I have a new hair shape and I feel more firmly rooted, truly planted within myself, than I have in months.

On the day I got the haircut, I took my new hair out for a drink. 

Texted a friend:

omw w new mullet !

Recently described to a friend that I haven’t been as concerned with how my hair looks lately, because of how solidly right it feels just sitting on my head. This was a gender-affirming cut and I feel very much like myself just wearing it. It’s hard to describe how much of a shift this was for me, but perhaps you’ve felt this way too?

I’ve been thinking lately about how hair plants us, roots us within ourselves and tethers us to our literal heritage. Hair showcases narrative at the level of the communal through shape, texture, length, but also perhaps even at the scale of an individual, single strand.

In the Art21 short documentary “Kameelah Janan Rasheed: The Edge of Legibility,” Rasheed, an artist who engages text and installation in her multi-faceted work, invites us to consider the contours of our experience encountering ideas.

She says of her own practice:

How do we think with a text? Here, ‘text’ broadly defined as any work of art.

Rasheed’s works, a combination of found and generated text evoking annotations, as well as prints, drawings, and installations that engage with thinking as an active, expansive, and often collaborative space derives in part from studying her father’s annotations of the Quran when he was converting to Islam during college. The notion that we can speak to, or speak back to, and think with, a text is, to me, probably the ideal way to engage with art.

What is the difference between thinking with something and thinking about something? One feels more collaborative, communal. The other, perhaps, more extractive, and even maybe invasive. The former implies a collapsing of the narrative space: ‘I think alongside this work, at the capacity of my own embodied understanding.’ The latter implies that I might be coming at the work from an opposing angle, standing apart from it. I prefer to inhabit. And thankfully, when discussing art that involves hair, it is always possible to inhabit the work.

This month, it’s an honor think with the multi-disciplinary work of Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum alongside you. 

Where your own interpretation, your own experience, your own ideas diverge from mine, please enrich our space with your thinking in the comments below.

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The Hair Work of Mona Hatoum

How is a sentence like a thread, like a strand of hair?

In my last newsletter, I shared this piece by Mona Hatoum called Keffieh (1993-99). It is comprised of human hair on cotton fabric and exists at a dimension of roughly 45x45 in. square. In this work, the traditional Palestinian keffieh pattern is woven with human hair in a tenuous and gentle gesture. It feels as though any thread of hair pulled might unravel the cloth. And yet, its tensile strength is evident in the line weight, the measured consistency of the locks themselves.

What would it be like to wear the hair of a loved one like a scarf? What would it signal beyond its pattern? What would I know and feel more deeply in wearing it?

The Keffiyeh pattern has had multiple symbolic resonances throughout history, but first and foremost it is a type of woven cloth, usually in a black and white pattern but also seen in red and green, that has become associated with the cause of Palestinian liberation. Worn throughout history by leaders of Hamas, some associate the cloth with anti-Zionist sentiment, that is: worn in defiance of the British occupation of historic Palestine. Members of the Palestinian diaspora, as well as non-Palestinians, wear the keffiyeh as a symbol of solidarity. 

It is also worth noting that because of its associations with this anti-colonial movement, the west has sought at various times throughout history to cast the keffiyeh as a symbol of “terrorism” in an attempt to homogenize the narrative around what it means to fight for freedom. 

A few weeks ago, I attended a lecture at the University of Maryland on the intersection of the movement for Palestinian Liberation and Black Radical Feminism during which the visiting scholar, who is of Palestinian heritage, was asked by a fellow academic whether she was worried about the destruction of Palestinian universities, museums and libraries.

“What of the loss of information, of records of your people? How will you continue your research?”

The scholar acknowledge the tragic loss of these documents and artifacts, and understood why a fellow academic would mourn that loss. “Fortunately,” she replied, “there are other ways to carry information across time than these western fortresses of information.”

My mind immediately fled to oral tradition, and then to fabric. 

What is weaving? Woven thread? Throughout so many cultures, weaving literal strands of history into cloth has been a way of solidifying and planting the histories of a people into its lived visual culture.

According to Arab fashion historians, the distinct black designs on the white keffiyeh cloth symbolize ancient trade routes that came through the fertile lands of Palestine, the waves of the Mediterranean Sea, on whose shores Palestine used to sit, and the nets used to catch fish symbolize economic freedom and prosperity from the river to the sea.

As I sat in the audience at UMD and witnessed this resilient historian crack open the minds of her colleagues in the way she valued these non-western methods of transferring and preserving information, I thought about how remarkable it is that our bodies live to carry stories. Of course through memory and language and music and song and rhythm and movement and ritual and feast and gathering.

But also through hair. 

In this work by Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian artist who was forced to flee to Lebanon after 1948, I can feel the interplay between the notion of transience—each thread a strand of hair that has fallen out—and also of solidarity, of cultural symbolism, identity firmly planted, and ordered within the fabric itself. 

In a way, a bolt of cloth is a home for wayward threads. Cloth makes sense of what might otherwise become tangled, intangible, inscrutable. What wisdom woven fabric holds, what sacred internal logic.

I have been following along with the independent Palestinian fashion brand the nöl collective for many years. The work they do to help preserve ancient weaving techniques in Palestine, even through the ongoing occupation, is remarkable. These techniques have been passed down through machine and human hands generation over generation. Both through the garments and items they design and the access they provide to the weavers themselves, who are currently navigating unfathomable loss, nöl collective provides access to the ancient and precious wisdom of cloth and pattern in preserving Palestinian cultural heritage. 

In the 200 days since October 7, the weavers’ workshops in Gaza that nöl collective works with to produce their garments have been irrevocably destroyed. Looms splintered and the buildings in ruins due to the unceasing bombings. Many members of these weaving families have been killed. Beyond the human loss, craftsmanship itself is under threat; the potential to continue these traditions, plant these stories in future generations cast into dangerous and tenuous scarcity. 

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Mona Hatoum’s gesture in Keffieh is that of re-planting. Taking the detritus of human existence—hair itself—and re-investing the cloth with the preciousness of that singular evidence of humanity. Fabric is understood historically as one of the earliest and most important technological innovations in human history—but to also have the threads themselves made of human-generated biological material invests the fabric with something even more symbolic, even more precious than even just the idea of history: the individual person, the people themselves.

I think it is a miracle that Mona Hatoum’s Keffieh, like so much weaving tradition in Palestine, seeks to unify warp and weft into such beautiful, meaningful designs. The act of weaving is necessarily an act of unification, of ordering. It is an ancient act, a site for storytelling and recording history, which makes it all the more poignant that Hatoum weaves hair through hers. 

In a 1998 Bomb Magazine interview with artist Janine Antoni, Hatoum said:

Although I was born in Lebanon, my family is Palestinian. And like the majority of Palestinians who became exiles in Lebanon after 1948, they were never able to obtain Lebanese identity cards. It was one way of discouraging them from integrating into the Lebanese situation.1 

The thread of Hatoum’s hair work is generally understood in the context of dislocation. Exile, refusal of state and legal status, something many Palestinians still struggle to achieve today in Israel and across the West Bank, within their own ancestral homelands.

Where is a person supposed to belong if not to their own ancestral lands?

Belonging, dislocation, root shock. Areas of disenfranchisement and displacement. These are stories hair is uniquely positioned to tell.

In Hatoum’s work hair is both the material substance of the work as well as its symbolic image. Often, a symbol becomes a stand-in, physically altered from the idea it comes to represent. Hair in Hatoum’s work may be read as its own signifier, and also as a scale model of the whole. A single strand as important as a cluster of multiple strands.

Hair is sticky in this way.

Sometimes an idea develops over a long period of time before it finds a “home,” so to speak. The hairballs that ended up in Recollection were collected over a period of six years.2

Hair is a fascinating material. Yes, it comes in individual units—a strand of hair—but it is also most often perceived in the gestalt: a whole image or shape. An entire head of hair.

Encountered individually, it is easier to separate from the human that made it, but collectively the strands unify into a single recognizable gesture: a lock, a ribbon, a clump, a head, no longer a strand but a braided chain. Even so, an individual strand becomes emblematic of a whole. And in terms of the relationship to narrative, history, and storytelling: there’s a literary term for this. When a single part references the whole, it’s called synecdoche.

In Hair Necklace (wood) (2013), Hatoum’s own hair has found a ‘home’ in these hair beads. A more general term for these might be ‘hairballs.’ Here converted from an item of disembodied hallway disgust to an object of physical beauty and value: jewelry which denotes royalty and ceremony, an occasion. This work situates hair as a precious commodity, precious bodily output. In fact, it took nearly six years to amass all of the hair it took to create this work.

The work also posits hair as a piece of armor donned to project a sense of power and beauty. That hair can be recast as a valuable and covetable necklace raises the value of that hair. 

And really: isn’t our hair a sort of armor?

Hair Drawing (2003) represents a series of “drawings” Hatoum made wherein random clusterings of hair are affixed to handmade paper. In this example, a thicker cluster of hairs creates an almost perfect circle amidst the chaos of scattered curls. 

I have been documenting my own hair on shower tile for nearly two decades. I’ve called them “hair drawings” too, long before I knew of Mona Hatoum’s work.

Seeing these hair drawings makes me feel held in a way that’s hard to describe. Her work feels so generous. This hair, offerings. The work administers a sort of care, even as it calls out systemic injustice.

In other works, for example, Interior/Exterior Landscape (2010), hair is used to represent the literal remnants of a life lived. Hair dangles from the bare bed frame on one side of the room installation “like cobwebs.” At the head of the bed, hair is suggestively left on the pillowcase, an “uncanny evocation” of humanness.3

What is a room’s relationship to freedom? 

It is difficult not to think of incarceration in this piece. The spare quality of the room, more than adequate as a space to sleep or be, but not without an institutional feel. The scale of reference here is so important. To some this bedroom might seem uncomfortable, a cell, while to others, the notion of a room of one’s own is central to the idea of belonging. The luxury comes in the feeling of being planted in one spot, to have an uncontested home.

Across the room, a single hairball sits in a small wooden birdcage. The walls close in. Is a room a container for humanity? Or a cage? How far does one’s own interiority extend? And what remains?

Hatoum’s knotted hair grid sculptures are far more fleeting, almost impossibly delicate.

In Hair Grid with Knots (2001), the artist’s own hair is woven into a loose grid with single strands of hair knotted together. One long continuous thread of hair is looped and woven into itself with hairs trailing off at the top and the bottom looking oddly lost and wispy next to the logic of the grid.

At once ordered and also slightly haphazard, I can feel the tensile pressure of hair against hair, and the rigid pliability of each hair as it loops around to form a new row, or weft, of the grid. 

