By Jodie Warren
The deadline for our final year project proposal was getting eerily closer. Dissertation or a Performance as Research? I couldn’t fathom writing 15,000, I wanted to use my body to convey what I passionate about, as a performer should. Performance as Research it was then. Studying Theatre and Performance had opened doors inside my mind about stereotypes, ideologies, and performance artists. I wanted to make a statement. I conducted a survey that asked, “what should a woman look like?”.
“Long hair” was by far the most popular answer, so I shaved my hair off and documented everything from then on out to see if I still felt like a woman. Did I still feel like a woman? Yes. Did I feel like a woman that was accepted by society? Not in the slightest. I was met with comments like “you looked prettier before!”, “are you okay? Are you ill?”, “she’s doing a Britney Spears”, “what charity are you raising money for?”.
It was then that I realised that it wasn’t about how I felt, but about how others perceived me.
Women’s bodies and features have been, and continue to be, at the forefront of public commentary. Women’s gossip magazines, quite often supervised by men, have been notorious for shaming women about the shape and size of their bodies, their skin, and many other, often uncontrollable aspects of how they look. Sociologist, Raewyn Connell, has recognised this as being the public cultural construction of ‘emphasised femininity’, which is promoted to be performed by women in relation to, and for men (1). This concept of ‘emphasized femininity’ also extends to the everyday behaviours and practices of women, which again are highlighted and scrutinised in such gossip magazines. As a result, women are left in a state of confusion and anger by such mass-media ideologies. They are placed in a state of limbo with regard to the uncontrollable parts of her body, and no matter how she navigates through the world, she is constantly being policed by such hateful remarks.
Women’s hair still comes under scrutiny, just like every other part of our body. For Black women especially, despite their hair being a signifying feature for one’s culture and expression, it is a feature used to discriminated against. Society has subconsciously agreed that a defining feminine feature is a woman’s hair. And so, to have none at all is considered unfathomable by many. And yet, we still see women choosing to object to these unwritten rules of femininity by ridding themselves of their hair.
At 20 years old, singer-songwriter Sinead O’Connor, had been encouraged to appear more feminine, to grow her hair long to appease the male gaze of her audience. O’Connor resisted these demands and had her hair shaved off to “look like a boy”. Her identity as a woman was up for debate, and she reclaimed it as her own through becoming bald to object unwanted sexualised attention.
According to a study by Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology, (https://www.dovepress.com/traction-alopecia-the-root-of-the-problem-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-CCID), one third of women with African descent suffer from hair Traction Alopecia, among other conditions. Just like Jada Pinkett-Smith’s recent decision to embrace her alopecia, many other tackle circumstances by choosing to shave their head too. Instead of allowing her condition to define how she was viewed by the world, Pinkett-Smith chose to take control. Black women are consistently at the centre of negative discourse regardless of how they wear their hair, and so the power of seeing an entire army of beautiful bald Black women in the film Black Panther was something that will stick with me for the rest of my life.
What’s important here is the difference between a woman’s hair and the rest of her features that are publicly scrutinised. The majority of a women’s features that come under fire are things beyond our control, we cannot change it at the drop of a hat. However, when it comes to our hair, most of us are always immediately autonomous. Women have the power to change our hair at will. We can choose to respond to negativity, feminine stereotypes, and even hair-loss diseases through the means of having control over our hair.
Despite how shocking and unruly society still thinks it is for a woman to go bald, there is so much power in the underlying statement she is making: you will view me on my terms, not on the terms that you’re conditioned to think.
- This concept was established in the book Gender and Power: society, the person, and sexual politics in 1987 by Raewyn W. Connell