.3 (2012), 262–275;
referring to S. Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2003).
G. Ofek, ‘Hair Mad: Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture 1850–1910’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Oxford University, St Hugh’s College, 2005), pp. 9–10;
since published as G. Ofek, Representations of Hair in Victorian Literature and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
Ofek, ‘Hair Mad’, pp. 9–10; citing Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 121–122; P. Hershman, ‘Hair, Sex and Dirt’, Man, new series, 9: 2 (1974), 274–298, at 290.
J. Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. xi.
A. Askowitz, ‘Hair Piece’ in D. Atkins (ed.), Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Communities (Binghamton, NY: The Hawthorn Press, 1998), pp. 93–97, at 96.
W. Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth in S. Wells and G. Taylor (eds), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 975–999, at 978 (act 1, scene 3).
Inckle, ‘A Lame Argument’, 389–390; citing J. Butler, Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004).
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Tondeur, L. (2015). The Construction of Hirsutism and Its Controlling and Disabling Manifestations. In: Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (eds) Rethinking Disability Theory and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137456977_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137456977_4
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