As public-facing as hair often is, historians often read “intimacy” into hair, another of hair’s dichotomies. I’m beginning to understand that when people say “intimate” and “vulnerable,” what they really mean is: so personal that it achieves the universal. Hair too is personal yet universal. Repeatable, infinitely renewable, and relatively effortless.

We grow hair outside of desire. 

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The more I talk and write about hair the more I wonder if hair really is so intimate. Or is it society and culture that has coded hair as intimate? Of course in many religions a woman’s hair is a place associated with sensuality and desire. In many belief systems hair itself is sacred, perhaps related to hair’s natural propensity to grow: in Rastafarianism, for example, hair is god’s gift and should not be cut. 

Society tells us that hair is intimate, a node of vulnerability. Really, hair is our body’s only natural armor. Hair is strength. 

In Pull, a performance first conceived in 1995, Mona Hatoum’s own head is displayed upside down in a video mounted directly into the wall. Just below the smooth-mounted screen is a small niche in which hangs a thick braid of hair, tied off at the end with a hair tie. In this photo documentation of the work, a man tugs at the hanging hair while the artist’s face in the video above it makes a shocked expression. It looks as though he is tugging at her actual hair because of how the artist’s head is cut off slightly at the top (along the bottom of the screen frame). And in reality, he is.

Invasions of body and space. The way we intrude on the humanity of others and feel a false sense of ownership over their bodies, depriving them of their own physical autonomy. Pull exists to remind us that even though we may be able to see someone’s hair, it’s not for us. It’s not for us to reach out and touch, and if we genuinely feel the need to do so, we should examine ourselves.

Hair may be an intimate substance, and it is certainly very personal. Pull speaks in two ways of personal autonomy. Through the lens of Feminism, it reminds viewers of the necessary autonomy of women’s bodies. Through a post-colonial lens, it is a reminder of the necessity of a people’s right to autonomy, and an acknowledgment of one’s own basic humanity.

The final work I invite you to think with me on is a photographic work called Van Gogh’s Back (1995). Van Gogh’s Back (1995) feels distinctly queer to me. In the way that queer icon/poet Alok Vaid Menon fashions their own body hair. The soaped-up, sudsy quality implies this sensual act of care. What it means to wash someone, what it means to anoint them (hello, Mary Magdalen). 

The texture of the hair in Van Gogh’s Back achieves brushstroke, and becomes adornment. Why don’t we worship body hair the way we fetishize head hair? Why is body hair not even more sacred? Having body hair is a beauty standard that exists way outside the western standards of beauty. At times it feels like a radical act to simply have body hair. To celebrate it is an act of justice.

In Hatoum’s work, hair, even in its quietest gesture—a single strand—is enough. 

The phrase ‘do not harm a single hair on their head’ comes to mind.

Can a single hair even be harmed?

If the answer is yes, will it therefore necessarily harm the person attached to it? The delicacy of Mona Hatoum’s work would say yes. A single thread is enough, a single thread can tell infinite stories: of love, loss, persecution, dislocation. Coiled within each hair itself is DNA that represents a whole life. And whether the individual stands in for the whole, the individual is enough.

Protect the individual. Through the individual, we might protect the collective.

Happy Pesach everyone, may all beings be free.

xo,

Suzanne

If you’re new here, hello and I love you! Let’s talk about hair.

These newsletters are going to come to you monthly. I’ve chosen to publish the last week of every month to give me as much time as possible to procrastinate writing them.

You may find that this essay is cut off for being too long in email format. To experience the whole thing (and I recommend that you do! there is a breathtaking artwork at the end), please go ahead and read it in your browser or in the Substack app.

The Hair of Heartbreak

The truth is: I have been outside of utterance. Here is what it feels like..

Self Portrait with Cropped Hair (1940) is the first painting Frida Kahlo’s completed after her divorce from Diego Rivera. Rivera had been unfaithful to her, and her heart was clearly breaking. Here, her hair might moonlight as fragments of her heart.

The text above her autorretrato reads “mira, que si te quise, fué por el pelo, / ahora que estás pelona, ya no te quiero.” Which translates in English to:

Before I typed the phrases into Google Translate, and read several translations in art historical texts, I tried translating the words myself, and I read that first line as “look, if I loved you, it left through the hair..” And this is how I fundamentally see this painting: a cleansing ritual to rid oneself of love by cutting one’s hair. Consequently, recasting Frida’s gender, but more on that in another newsletter.

Both translations made me want to hug myself with grief.

Fascinated by this word “pelona,” I dug a little deeper. Turns out, the word pelona, translated here as “a person without hair” is also the name of a popular sandwich, referring to the shiny dome of the bun it is served on. But historically, the term “pelona” was used to refer to women in the 1920s in Mexico who had recently chopped their hair off, deviating from the traditional lengths of Mexico’s feminine Tehuana archetypes, here exemplified in this photograph of Frida Kahlo by Nickolas Murray for her Vogue cover in 1938,

to the popular bob that came to exemplify the “flapper” hairstyles of the 1920s. The term “pelona” was used not only to referred to those who are bald, or who have lost their hair, but to those women who have shortened their hair, therefore challenging the status quo of “acceptable” femininity in Mexican culture at the time.

As with anything related to hair length, it’s a matter of degrees.

In a post-Mexican Revolutionary time, the bob may also have been viewed as an unwelcome marker of Western influence after a time of righteous uprising to reclaim Mexican cultural heritage away from the colonizing European influence exemplified by the ousted dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

It is fascinating to me that Frida would use the term “pelona” in her painting Self Portrait with Cropped Hair. She must have been aware of the term being used historically as a derogatory marker of women with shorter hair. Yet here, amidst the hair of grief and heartbreak, Frida claims the term in the second person. At first we think she is directly addressing her former love, Diego Rivera, but upon further reflection, the term “pelona” seems self-reflexive, referring to herself, perhaps her own lovability.

Was cutting her hair short meant to be read as an act of defiance? Or a symptom of grief? A genius in the realms of rendering emotional realism in symbolic gesture, Frida uses the act of cutting her hair as emblematic of her heightened emotional state. We often shear our head at times of ritual, or extreme heartbreak.

I teach Art History to young visual artists in an arts magnet Baltimore City public high school. In class last month, we watched a segment of the controversial film Frida (2002) because one thing I think the movie got right was how it worked Frida Kahlo’s paintings, especially the self portraits, into the narrative. When we got to the scene where Frida tells Diego Rivera that she is pregnant, Frida is lovingly bathing Diego in the kitchen of their apartment in New York. My students asked “if she is in pain all the time, why is he getting the bath?” Valid question. “Because patriarchy,” someone replied. I nodded in the dark. Why is anything right now? Because power dynamics. Because [insert unchangeable condition here]. Because war. Because grief and loss. Because rejection.

For the past several months, big hair change has been threatening within me like a storm. In the face of feelings of powerless grief, the relentless dehumanization of Palestinians, the heartbreak watching Israel enacting its own generational trauma upon another undeserving people, I want, I feel, I have this need to enact change over the only thing it feels like I have control over. I want to chop off all my hair.

I remember learning how tears shed in different emotional states have different salt structures: tears of sadness different from tears of necessity or joy. In fact, each tear has its own signature.

I wonder if it’s the same with hair cut under emotional duress.

The breakup haircut is a well-trodden trope in popular culture. Impulsive, emotional, needful of change. As though cutting one’s hair is synonymous with leaving the past physically behind us. And, isn’t it?

Seeing the hair strewn about Frida above, some discarded bits woven into braids, it feels like the detritus of a past life fallen, flung in shambles all around her. And yet, newly shorn, she sits resolute, serious, her own person.

We know that hair is ejected proteins leaving the body, it is itself detritus, unwanted and unneeded. We know that hair records that which we ingest, and can tell stories beyond the mere physicality or shape of it. I wonder what stories Frida’s chopped hair would tell, and what she hoped her newly cropped hair would say about her.

In the Muslim faith, hair is often shorn at the beginning of a religious pilgrimage, or at the conclusion, as a form or marker of grief.

The grief haircut is maybe a different animal. In movies we see the tear-streaked face of the protagonist looking at themselves in the mirror, hopelessness and anger coursing through them somehow visibly. They grab a clump of their own hair, and they take the scissors to it, chopping in enormous clumps, the sound of the scissors hacking through the fibrous hair makes sinew of them, turns them briefly back to flesh. Sometimes the character takes a clippers to their head and shaves everything entirely off.

For the past several months, I’ve wondered wildly when I would feel good about returning to this space. I speculated on all the essays I could write, and wrote many of them, but I couldn’t re-enter this space. I couldn’t make myself take up space while the world seemed to burn around me. I told myself in these months away—I am a body, not a capitalist machine. I do not need to produce all the time.

The truth is that I needed some time away while I brought a few projects to completion, and while I submitted my yearly round of applications, proposals, entreaties, wishes, so that I could weather the onslaught of stock rejections, heartfelt personal rejections, and near-misses (the life of the artist). Heartbreak season amplified by the loss of a key figure in my life, the top of my own family tree, our matriarch, my Grandma Bobbie. Devastated, we carried on into the New Year amidst illness and missed connections, far away from one another and drifting further out of reach.

Sarah Ahmed, writer, Feminist theorist, cultural historian and author of Feminist Killjoys, has been addressing the many ways in which the pervasive grief of this moment has impacted those of us who think about culture, history, and injustice holistically, aka writers of cultural history. Her words express far better what I have been feeling in her most recent post entitled “Find Other Killjoys,” written on December 31, 2023:

I have been struck, and feel deeply seen, by other writers I so admire, who in finding their ways back to professional pursuits post October 7, have found ways to acknowledge the devastation that daily, hourly mounts to a fever pitch that is all-consuming and overwhelming, in the face of no real change.

In the February 11, 2024 newsletter I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later from , the artist pauses to acknowledge both personal and global heartbreak after a brief pause in getting her newsletter out to her readers:

On the global front, we are now entering the fourth month of watching Gaza and watching our elected officials and heads of state do nothing. We are now entering the fourth month of what no one should hesitate to call a genocide. I did wake up with a bit more joy this morning in knowing that while we are still fighting for the bare minimum (a ceasefire), it seems that there are more and more people who, in defiance of their political leadership’s stance, are acknowledging at the very least, something ain't right.1

Friend, writer, curator, and cultural worker Alex Santana recently sent out her professional newsletter announcing the many incredible projects she is currently working on in NYC and beyond, and included (in smaller font) a caveat at the top of her email, which I think captured with honesty and beauty what it feels like to be an artist deeply feeling the events in Palestine, and the disconnect of trying to continue to make moves in the simultaneous present.

She generously gave me permission to share it here.

