Every woman I know has a complicated relationship with her hair. From Delilah to Rapunzel, there is something about femininity in the US that is bound up in locks. I am not limiting this relationship strictly to the US, it's just where I have the most experience. In fact, I had one professor who worked in Samoa who posited that the shift in women's hairstyles with the arrival with the missionaries was a symbol of sexual repression. Of course, she was a psychological anthropologist, so most things were about sex for her.
I shaved my head when I quit dancing. Prior to that, I generally kept my hair long, to the middle of my back. Much like makeup, however, I only wore it loose when I was at work. It was part of my stage presence. Working in the sex industry is complicated, neither the tale of the happy hooker or damsel in distress (for an interesting ethnographic examination, take a look at Stripped by Bernadette Barton). So when I was finally ready to leave (although I had left and gone back several times), I shaved my head. There was no turning back.
I was also just learning about gender through anthropology and I was pretty angry that I had bought into conventional standards of feminine beauty. Shaving my head was a giant "eff you" to patriarchy. As liberating as it was for me personally, it did not have the shocking effect I had hoped, since I was living in New Orleans and one had to be really odd to be truly outré.
Then I moved to Washington State for grad school. I routinely got the comment "she intimidates me" on my student evaluations. Ok, I had a shaved head and a nose ring, but if you knew me, I am hardly intimidating. Students in a small-town, conservative, state school were unsettled by what, for me, had become normal.
I let my hair grow in some before I did my MA fieldwork in Belize, not knowing how it would be taken abroad. It was a lucky choice for me, as I spent a good deal of time "gaining rapport" with the women I worked with by getting my hair done. Rollie-pollies, corn rows, extensions, and more braids than I could catalogue. I looked ridiculous most of the time owing to the fact that my pale scalp burned every time I got a new style. If it wasn't fire red, it was peeling. It was an education for me. Women bonded over hair. It was the intersection of the natural and the cultural, between self and other. And it was something that women did together. It did not translate for me back to the United States. I returned to the solitary ritual of dying my hair at home and occasionally making a salon date with a friend.
Once I moved to Texas, I had settled into a more traditional hair style, although the color scheme varied. Then my mother died. I shaved my head as an act of mourning. It was a relief to have an external symbol of my grief. People would ask and I could explain - otherwise, there's no easy way to start off a conversation with, "Well, my mom just died and it has me all messed up..." A shaved head and, bam, it's out there. Luckily, I worked for a city department where I didn't have to deal with the public and my co-workers were generous granola folks. It was definitely more of a show stopper than in New Orleans but not in a bad way. I was a little put off by how often people wanted to rub my head.
By the time I moved up here, my hair was decently long. Given the ravages of winter and no referrals for a good hairdresser, I just let it grow. By spring time, it reached my shoulders. I felt like it was weighing me down. I went to a conference on community organizing and a queer woman there told me I "read as normal" so it was important that I come out. I don't know that I've ever felt normal, so when I picture myself as a middle-aged woman with frizzy red hair, it just didn't sit well.
At a fundraiser for an abortion provider, I won a haircut for a swanky salon. I decided if I was going to get a haircut that was valued at $70, I wanted to do something extreme. Note to self, Cleveland is not the place to experiment with hipster haircuts. At least not the salon I went to. I ended up with a faux-hawk/undercut that was patchy and uneven. My partner, ever GGG, helped me shave the sides to even things out. What surprised me was the reactions I got and how different they were. Most white people looked a bit shocked, although younger people seemed pretty unfazed. The reaction from black people was entirely different. Women and men would smile at me and kind of nod. I started thinking deeply about the ways that black women style their hair. My half-and-half 'do had more in common with many of the black hairstyles than the white ones in the area.
Although I sing the praises of liminality, I couldn't handle the inbetween state of my hair, both practically and psychologically. I also realized if I shaved my head, it would not raise as many eyebrows in the black community where I primarily work as it might if I worked with elderly white people. So I did it - not as sign of inner turmoil but as way to start over. The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. Additionally, many of my new friends identify as queer in some way or another, and a woman with a shaved head is not a novelty. They have helped me celebrate my shorn state. All the times I've shaved my head, I have had many women confess that they wish they were brave enough to do it. Bravery has seldom entered into the equation for me. It is nice, however, to walk down the street and see people smile.
I'll be back on the job market, eventually. I'll probably only keep it shaved this summer before I begin the awkward process of growing it back in so I can look professional. But for now, I am enjoying this corporeal social experiment.
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