Hair!

Across continents and through time, humans have taken thick, strong, shiny hair to mean the bearer is a healthy, capable being. However, if this was the only reason humans cared about it, we wouldn’t have the enormous array of products, tools, commercials, businesses, and tutorials dedicated solely to hair. There’s a certain cultural aspect to hair that takes it from matters of body parts to body practice.

Hair speaks volumes about a person. One glance and you can begin to make inferences about gender, age, ethnicity, and personal taste. The great thing about hair is that you can change its appearance by by growing, cutting, coloring, and styling it. The way an individual “chooses” to care for and style their hair is a perfect display of how a body practice sits at an intersection of agency and docile body.



Perhaps the biggest example of this relates to gender; roughly, women have long hair and fuss around with it all the time, while men have shorter hair and don’t need to care so much about it. Why is this? Following Leppert’s reasoning about femininity, males look at females (active) while females get looked at (passive). So, the ladies, focusing on self-improvement, are told they need their hair to look lustrous and voluminous to attract guys, as illustrated in the Sunsilk commercial I posted above. Even though the video isn’t in English, it clearly shows that the girl’s role is to have gorgeous, silken locks and the guy’s role is to lust over it. Females are eager to put labor into their hair routines as docile bodies because society tells them guys will dig the end result.

Hair is a form of self-expression, whether purposeful or not. Some people rock a new look every two weeks, while some have had the same haircut since elementary school. Either way, a hairstyle can say a lot about how a person sees himself or herself fitting into a social position. This could be seen as a demonstration of agency, or it could be be the exact opposite of a personal choice. It's all very subjective...