As a creative / arts freelancer in NYC, it is difficult to stay afloat sometimes. Each win comes along with 2-3 setbacks, and every day is a struggle to maintain balance. Very often, this city does not feel hospitable to creative and experimental pursuits, especially those orchestrated by folks who are questioning the chokeholds of neoliberal capitalism. I live everyday in a dissociative state knowing that my taxes support the U.S.'s incessant violence locally and abroad, and I imagine ways of defecting, or sometimes just escaping. But I don't think escaping is the answer. I think working at being present is an answer, one of many. I deleted my Instagram in this call to stay present, and will be sharing info in email newsletters in the meantime. It's a puzzling thing to pursue creativity and inspiration in the face of so many organized obstacles pummeled against us.

So, in the spirit of presentness and presence, we continue.

I’ve been thinking about the many ways that hair is an insistent a call back to our humanity, to the flesh of us, and while it sometimes feels insane that we should need proof that we all share the same basic human DNA, I often look to hair as a tangible thread of connection.

I was raised in a household steeped in Zionist ideology. My maternal grandparents often spoke with gleams in their eyes of making “aliyah,” and moving to Israel. Israel was, to them, a beautiful dream.

Not without a sharp measure of heartbreak, I confide that I no longer believe that Israel should be a reality. Not like this, not after the nakba, and the subsequent continuous violent ousting of the Palestinian people from their native homeland. Not without a sustainable and respectful pathway to peace that acknowledges the history of the land itself.

If you ask someone who was raised with Zionist indoctrination “why, why is this happening?” They will tell you some version of what I was told: “because they attacked us on our highest of holy days”/”because we were outnumbered”/”because we belong here.” All dangerously one-sided stories that tell nothing of the powerlessness of the Palestinian people post-1948. Listening to historic recordings of Hamas, they state explicitly that their quarrel is not with Jewish people because they are Jewish, but rather with the project of Zionism as a nationalist ideology, a settler-colonial project backed by the UK and the US.

It is difficult to understand how this region became recast in the Western imagination as a place devoid of indigenous cultural heritage. But then of course, it isn’t so difficult. We live within the constructs of late-stage capitalism made possible by centuries of violent colonial expansion. This erasure is unacceptable, and yet, I know that this cognitive dissonance is a lived reality for many who have not yet healed from Zionist ideologies, and who have come to conflate their Judaism with the project of Israel. In reality, and historically, Jewish identity hasn’t had a national locus; it was held together by the thread of tradition and belief and community, scattered. And it was a strong thread, woven tightly.

Dear one, incredible writer, storyteller, and human being, Temim Fruchter, wrote a beautiful book, City of Laughter (Grove Atlantic, 2024), which came out in January of this year and found me at a time when I needed a firm handhold on what it means to be Jewish and queer. You may recognize the title from many NYT recommended lists and subsequent rave reviews!

In her book, Temim’s protagonist Shiva plunges herself deep within the voids of her own Jewish family history—a frustratingly fragmented history—in the hopes of finding wholeness. What she finds is so much more than that, and the question of “wholeness” remains a question.

City of Laughter gave me permission to celebrate the searching/finding, the diasporic nature of that Judaism, which felt so nourishing. The book celebrates the transitory nature of Judaism at every level.

At a recent book event in Baltimore, Temim taught me a word that I will be eternally grateful for, a word that comes from deep within Yiddish wisdom, before Israel and at least a century into the systemic project of annihilating Jews across Russia and Eastern Europe via pogroms, ghettoization, and the lead up to World War II.

The word is: doykeit, or “hereness.”

Strength in the scatter.

The term “doykeit” was coined by a socialist labor group formed in Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century called The Bund. Their motto was:

Queer Jewish Diaspora Studies scholar Shelby Handler writes of the movement: “in the face of burgeoning Zionism, [the Bund] offered a vision of secular Jewish cultural autonomy that did not rely on nationalism.”2

When I came across the article with this image, and read the caption “Members of the Bund on a picnic, Minsk, 1910,” I remembered that my grandfather used to say our ancestors were from Minsk and Pinsk, regions of modern-day Belarus. These seemed like made-up lands to me at the time, fairytales. Like the protagonist of Temim’s City of Laughter, I let myself begin to imagine into my own ancestry. I imagined that my ancestors may have been part of the Bund, or at least encountered the Bund, as it was a very popular secular Jewish political movement at the time.

I looked deeply into the faces of each person in this photograph from 1910, and searched wildly for recognition, for some belonging. The Jewish ability to establish communities rich in care and tradition wherever they were forced to go is a strength to be celebrated. Which is why it feels so disproportionately wrong to me to focus Jewish identity into this frozen mass of statehood. It is mindboggling that believers in Zionism cannot see the correlation here—the same sorrows they are enacting upon the Palestinian people. Every Jewish value in me screaming “Never Again. Not to Anyone.”

I recently wrote to Temim that the moment I came into solidarity with the movement of a free Palestine (many years ago), it wasn’t difficult. In fact, it was easy to acknowledge the selfsame humanity in others—it was a beautiful relief, after so many years of queasy feelings around my own indoctrination. Of course we share a basic humanity. Of course we must recognize the humanity of those who claim rightful, generational ownership of the lands and region. It shocked me that people with the same beating heart, the same shiny dark hair, the same proud tall foreheads and strong hairlines, could look across the chainlink fences at their Palestinian siblings in humanity and not understand how even killing a 300 year old olive tree would be an act of violence, let alone an entire grove of trees, let alone a person, a child.

Whole family lines have been wiped from the planet. How does this not wrench us, sicken us into action?

I didn’t know how to reenter this space without an acknowledgement of the present we’re all experiencing. The daily heartbreak of live updates now from Rafah and the starvation in Gaza, the ongoing devastation and genocide, families cut off at the top, children caring for their younger siblings (infants) amidst a constant barrage of bombings, snipers, and persistent grief. I couldn’t find a way back into this space without telling you that I am fighting through these constant thickets of heartbreak, and losing hair to show for it.

On December 15, 2023, day 70 of the ongoing violence in Gaza, brave filmmaker and reporter Bisan Owda (@wizard_bisan1 is her account in English on instagram) posted a photograph of her hair held lovingly in her hand after chopping it off. The caption reads:

Bisan’s hair looks like my hair. Every child in Gaza could be my child. When are we going to stop letting a colonial agenda cancel out basic human dignity? How many ways can we draw this idea closer so that we all feel it in the same way and take action to put a stop to this violence?

A few weeks before cutting her hair, on November 26, 2023, Bisan posted a video that she had discovered an “Early Gray hair :)” as the caption reads. “Hey everyone, welcome with me the GRAY HAIR!” She is smiling, her vitality bursting through the clear and present danger and grief of daily life. “This was not here before the war,” she says. A small but meaningful moment to acknowledge the impact of stress on the body. When I think of the trauma these children are already experiencing. There are no words.

In the video, Bisan laughs off the gray hair and proudly shows us her hair beautifully braided like a crown around her head. In later videos, showcasing the camps with temporary tents to house the refugees fleeing bombings and strafing further north, she stops at a single chair between several tents. “This is where the barber cuts our hair.” In the midst of everything, we find and fight for our basic human needs. Maintenance. Care for the body and for each other.

Share Pull out your own Hair

I became obsessed with figuring out how to explain to you that I’ve felt moved by my own hair’s keep-growingness, even as I froze in horror and grief, even as I wished for all people to taste freedom. How can a body just keep going, keep growing, keep producing these unlikely pigments gathered into mass, matter, and fiber?

Whatever unspeakable horrors are going on outside the body, the body continues its wisdom of functioning wildly, miraculously, even in the face of deadly change and never-ending loss. In the first months of the onslaught in Palestine I stumbled into the bathroom one morning and was astonished that, as my mind, my entire being, was glued to the events unfolding in real time before our eyes in Gaza, this one hair on my chin kept growing unnoticed. My first reaction was shock, and then admiration at the resilience of this hair.

It just keeps growing.

There is small comfort in remembering that hair itself is a caretaker. Quick to rewild the smoother areas of the body left vulnerable, under-protected. Where some experience unprecedented loss of hair due to bodily and environmental trauma, others grow hair more thickly in response. Whether growing, or being cut short, hair is ever a marker of our experiences, our collective storytelling, what we value and hold dear, and how we present ourselves to the world.

If we’re lucky, it can be a locus of connection.

This past week, a dear friend sent me this gorgeous artwork by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, which I have not been able to get out of my head.

I want to let it grow roots there, in my mind.

Hair is woven into the fabric of both collective and individual identity. And yet it is something we (mostly) all share. Experienced in degrees of shorn-ness, “pelona” or not, hair is a fundamental state of human beingness. We mustn’t forget what we share.

I’ll leave these images with you for today, but I’m excited to delve deeper into Mona Hatoum’s incredible multi-media work—including lots of hair work—in the coming weeks.

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Yours in solidarity, yours in peace,

May all beings be free,

xo

Suzanne

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Rasheed, K. [11 February 2024]: "Primitive Hypertext" — severance; reanimating spider corpses - "necrobotics"; penelope the platypus fakes a pregnancy; "and it's legal"; techno in palestine. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later, accessed February 21, 2024.

KJR Studios: Kameelah Janan Rasheed

[11 February 2024]: "Primitive Hypertext" — severance; reanimating spider corpses - "necrobotics"; penelope the platypus fakes a pregnancy; "and it's legal"; techno in palestine

Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We say Bismillah to initiate an act to acknowledge the intention and the ethics we carry with all that follows Bismillah…

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2 years ago · 9 likes

I saw Girl God at Ottobar a couple weeks ago. It was early school days and a friend had an extra ticket to the comedy duo. We made a plan to meet at the bar across the street and arrived just in time for Grace Freud and April Clark to sidle onstage and make us laugh a lot. It felt good to release the tightly-gripped expectations of that first week of teaching; it felt good to sit in a crowd of mostly fellow queer people and exalt the trans women on stage doing their deft comedic footwork; it felt good to rest in a communal experience for a second.

It honestly felt religious. I’m used to being pressed up against the stage at Ottobar as a wall of sound blasts my eardrums, or else hovering at the top step above the crowd by the back bar, or else standing at the edge of a swirling mosh pit, body guarded by my partner Allison and pregnant.

As we walked around the assembled chairs entering the space I had this feeling like “you’re gonna want to sit down for this.” There was an aisle left down the middle. It was downright pew-like, adding to the heady mix of stale beer and cigarettes that kept the place vacuum-sealed against time.

Girl God was funny as hell but if I’m being honest, my clearest memory of that night were the haircuts. Grace Freud, one half of the comedic duo, has a very notable gay mullet.

At a housewarming party about a month ago, I was explaining HAIR CLUB to a new friend and they immediately said “oh, like gay mullets?” I beamed, nodding with deep respect at their own gay mullet and said “yes, EXACTLY. Like gay mullets.”

Trends of hair styling within specific communities and cultural groups have always helped to flag safety and shared values. This has been true forever and across so many cultures and histories. While the mullet has a rich and varied history—from the Mohawks of indigenous peoples in the early Americas who grew their hair long in the back for spiritual reasons, to contemporary trends in Hockey hair—the mullet is certainly having a queer moment.

The pandemic years provided a generation of house-bound queers a perfect pupal stage to grow out their secret mullets, all reappearing with the vocal glee of Brood X at the end of 2021 and now crowding up queer bars across our cities. How beautiful, how gorgeous. Forget the practical hairstyles of helmet-ready Greeks, the privileged boredom of Roman teen 6th century elite donning mullets—the hairstyle of Rome’s direst enemy, the Huns—to anger their fathers, and please let’s forget Ben Franklin’s “skullet” (bald top with long frizzy sides) which he used to tug at the opulent heart- (and purse-) strings of the French monarchy by poor-baiting them into giving their financial backing to the early “United States.”

All rise, the heady lesbians of the 1980s, who used their mullets to find each other like beacons in a dangerous social landscape. All rise, David Bowie, whose orange-androgynous Ziggy Stardust mullet made being here and being queer more bearable, iconic even, glam. All rise, Virgil Abloh’s Spring 2018 collection for Off-White, which walked the Paris runways during Fashion Week. All rise, RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 12 finalist Crystal Methyd. Stand up, KD Lang, Zendaya, and pop duo Tegan & Sara. Take your bows for queering the mullet. 

Sit down, AC Slater from Saved by the Bell. Move aside, Tiger King. 

Jade Gomez, queer journalist and writer, has been quoted with a beautiful take on the queering of the mullet in recent years. She says,

Queerness as cultural alchemy, churning the rejected detritus of mainstream heteronormative culture into the glowing pearlescence of the newly cool? I believe it.

Share Pull out your own Hair

I often fear my hair is complicit in my passing as straight.

I am not straight, and I don’t want my hair to be a beard.1

When I am out alone in the world, my femme-presenting body and styling habits make me easy to mistake for a straight. As much as I try, and I do try, to embody a dandy-ish masculinity, a flair for the glammatic—sparkles, sequins, and wild print button-ups buttoned all-the-way-up are all well within my closet repertoire. But how to get my hair out of the closet?

So I sat in the audience at Girl God, in my denim shorteralls and my teva flatforms, my curly hair sitting like a helmet of tangled brambles over my head, and I counted mullets. There were at least 25.

I burned with a deep queer longing for what they all had.

This isn’t a coming out story. Except that it always is. It’s a mark of privilege to pass as femme and straight, as I often do. And while I’m relatively safe in public restrooms and at gas stations, as a person I am in a near constant state of coming out. It’s a daily risk-reward evaluation with anyone who might assume I’m straight when I’m not, who might assume my gender when it’s not “apparent” to them.

In an application I was recently filling out, I checked “prefer to self-identify” under the Preferred Gender question and in the space provided I typed: Robin Williams’ character from The Birdcage (1996).

My current stylist often warns against straying into mullet territory. She says “I don’t want to give you a square shape on top” as though this is obvious, as though this is the right choice. I nod because I trust her, but inside I’m shouting: “GIVE ME A SQUARECUT, MAKE ME A JAUNTY LITTLE FRILLY BOY.” Anything that will help my insides match my outsides, anything that will flag.

A queer haircut acts like an exclamation mark. But really it’s more than an exclamation, it’s also a question: a queer haircut is an interrobang. |‽| It says: I exist inside the radical questioning of gender, of heteronormativity. I exist in an in-between state that seeks answers outside the binary of genders western civilization has offered to us.

It was in this mindstate that I arrived at services for the High Holy Days on Rosh Hashanah last Saturday. And as though in answer to my urgent incessant internal interrobanging, as I found a seat at the back of the Quaker Meeting House where this roving Jewish congregation holds services, the rabbi said “Now let’s make one thing clear: we don’t arrive at the New Year whole. In fact, some of us might feel like a hot mess.”

The rabbi, I notice, is rocking an impressive shag. I think, maybe I should email the rabbi about this. Hair in Judaism is already sacred—”like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead” as the Bible says—maybe the rabbi will have some advice on my squarecut beshert.

In the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah—this holy return to an embodied Jewish space after many long years feeling diasporic to my own people—folks kept sending me news of the woman who now held the record for longest mullet in the world, Tami Manis.

Was this an omen? Or, in the spirit of Rosh Hashanah, was this a testing of my faith? Am I strong enough to keep growing my hair out? Am I strong enough to shear it down into the shullet (a hybrid shag-mullet) of my dreams?

Up until this past Saturday, I was unsure if I would ever feel truly at home in a temple again, a space that used to be the seat of my intellectual curiosity as a kid. It is where I learned the concept of internal questioning, the fuel of my earliest academic engines. I hadn’t set foot in a temple in nearly ten years. It was a loss I hadn’t realized I had been fostering, a hole that was so much void it had disappeared from view.

As I sat in the back pew of this temporary holy space, I looked at the congregation settled in before me. Heads bowed in prayer or lifted in attention, heads craning to see a friend or thrown back in laughter. Belonging surged through the crowd like an energetic pulse. I found home in the familiar melodies of the prayers and the sequence of the blessings.

It all fit back onto me like an old glove, and I felt that warmth and rootedness I hadn’t felt in years surge through my whole being. I’m no shill for organized religion, but Judaism has always been more than an institution to me—it’s a space of belonging over centuries, against all odds, through ritual. I always understood that to fully participate in Judaism was to exist in a state of constant questioning, which is to say, engagement. Welcome to the year 5784.

While I sat there feeling all of this at once, it occurred to me that I had been preparing for this ritual return by examining my own rituals of preparation through hair. I had been meticulously combing each impulse to return to my body as the temple for meaning, and ruminating on hair maintenance as a special space of ritual, and I had been missing the spiritual in all of it.

It was joyous to see so many young people crammed into this space with their kids and their elders, surrounded by their chosen families. As I stared at the back of everyone’s heads, I realized, beginning to lose count, that I was surrounded on every side by queer ass haircuts!

I had chosen this congregation because I liked their message of radical inclusion. It was a safe space for Jewish people interested in liberation of every kind. The more I looked, the more I found. Every other person had a mullet or a shullet or a gender-affirming asymmetrical undercut of some kind. And there were other hair moments: vast tangles of curly hair just like mine.

It felt like staring down a real time real life google image search of “dark brambly curly hair shag and mullet.” They were sitting all before me like a glorious hair buffet. And they were each possible.

Love y’all. We’re back and we’re going bi-weekly.

Let me know if you ever feel like your hair is a beard, or how you let your identity shine through hair choices. Or just write in to say hi. I love hearing from you.

We’re back after a month away ! I’ve been working hard on a book project I’ve had on my desk for a while now, a project that always takes up my whole brain. But I’m really glad to be returning to this space to think more (and forevermore!) about hair.

This month brought lots of joy in the form of Arlo learning how to dance, old friends visiting, sun breaking through layers of leaves in the morning and walking those leaf shapes across the ceiling of our bedroom. The days of our early morning snuggles are numbered: Arlo is almost a year old and her sleeping patterns are changing!

August also brought news of illness. A friend started chemotherapy this week, another one left the hospital.

For all the gauzy lightness of summer, these last few weeks the writing has felt very heavy. I usually fly, skimming from the surface of the thought the words I need to convey it. But these weeks I’ve felt the full trudge of wading through a soup of ideas. I am distracted by worry, the health of friends, and fleeting change. I need a haircut. Even my hair feels heavy.

If there was anything real I could do for either of them. If there was something I could do.

So this reentry is something of a swirl, thinking about health and storytelling, thinking about gestures of faith, and planting memory in a bed of words. Before you go forward this week, please know this newsletter trods into the territory of illness and healing. You get to decide if that’s the story you need for today.

Either Way, You’re Covered

Hair falls out for every reason, and for no reason. Hormonal shiftiness, stress, healing, illness, change. Losing one’s hair is like losing track of oneself just a little bit, or little by little. But what if in losing track of yourself a bit, you make just enough space for others to support you?

My friend is going through chemo. She will lose her hair soon. It’s not my story to tell, but it is a familiar story, a story I have held of many others’ over many years of holding hair stories. Hair and our health. Inextricably tied.

When embodied, hair might tell the story of your health for you.

It’s no surprise then that biblically, mythically, epically, hair is often tied to power. Across many cultures and belief systems, hair is emblematic of that special vitality, of virility, of miraculous life, of danger, and of strength. This stunning read by Safiya Sinclair which I read recently in the New Yorker gives gorgeous prose to some of these beliefs within the spirituality of Rastafarianism, for example.

A few weeks ago the poem “Baby Brother Shape-Up” by Donna Weaver landed in my inbox. If there’s anything I can’t recommend enough it’s the entire archive of Recommended Reading by Electric Literature, and their online short forms missive The Commuter. I’ve been getting it for years and it’s the one thing I can remember consistently opening.

July 26th’s email called out to me from the sea of false advertisements crowding my inbox. “Real Family Grows Your Hair For you” read the subject line. I blinked. At first, it really seemed like an ad, an ad for something I wanted.

I clicked, and realized it was poetry.

When we speak of hair and caring, what could be more beautiful than this whole complete gesture? “I’m growing my hair for you.”

This past weekend I had the pleasure of getting to see a friend’s film at the New/Next Film Festival in Baltimore, MD. The film is called De Lo Mio (2019), written and directed by the absolutely luminous Diana Peralta, and it centers the story of two sisters and a brother who are reunited, having to sell their grandparents’ house in the Dominican Republic, a house their family had lived in for generations.

They meet up, the sisters from New York and the brother having stayed in the DR all these years, to clean out the house. The film maps a mountain of memories and tensions rising against the lush backdrop of the Dominican Republic. It is a film about family and a film about place.

There are a number of hair scenes in the film; Diana said she had a “whole hair plan” going into the filming, and has agreed to chat with me about all of it in a future newsletter (!!). But the one that comes to mind this week is a scene where one of the sisters, Carolina (played by Darlene Demorizi), is cleaning out her abuela’s closet, and she begins trying on her clothes. Finally, she finds her old wig and puts that on, transforming into the image of her abuela, at least, according to her sister Rita (played by Sasha Merci Medina), who walks into the room at that moment while Carolina is miming glamorous airs in the bedroom mirror.

It is instantly funny and sweet and poignant, and something complicated passes between the sisters seeing one of them in their grandmother’s wig. The wig itself is styled like “early Whitney” and changes the character’s whole vibe. I wonder what it feels like to wear someone else’s hair, someone you knew. Is it like putting on an old hat of theirs? Or their clothes? Or is it somehow more alchemizing? Part of you merges with them; maybe you become them somehow. Closer.

The guiding principle behind this newsletter has always been to find the many metaphoric possibilities of hair in art and culture. Metaphor as a way to describe the multitude of forms and symbolic resonances hair can have across creative media, throughout cultures, and by extension, in life. I’m interested in the difference between the narratives that hair transmits as hair itself, rather as image, rather as description. I know there is a difference. But what is the texture of that difference? 

Sandra Cisnero’s “Hairs” (or “Pelitos”) from her story collection The House on Mango Street (1983) is one of my favorites. Here, hair is drawn as one long line of descriptions: different shapes and different textures of hair adorn each member of the family. The way hair is described—“like a broom,” “lazy,” “slippery,” “like fur”—is some of my favorite cascading metaphors and descriptors of hair, each one surprising. How many ways there are to describe hair, the specialness of hair, as unique to each person as their smell.

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When we started HAIR CLUB back in 2014, Hair Myth and Cautionary Tales was one of my first research vectors. Samson I knew of, Rapunzel naturally, and the frightening locks of Medusa were all already in my hair story lexicon. I have spent the years since gathering as many hair stories in literature that I can find. I read re-tellings and re-appropriations of older tales, like Anne Sexton’s “The Letting Down of the Hair” (1972). I devoured any story that referenced hair or the power of hair from the story “Pigtails” in Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School to the more recent and very thrilling The Other Black Girl by Zakiyah Dalila Harris, the adaptation of which is coming out on Hulu this fall.

In 2015, I drew together a growing library of hair stories, myths, and paper ephemera from my graduate school’s special collections library—the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection—and curated a reading of peers whose work featured hair, creating a small interactive installation of works on paper from the library’s archives, inviting folks to thumb through on their own.

One of my favorite hair artifacts was a clip-in streak of white hair modeled after Susan Sontag called “Feminist Hair Wear.”

What are some of your favorite hair stories or hair-based ephemera? I’ve had students over the years make books with their hair pasted to the front and back covers, use hair as embroidery floss, and write gorgeous stories of loss and profiling and queer longing centered on their hair. The stuff of hair always holds a magical, irreplaceable property, but the way hair exists in stories, in the written word, always astonishes me with its resonant power.

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A digital hair parcel fell into my inbox recently, forwarded to me by one of you wonderful folks in this hair community: a story by a wig maker (@high.definition.hair on instagram) who works with clients preparing to begin healing therapies that will inevitably result in the loss of their hair.

In the video, a woman’s mane of long red hair is prepared, cut, mapped, and meticulously labeled in preparation for making a wig of her own hair. The video flashes by in a familiar internet reel of tiktok flash cuts—a mode of storytelling that we are by now all pretty adept at reading.

Flash: a woman sits in the salon chair in the nylon black robe, her hair is set in carefully apportioned tufts, gathered by tiny rubber bands. Flash: the stylist cuts each lock above the gathered band and places it in a plastic bag that is labeled according to the placement on the head.

Flash: a map of the woman’s swirl pattern, the direction her hairs grow drawn out to guide the wig making. Flash: the woman returns mid-treatment, having lost the hair she had left, to try on her new wig. Flash: she flips her hair back and examines herself in the mirror with a look of overwhelming joy.

I smile because she gets to wear her own hair until her own hair regrows in miraculous health. As I watch, I think of propagating plants; making a cutting above the node to make way for new growth. The wig maker’s gesture is replete with optimism and care.

I hope this newsletter finds you feeling good, maybe your fingers are sticky with ice cream. I hope it finds you by a window, letting the light shine onto closed eyes, just for a second, finding pause in these last moments of summer. If you or a loved one are going through a health process, or an ongoing one, I hope it’s a good day.

Sending love to you all.

Until next !! xo

I’d be remiss if I didn’t use this pop culture round-up to mark Ken’s reference to “blonde fragility” in the Barbie movie.

[Chorus]
I'm just Ken
Anywhere else I'd be a ten
Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blonde fragility?
I'm just Ken
Where I see love, she sees a friend
What will it take for her to see the man behind the tan and fight for me?

As I move through the world of media, news, entertainment and advertising looking for “Hair Moments,” I’ve become aware that there is a subtle yet rigorous logic behind what I consider to be a true “Hair Moment” versus a moment that simply references hair.

In past newsletters I’ve defined the Hair Moment is a moment that involves or references hair in any form, not just for the sake of hair itself, but in a way that metaphorically connects it to some wider truth about the condition of being.

But when is a hair moment a whole moment, and when is it just a punctuation of living. Does it have to be a plot point, or a character point, or a way of marking time passing to become a full on hair moment?

I’ll explain.

Throughout the first and second seasons of The Bear (2022-23), Natalie “Sugar” Berzatto (sister to Chef Carmy), played by Abby Elliott, is a blonde. But for one episode, the high octane, high stress family Christmas episode, she is a brunette. Why?

At face value, this hair change helps to signify a change in the timeline: a flashback, going back in time. But still, it prompts us to look and think more deeply about Natalie as a living, breathing character, one with a whole history of choices and changes. Her hair color isn’t addressed within the episode, or even later on, but from this episode forward we understand her to be a person who changes her hair.

Based on other moments of characterization, we could extrapolate on the why: perhaps she changes her hair color in order to fit in, or to impress, or to please others. Maybe she was just conforming to a beauty trend of the moment. It may have been more interesting if her part had changed too—side part to center parted, but perhaps it’s more significant that she’s a person who has had center-parted hair her entire life? Regardless of the trends.

Ultimately, we are invited to know this character better through what happens, even subtly, with her hair.

In the second season of Search Party, the fair-haired Elliott Goss, brilliantly and hilariously played by comedian John Early, begins to lose his already wispy hair.

Elliott’s hair loss joins a litany of other health-related concerns that we, being privvy (without spoilering!1) to what he has been a party to in the first season, understand as related to the stress of hiding the truth, both to himself and to the outside world. The hair loss is happening as a sub-plot, but it relates to the condition of being that Elliott finds himself thrust within: symptomatic of the guilt of being an “accessory” to a sticky situation the first season and his growing status as a public figure.

Whether he admits it to anyone else—least of all himself—Elliott’s hair concerns this season are a direct result of his actions, and the situation in which he finds himself.

But is this a hair moment?

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Another example.

I’ve been rewatching Sex and the City noting every hair moment that comes up within the show. There are many.

Some small, like in Season 2 Episode 8—“The Man, The Myth, The Viagra”—when Carrie makes a “huge” request of Big: “I want you to know my friends better,” she says, perched on a stool at Big’s kitchen counter while he cooks for her. “I know your friends fine,” he says, offering Carrie a taste of something. “Charlotte is the brunette, Miranda is the red head. And Samantha is trouble.”

In this smaller hair moment, we see the patriarchal move to categorize women according to their hair phenotypes, as though being “blonde” or “brunette” relates directly to some quality of personality. I won’t pretend that there aren’t stereotypes around this plastic categorizing of women. Obviously, the idea of being “a blonde” is something that the Barbie movie, and Ken in particular, seizes on.

And yet, some hair moments in SATC speak to even larger themes, larger concepts of femininity, of hair maintenance, and the pressure to perform one’s body. Which, in this show, means performing one’s body mostly for men.

In Season 2 Episode 6, for example,—”The Cheating Curve”—Samantha sleeps with her trainer from the gym. When they’re in the shower together she says “If I had known we were going to do this, I would have shaved my legs!” “Don’t worry,” he replies, “I’ll shave them for you.” The shaving is overtly sensual, and as the razor crests her knee, he looks up at her and says “Are you a dirty girl?” Carrie’s voiceover kicks in at this point “..and then, to Samantha’s surprise and delight, Thor just kept on shaving.”

We learn later that Thor shaved Samantha’s pubic hair into his signature shape: a lightning bolt.

At the diner later on, Samantha wonders out loud what it is these days about “men wanting to shave your pubic hair.” True to character, Miranda suggests that men just want a “little girl.” Samantha laments. “You can’t just let it grow wild anymore,” she says. “These days, [your pubic hair] says as much about you as your shoes!”

Later in the episode, Samantha makes an unpleasant discovery. She realizes Thor has been sleeping with lots of other women at the gym when she sees a hairy lightning bolt that matches her own in the locker room.

And in the category of hair moments I truly question, I couldn’t help but wonder: can we consider the mere existence of Garth Brooks’ alter-ego Chris Gaines a hair moment just because we all know it’s just Garth Brooks in a wig?

I’m gonna go ahead and say yes. The steady state soul patch is a masterful touch.

Whether we think of it this way or not, hair is line, form, and shape. Hair is content, event, and performance. Hair itself is mindless art—that is, it grows according to the wisdom of the body and not the mind, although we know events that affect the mind often affect the body, wise or not.

Many people, most people, have elaborate ways of caring for and preparing their hair to greet the public, whether that happens each week, each month, each day. We perform hair in countless ways, individual to each person. Sometimes, the act of hair care is an invisible dance of cascading veils designed to cover traces of care at all: to appear coiffed and perfected is akin to godliness. See: celebrity culture. See: the real estate mavens of Selling Sunset. See: hours spent in the salon chair to achieve the perfect look.

Like good design, hair often bows to the pressure to appear “effortless.”

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Loving Hair Loving Care

The work of artist Janine Antoni playfully and poignantly questions traditional forms of labor, twisting the basic functioning of our bodies into productive systems that engineer perfect forms, or, art.

Far from using a judiciously-flecked paintbrush to move oil paint across a canvas, Antoni employs forms of under-explored bodily labor in her work: teeth for biting, tongue for licking, hands not for traditional sculpting but for washing away and lathering. Forms of labor we might consider as more innate conditions of living—the need to bite, chew, lick, wash.

Her pieces Gnaw (1992) and Lick and Lather (1993) are some of my favorite works of hers. In Gnaw, Antoni created sculptures from large blocks of chocolate and lard, using her mouth to manipulate the material. If you look closely, you can see the teeth marks used as complete gestures across the blocks of chocolate and lard upon their low marble pedestals. Teeth become chisel, working away at the soft material.

For Lick and Lather, Antoni poured moulds of her own portrait bust in soap and chocolate, respectively. She made multiples of each. For the chocolate busts, she licked and nibbled on the sculptures, altering her own visage subtly by delicious attrition. She approached the soap sculptures in a similar fashion, with wet hands, lathering and smoothing the surfaces away until the forms were altered, or at least had lost some of their most defining features.

I like these pieces because there is something of the body in them, more purely and more cleanly than in the way a body transforms material into art in the traditional sense. Rather than making, Antoni’s labor in these works was to lick down, to wash away. Her work achieves special resonance when it engages the body as performance.

In Janine Antoni’s hair performance Loving Care (1993), the artist soaked her long hair in Loving Care brand hair dye, Natural Black, and painted the gallery floor using her own hair as the brush until the entire space was covered in large swirls of black dye. 

From her website: 

There is so much to unpack here, from the act of mopping to the association with Abstract Expressionist painting. It’s important that these references come directly from the artist herself.

Abstract Expressionism is a post-World War II art phenomenon in the United States where artists confronted a crisis in representation after having lived through two world wars.

AbEx paintings, it might be said, are paintings of movement, motion, chance, gravity, and decisive action. Paint was flung, dripped, splattered, seeped, smeared, applied, and otherwise hurled onto the canvas with an expressive force that served to convey if not the visual reality of the time—as a still life or landscape painting might—then the emotional reality. The turmoil roiling beneath the surface of an otherwise polished 1950s pomade-slicked “American Dream.” The best of the AbEx artists sought to formalize, capture, and repeat, systematize what many saw as mere violent machismo flung at the canvas. Artists like Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Alma Thomas and Richard Mayhew saw in abstraction the opportunity to render an internal, emotional landscape, making internality and feeling an important subject of art.

In so many ways artists are the sensors of society, feeling the outward edges of what is true and transmitting that truth through their art. 

Artists are like hair in that way.

And yet, AbEx still relied on the use of traditional tools and traditional modes of expression: canvas, paint, paintbrush, body. Collaborations with time and gravity, and the viscosity of the pigments are all at play. 

The artist’s wingspan is a node I often focus on with my students: can you look at an AbEx painting and sense how tall the artist was, standing before the giant canvas? How far their reach extended? Can you imagine the flicks of the brush itself by looking at the length and width of each stroke? Can you inhabit the action of the painting?

Not the smooth blueing of a distant horizon or the careful gloss of disappearing brushstrokes we might find (or not find) in Renaissance paintings, for example. Instead, the path of the brush in abstract art of this period is often visible. As nearly accurate as calculating the orbit of a planet from the relative observed velocity of its passage through the night sky, one might look at an AbEx painting and say, by examining the radius of the splatter, the slow pool of the paint, or the drag of dry brush across the canvas how fast, or slow the artist’s hand, how much force was used, or perhaps even the distance from which the painter was flicking the brush, pail, or handful of paint in question.

In Janine Antoni’s piece, the artist’s hair becomes the paintbrush. Her whole body is involved in the act of mark making, kneeling prostrate on the floor with her hair flung out ahead of her.

In documentation of this performance, a big bucket filled with hair dye sits behind her and we watch the artist dunking her head in there repeatedly to re-moisten her locks. In the swiveling swirl of black dye on the floor we can see the full reach of her physical body, swishing this way and that in long coils. The artist’s own torso is the limit of her expressive mark-making, the split ends of her hair the flick and flourish of the bristle. We can imagine this by examining the path of “Natural Black” pigment across the gallery floor. The map of her movement shown in the wide swings of her hair and the tight, laborious pivots where her knees shuffled her ever backward. Smaller marks made by her fingerprints showcase the way she pushed herself across the space.

The most important detail of this performance, to me, is not the laborious effort of the body we might imagine in the strokes across the floor, nor the smearing hand prints that punctuate that labor in great gooey shoves of dye. It’s not the length of this durational performance, nor the documentation of it, nor the color of the dye itself, although those are all aspects of the artist’s myriad choices we might look to to generate a complete interpretation of the art piece. 

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To me, the most fascinating aspect of this performance, titled Loving Care after the brand of hair dye used to create it, is that as the artist performed the piece, and the artist “claimed the space, the audience was slowly backed out of the gallery.”

In other words, in order to complete the work: the audience must disappear.

So often we talk about hair as a performance, and the performance of hair itself, of simply having it, and the choices we make whether culturally- or familiarly- or texturally-determined around our hair. These conditions determine length, style, cut, shape, done up, let down, braided, pinned back, covered, etc. etc. These choices determine how our hair is read by others, and how it feels to be ourselves. 

In this hair performance, Janine Antoni slowly forces the audience out. She takes a space that exists for the public enjoyment of art—the gallery—and she forces everyone to leave.

True loving care may sometimes be about making space, claiming space for oneself. As Antoni claims the space with her hair, she renders it un-perceivable.

I think that’s really fucking powerful.

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In Suz news ::

This morning, I plopped my nine month old and her bottle in the travel crib we use as a pack n’ play and ran upstairs to do some hasty hair maintenance.

As I plucked my eyebrows back to a shape that made me feel better about my whole face, I took note: I’m making space for this. Most hair rituals requires gently forcing people out, carving a slice of precious time to confront your own body.

Since we had the baby, my partner and I often need to ask for this time from each other. This time, I was taking it from Arlo herself. I finished up and went to retrieve her from her little pen so we could resume her bottle time on the couch while I read next to her as usual.

How do you make time for your hair?

Does hair time intrude on other obligations or commitments? How do you ask for it? Do you simply take it? Have you tried painting the floor someone else is standing in with your own hair as a way of saying “hey, I need some time alone with my hair”?

xo, with love

First, a big warm welcome to all the newcomers in this space ! Thank you for the outpouring of support around Heavy is the Crown and also for sharing your hair stories with me in the comments last week. I don’t take them lightly at all. I feel so touched, overwhelmed and excited to keep digging into this ground together.

In HAIR CLUB, hair stories are incredibly important to our collective understanding of hair. Always, you are the expert on your own hair experience and I hope you’ll keep sharing that with us.

Many of you have shared stories over the past couple of weeks in which hair contains a dichotomy. After all, hair can hold many truths at once. This week, I’m thinking about the metaphoric potency of a hair ritual: how many threads of meaning can an act of hair removal unravel?

I’m so glad you’re here.

Hair Passages : Thresholds, Doorways, New Beginnings

We know hair marks time passing: it grows. We cut it. It changes with our internal weather. Breakups come for it. Grief and loss find us tearing at it. Stress scares it away.

A first haircut is an important rite of passage. The gloss of the plastic turtle chair; the feel-sound of the snip. Your hair wet in the mirror.

As I finished up my time at Wassaic Project this past week, I was grateful for the opportunity to host a Hair Salon event. In HAIR CLUB, Hair Salons are swirling conversation events that delve into the topic of hair in an expansive-associative dialogue, championing the anecdotal, and always uniquely unibrow—our definition of content that is inclusive of low/no-brow to high-brow reference and everything in between: unibrow !

After the event, as we shoved our glasses together at the local bar, one of the artists said: “I never fully realized how hair can be an organizing principle for important moments in our lives, our most potent memories.”

I loved the way he phrased that: hair as organizing principle for memory.

One particular memory that came out of this magical hair conversation, a story told by one of the other artists in residence, has been sitting at the top of my mind.

It’s a short story, but it contains lots of time, and condensed emotional weight.

During the pandemic, the hair on my head and in my beard went silvery gray, then white.

“From stress?” I asked.

They nodded.

Post-pandemic, however, my hair has slowly returned to the way it was before: dark and sort of black-brown.

I had never heard of hair naturally returning to a former state. Listening to this artist’s story I was shocked and deeply moved to think of hair returning to an earlier state. To think of hair “healing” itself. I was familiar with the concept that hair could be a measure of our mental health, a visual register of our nervous system. But it had never occurred to me that a hair passage could actually be reversed.

On a trip to Niagara Falls in middle school, we stood at the precipice of the falls as the water rushed to meet itself below. Later on, we were handed plastic ponchos and passed through the metal turnstiles to get onto the ferry boat. We bobbed out to where the water churned in on itself in a deafening rush. Water flecked our ponchos and the glasses of the kid next to me and it felt like every story about the falls was told from the land of “what if.” What if you went over the Falls? What if you went over the Falls on purpose? What if you went over the Falls by accident? What if you fell?

At a local museum we learned about a black cat that went over the Falls in a bucket. The story is that it came out of the ordeal alive, but its fur turned stark white from fear.

I used to think that this story about the cat was as common knowledge as some scripture. I would reference it casually in conversation. “Like that cat that went over Niagara Falls.” Meaning, you get frightened and you sustain great physical change: inward signals outward.

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I often visualize hair events as happening in one direction—the direction of time. While hair “can always grow back” (a comforting refrain told by good friends to the victims of bad haircuts), I tend to think of hair changes as doorways we pass through in a never-ending surrealist hallway. Time moves forward; so does our hair.

Even when I cut my hair back to bangs last year I could never quite get them to look like the bangs I’d had in previous periods of my life. They even felt different. A hair return is more like a distorted reprise: an echo of the familiar theme, but newly syncopated perhaps with the rhythm of what we now know. Same, but with new resonance.

When I found out Heavy is the Crown was featured on last week—making Pull out your own Hair a 2023 Substack Featured Publication (!!)—I immediately hopped in the shower and shaved my legs.

At first, it felt like a joke. What was I doing?? Shaving my legs that day hadn’t been on the agenda. And really at first glance it felt like an old habit: to be visible (even digitally! even through the screen!), does my hair have to be invisible? 

As I was performing this ritual, however, I came into an awareness that I was shaving not to perform my body for an external audience, not to prepare myself for the world outside—as I had previously used this ritual to do—but this time to mark an internal shift. In a lifetime of performing this act of hair removal as rote and imperative, I had felt moved to use the ritual to mark a passing: from one moment into the next—as a way of celebrating, of preparing—as new community flowed into this space.

And really, it felt like a threshold. As I returned myself to a hairless state, I privately marked the turning of a page.

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I think I’ve mentioned before how during the pandemic, when I stopped having to perform my body as hairless thanks in part to Zoom’s blur feature while remote teaching, I began to explore my natural hair removal rhythms from outside of that pressure to perform. When did I feel like shaving my legs? Or plucking my eyebrows and face? In the absence of the ability to go out and get a haircut—the most obvious of public-facing hair upkeep rituals—I turned my attention inward and softly monitored the surface of my body.

It got me thinking about the ways we prepare for whatever’s next through our hair rituals. In many ways—and paradoxical perhaps to biology—removing hair makes me feel more armored. 

Over the past two weeks at my artist residency in upstate NY, I used the time and space to go on a hair journey. I decided at the beginning that I would simply stop maintaining the hair on my face. Eyebrows of course, but also the hair that grows on my neck and chin.

It wasn’t easy. I’ve worked my entire life to be and stay as hairless as possible, to remove “unsightly” hairs as soon as they crop up. In the context of this professional opportunity, I felt torn between wanting to perform the “best” (most polished) version of myself and wanting to feel authentically rooted in discovery through hair.

But then in the middle of my residency, death happened; I found out that someone in my family had passed away. In the soup of grief and reflection that follows this type of news, I thought: oh no, I’m going to have to pluck my chin.

It wasn’t until I was standing in front of the mirror I had found in an empty room upstairs and dragged into the brightest room of the old house we were staying in to catch the best light for plucking that I remembered: pulling hair is itself a grief ritual.

In certain regions of ancient Greece, a funerary practice emerged in the 8th century BCE wherein professional mourners would gather outside the home of the deceased to sing mournful songs and beat their chests. The chief mourners (usually spouses, sometimes a child or siblings) would ritually tear at their hair and clothes in mourning. These rituals marked the passing of a soul into the afterlife, and were most often performed by women.

Ritually and communally pulling at one’s hair in grief finds many depictions in Greek vessel painting. In some regions, it was also believed that in order to find safe passage into the afterlife, the deceased would need ceremonial offerings, graveside libations, and hair clippings of their closest relatives to guide them onward, passing from this world into the next.

What at first had felt like a moment of social pressure to appear hairless and “presentable” to the rest of my family at the funeral the next day quickly became a ritual of preparation, of sitting in the muck of unexpected loss and ruminating on it.

As I stood in front of the mirror that morning contemplating my chin, the morning light poured in generously, gold and glistening as the sun rose. I kept furiously plucking, scanning my face for errant hairs.

As I plucked, I gathered the fallen hairs and dropped them into a tiny jar I had brought in case I wanted to mark the passage of time by collecting my own hair in it.

I often want to forget I have a body—being perceived is complicated. But maybe I’ve fallen into a new pattern. Maybe I am moved now to remove hair as more of a ceremonial threshold, as an act of passing from one phase to the next.

In the end, I was glad to couch the instinct to return my face to its usual armored hairlessness as a grief ritual. To give meaning to the act beyond just doing it.

Ultimately, it felt like growth.

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xo as I emerge from the woods and re-enter the world !

Our goal is always an expansive and associative exploration of hair, and how hair achieves metaphoric resonance across art and culture. I’m so glad you’re here.

I also wanted to thank an old friend and exquisite writer, Julia Bedell, for recommending me to last week. If you aren’t reading her luminescent prose over at , you really must. Her missives and dreamy photography of life in Alaska are so atmospheric and just always the perfect poetic pause to a busy day.

This week’s newsletter is a slightly different format. I’m pulling in dialogue, conversations about hair that have already begun during my first week as an artist in residence at Wassaic Project in upstate NY. Being in community with artists is my favorite, and I hope some of these shares and musings from our residency will touch your heart as they’ve touched mine. Maybe they’ll spark conversations among your nearest and dearest around how hair acts as an extension of the body, as a vulnerable space, and especially how hair can become a shape that you might safely harbor yourself in.

Big welcome energy.

Half a day and half a world away from family we had been staying with in the Berkshires, we arrived at Wassaic Project with a sleeping baby and a car full of raw material. And a tupperware full of eggplant parmesan. And half a sheetcake with the words “Welco— Ar—” scribbled upon it in yellow icing.

It was my first day at Wassaic Project. We parked near the mill and found a program director to give us a tour: a barn full of artist studios, several houses of shared living space, and a giant iconic seven-story mill building installed with contemporary art. My heart!

Allison hoisted Arlo up on her hip as we wound through the grounds, waving hello to townspeople and greeting other new resident artists along the way. Later on at orientation, cold cans of La Croix gathered beaded sweat in the humidity as smoke from the fires in Canada swept down into the valley overhead. We gathered around two large wooden picnic tables to go over the handbook and introduce ourselves.

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Everyone’s work sounds amazing and I can’t wait to see what each person begins to explore here. I am always excited to be in community with other artists like this. When I mention “HAIR CLUB” or even just “hair” to a crowd of people some might be intrigued and want to talk about hair products and maintenance, but when I mention hair to a group of artists who are practiced in engaging with the world in a cross-material way, the resulting conversations are so affirming, and just incredible.

Here are a few snips of conversations we started this week. I say started because that’s what they were: brief and astonishing moments of connection and affirmation that I hope, I promise them, will continue in the weeks to come.

I have asked and received permission to reproduce these conversations anecdotally here, and the names used reflect the artists in residence at Wassaic Project right now, consent-given or changed as requested! I am deeply grateful to house these conversations about hair and for the openness of those sharing.

“So, you write about hair?” Padyn smiles at me dishing salad onto my plate at the welcome dinner.

“Yes! HAIR CLUB!” This is my always response, referencing our collaboration of nearly ten years studying, teaching, and writing hair. Usually I wave my hands, maybe even jazz hands, as a treat.

“So, like, what specifically about hair?” He places the dish down and reaches across for a bottle of wine.

“All of it,” I put my wine glass near his and nod at the red. “How hair achieves metaphoric resonance across art and culture.”

“Very cool.”

“I noticed your hair right away when you walked up,” another artist chimes in, reaching out their wine glass for a generous pour. I smile.

“Thank you! It’s in the in-between right now, but we’re getting used to each other,” I say, placing a bashful hand over my curly bangs. Everyone brings their glasses in to cheers and take a long sip.

“We had sort of a curly hair moment happening on our side of the table,” Padyn said smiling.

It’s true, three of us artists—Padyn, Salvador and myself—plus some of the artists who work at Wassaic, each have curly hair. And not just curly hair: exquisitely classed and completely different textures of curly hair. It was definitely a moment.

Salvador leans into the conversation at this point and says, “So, hair?”

“Yes! HAIR CLUB!” (you know the refrain by now)

I want to pause here and acknowledge something about starting a conversation about hair. Hair can be a space of deep vulnerability. Hair is also of the body. I make it a practice never to directly comment on any part of another person’s body—as, I believe, we all should (boomer moms out there: you hear me?). Too often, people don’t respect hair as part of the way a body takes up space. I have held stories about and witnessed inscrutable moments when someone reaches out and touches someone else’s hair without their permission. (There’s a whole book about it: Phoebe Robinson’s You can’t touch my hair: and other things I shouldn’t have to explain. One of the HAIR CLUB bibles).

I always wait. I always wait to say anything about someone else’s hair until we’ve settled into a conversation about hair and safe space has been generated between us. Even if I want to rush up to that person and gush about their hair: it’s gorgeous! Wow, what an incredible cut! I love the color, I love the shape! The curl definition is unreal! Even if I had the most pure intentions to gas up the other person, make them feel seen, boost their confidence, the fact is that they don’t know me yet. I don’t know what their felt history of hair has been. And I’m not yet a safe space for them.

As expected, upon starting each of these hair conversations at Wassaic, we immediately wandered into tender territory.

Padyn says “Believe it or not, I used to chemically straighten my hair” his eyebrows go up like I know you don’t believe it. Padyn has a gorgeous bed of defined curls, slightly longer on the top and going into shorter defined rings on the sides and around the back of his head. He says “I go to this boy who I’ve grown very fond of in Berlin…he does me right.” Padyn has been living in Berlin for the past year, so the fact that he has found a person, any person that he trusts with his curls is remarkable and I tell him so.

“I know,” he says. “I got really lucky.”

I have this exact conversation with two other people at the table: finding the person you trust to cut your hair and then clinging to them for dear life, even considering following them when they, say, move to Miami, Florida.

Salvador says he grew his hair out over the pandemic. He has a gorgeous mane of bouncy, dark curls. His hair is so actualized, so graceful and really stunning that I have a hard time fathoming when he shares that it still feels new to him.

He says when he was young he had no idea what to do with his curls. I immediately jump in “right!? Was this in the early 2000s-ish?”

'“Yes,” he nods emphatically.

“We had nothing back then! No one knew what to do with our curls.”

Another artist sitting directly across from me, Amelia, nods at this solemnly. She has a gorgeous center-parted mass of wavy blonde hair that squiggles at the ends just past her shoulders.

“When I was little..” Salvador smiles and puts his hand over his mouth as if to say, well we’re just diving right in here aren’t we? I nod, hoping my nod conveys all the complexity that I know hair stories might contain “…when I was little, I got made fun of a lot for my hair. I just wanted to, like, disappear.”

We discuss the expectations that weigh heavy on hair, from family, from society. Lately I’ve been fielding so man stories about people whose parents either would not let them cut their hair even if they desperately wanted to, or people whose parents would only let them grow their hair out long if they “proved they were responsible enough to maintain it.” I think a lot about this, how do you prove you’re responsible enough for your own hair?

“Looking back on it now,” Padyn says, reflecting on his chemically straightened hair in the early 2000s, “I wonder how much I just wanted to—needed to—fit in.”

Perhaps, he says, straight hair meant “straight” to him. Straightening it relentlessly and chemically during his youth in Montana may have been an assimilative tactic. Otherwise, he says, he felt he stood out too much. “Being slightly pudgy and also queer and also curly haired? It was too much for me. So I straightened it.”

I wondered aloud how many of us fell victim to the early 2000s straightening trend. How many of us were, in fact, queer, whether we knew at the time or not. Why people with curly hair feel the need to assimilate at all, to tamp down their gorgeous curls to blend in.

But I knew why.

“Prejudice against curly and textured hair as deep roots, of course, in racism and the desire to push forward a euro-centric beauty standard.”

“Of course,” Padyn agrees. How strange, he says, to have this resonate even as a white kid from Montana. That he would be feeling that assimilative pressure pushing down and down on him enough to straighten his hair. He tells me that his first boyfriend, also with curly hair and also from Montana, also straightened his hair as a kid. Talk about a moment.

As I look around the table, I feel comforted by the way that all of our hair seems to convey a sense of beingness and sure-footedness in our identities—so distinct from one another—even having pushed through those shared moments of assimilative cultural pressures we’ve all experienced in some form.

Another artist leans over at this point and says “When I saw you walk up I thought, that is the coolest haircut ever! That’s what I want my hair to look like.”

“Wow! Thank you,” I laugh and mean it. “My hair person calls it a ‘Shullet,’ a shag with mullet tendencies.”

“Well, it’s great. I used to have a bob, and for some reason I’ve been growing mine out. But without a real shape, I feel like it’s gone kind of blah—it freaks me out.” I get it. Having hair that isn’t an intentional shape is unmooring for me too.

“I actually had to have my hair fixed this week because of that,” I say. “My hair person, who I love and whom I’ve been going to for years and years, gave me my very first bad haircut last week. I had to go and get it fixed.”

I field the various gasps and “no! it looks great!”s that cascade my way with sincere gratitude (sob). Without the distinct shape the first go-round, I didn’t understand completely who I was.

If you’re new here (welcome!), you should know that hair is always a journey to me, and the journey I am currently on is: growing out my hair. The awkward phase is alive and breathing in my world! When does your hair enter the awkward stage?

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As the sun sets beyond the tree-covered mountainous hills to the west, conversation turns to a mutual love of curly bangs. Salvador would like to try them, but his hairstylist keeps suggesting that he wait, think it over. Kelly laments that she’s not sure she’s up for the maintenance.

Inwardly, I re-dedicate myself to my hairstylist’s artistry, mentally thanking her for her labor on my hair. It feels almost superstitious, like a prayer.

After all, she got me from blob to where it is now—somewhere between angled lob and growing “shullet”—and for that I am very grateful.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for being here :) Next week, we will return to talking about hair and art.

Much love from the woods, xo

It instantly reminded me of one of my favorite hair icons, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, or Empress “Sisi,” who was born 1834 in Munich, Germany and assassinated in 1898 with a needle to the heart on a trip to Geneva, Switzerland. Empress Sisi became the empress of Austria—and later Austria-Hungary—when she married Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria in 1854, a member of the house of Habsburg.

You may have noticed that I skipped a week here. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get my head on straight about how I felt about long hair, and which threads I wanted to pull around it. How to balance hair’s power with the weight of that power. How to parse the difference between long hair and big hair, in my view two very different hair forms with different ways of taking up space in the world.

I came up against how we approach defining “muchness” or “excess” in relation to hair, and how tangled those narratives are historically with narratives that prop up European standards of beauty, and tired notions of “femininity.” After a while, I realized that in my habit of expanding hair’s metaphoric possibilities, I was resisting admitting that hair could itself be a limiting force. A limiting narrative of beauty, of ritual, and ultimately, of control.

What is your hair’s relationship to power? Does your hair store power in any special way?

Once again I was in the room with Empress Elisabeth of Austria, whose hair became emblematic of the prison of the mind and her royal station, and whose hair was deeply fetishized both in her own time and even still today.

Before I had any awareness of what hair would come to mean to me, I had the extraordinary chance to visit two places that Empress Elisabeth of Austria had lived. The first was during college when I got to accompany my mother on a series of life-long dream-trips across Europe. Between the shatter-crunch of daily schnitzels and the swirls of glittering decorative motif that rim magnificent Secessionist halls, we visited the Hofburg palace in Vienna, Austria.

On the tour of the palace, the “Sisi Museum,” I was enchanted by the mysterious and melancholy Rapunzel-esque figure of Empress Sisi: her entrapment and her choice to never cut her long, long hair. I remember buying a postcard of her most famous portrait and tucking it into my journal. In the portrait, her back is turned to the viewer, and her pale profile peeks out from behind a long flow of thick, wavy hair, which cascades unfettered down her back and over the luscious silks of a simple white dress.

As we toured the Imperial apartments of the palace, the Empress’ hair was the major theme of the tour. For reasons I couldn’t understand at the time beyond the sheer notability of its length and her rumored remarkable beauty, the Empress’ hair seemed to be of utmost importance to the people and legacy of Vienna itself.

The tour guide showed us through to the chamber where she would take her daily bath and where her attendants would wash and wash her hair, condition it with oils, and methodically brush it to de-tangle. Her hairdresser as an impressive and imperious figure standing always behind the Empress combing and then braiding her long, luscious hair, was a particular point.

In the bathing chamber, I recall the surprisingly stark metal tub, a galloping pattern of roses on the wallpaper and the practical linoleum flooring installed to protect the wood from incessant bathing. These breaks in the otherwise opulent chambers of the Imperial family were meant, I understood, to convey the rooted practicality and “non-fancy” nature of the Empress herself, who often lamented the time and care her hair took up in her day despite obsessively maintaining it.

As we passed from the bathing chamber into her dressing room beneath the ornate gilded scrollwork that crested every doorway, I caught my own reflection in the dusty mirrors beyond the tub. In the aged and flaking glass, rays of weak sunlight ricocheted across the dull floor. I thought: it would be easy to imagine this place as a thick-aired prison. 

“Heavy,” I remember the tour guide saying. How heavy her hair was, especially when it was wet, and especially when it was balanced on top of her head in a crown-like braid for formal occasions.

After the tour, I had to lie down on a bench in the Michaelerplatz and take a nap.

Heavy is the crown.

I can’t help but think this singular character, which has inspired so much narrativizing and speculation, achieves special metaphoric resonance mainly due to her long and flowing hair, which became a symbol of her fiery character, and which eventually came to rule her life. When hair lengthens beyond its basic functioning, does its metaphor also change?

In movies and TV retellings of her life, Sisi’s hair and its length is often used as a symbol of her defiance. Her head-strong-ness. Her virility and her youth. Over time, perhaps, it grew into a prison, staking her to the palace, staking her to the forever ritual of combing and conditioning it, washing and combing it again.

I often think about how hair measures time. A record of growth. During the pandemic, one of my dear friends grew her hair and just kept growing her hair—mostly out of necessity—not going into a salon for a measure of years. Her hair was so long that by the end she described it as “too heavy.”

In a spiritual context, hair that is longer may signify a timeline of religious pilgrimage or devotion to one’s faith, or at least a measure of belief. What stories length of hair might tell. Of journeying, of seeking, of internal led to external growth and change.

But what else gathers alongside hair? What emotional or existential weight do we carry in our hair? What burdens of expectation? How does hair carry heaviness?

According to records written by Empress Sisi’s personal tutors and hairdressers, her hair required rigorous and consistent daily rituals of care. Every morning it took nearly three hours to brush and comb her hair, which was fanned out over a white lace peignoir, ultimately covering her entire body. Then her hair would be braided and pinned up into her signature style of thick corded braids woven to form a loose and cascading “crown” atop her head.

The weight of this hairstyle reportedly gave her terrible headaches.

Every two weeks, her hair would be meticulously conditioned with a mixture of cognac and fresh eggs to keep it shiny, strong and healthy. And then, my favorite part, any hairs that fell out during her rigorous daily haircare would then have to be presented to the Empress in a ceremonial silver bowl for inspection.

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While she had her hair done, Sisi would learn languages. Fluent in French and English in addition to her native German and, later in life, Hungarian (she was instrumental in brokering the unification of Austria-Hungary and was rumored to have taken the Hungarian Prime Minister as a lover). Eventually, the Empress also endeavored to learn Greek. During one of their sessions, her Greek tutor reported her saying,

An unhappy marriage and restless nature gave way to many bouts of ill-health. Throughout her reign, Sisi was sent to various far-flung places to recuperate from the stresses of life in the public eye. Many suspected that her frequent traveling masked a desire to escape the courtly duties of life in Austria, where nearly every decision was snatched from her, including the rearing of her own children, including the nature of her conversations, and the degree to which she was allowed to participate in matters of the state.

Empress Sisi studied widely subjects ranging from philosophy to political theory. She was an enthusiastic reader of poetry, and wrote her own, words that hover above the page like mist, missives of remembrance and longing. I wonder how much of her sadness got caught up in her web of hair, and whether it was really grief that she held onto, daily and fruitlessly combing it out, attempting to make sense of her life—making of it instead a chosen prison.

On a health trip to the Greek island of Corfu, Empress Sisi found a place she might land for a while. She built a mansion there in 1867 and it became her haven.

The Achilleion Palace is built on a stark cliffside overlooking the glittering sea. inspired by the Greek gods and designed in a neoclassical style, the palace rises up among the wind-shifted palms. The peace is occasionally interrupted by the unsettling squawk of peacocks, which roam the grounds freely. She once reportedly said that if she ever felt that she had landed in a place that she could not escape, she would immediately begin to hate it there. I wince at the available metaphor of flightless birds.

It is said that Empress Sisi did not allow her portrait to be painted or taken after the age of 30. She wished to freeze her image in eternal youthfulness. For all of hair’s utility as a record, sometimes hair obliterates and hides. Even Sisi would not want to be remembered.

As I re-roam my own memory palace of the light-filled halls of the Palace Achilleion, a building dedicated not to a god but to a mortal hero, Achilles, I wonder if Sisi ever saw her hair as her weakness. 

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:: In Suz News ::

I am headed to Wassaic Project in upstate New York for my very first artist residency this week ! And ! I get to bring my family with me.

Looking forward to digging into some deep creative practice in the woods. I’ve got big plans for a bunch of fabric, some hair-related sculpture and, of course, tons of writing.

Excited to get fellow artists in residence into conversation about hair. Excited to debut my own new helmet of hair (oh, the journey). Excited to discover all the ways my brain might leak out, in Empress Sisi’s words, through my hair over the coming weeks.

Stay tuned for updates.

xo

..but because while sitting there trapped in the chair her barber decided to tell her the whole harrowing story of having to put his beloved elderly dog down. By the end of the haircut and the story, all she wanted to do was rip off the smock and run away.

I thought about this a long time. The complexity of communication while sitting in the hair chair. That feeling like you can’t interrupt your hairstylist when they’re talking, even if to ask a question or make a shape or length request. In this case, Al’s barber was the one processing, the one who needed the support. It didn’t seem like he thought the story was going to be upsetting to her, but she was holding back tears the entire time. And in her haste to get out of the hot seat, she ended up leaving without advocating for the actual hair length she wanted.

Any person who restores you to a sense of yourself is an important figure in your life. A hair stylist might be one of those people. Whether you speak with them or not, an energetic exchange is happening through the medium of hair. A haircut opens us up to the vulnerability of change and the unknown. You sit in the chair and you’re just not sure how you’re going to come out of it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens in the hair chair in the context of the quintessential Hair Makeover, a pop culture phenomenon where someone gets their hair done live and on television. The most rewarding hair makeovers happening in my world lately are happening in the reboot of Queer Eye: not just a makeover. These “fab five” infiltrating the homes and lives (and deep inner psyches) of people—whom they call “heroes” on the show—have gotten quite good, by season seven, at what they do.

Queer Eye really isn’t just a makeover anymore. It is a full on internal to external renovation of self.

If you’re not familiar with the show, each episode begins with five gay men in a car driving to meet the “hero” of the week. These heroes are mostly people who give relentlessly to their own communities and who are in need of some serious TLC themselves. Each season is located in a particular setting, a city like Austin, TX or, as with season seven, New Orleans, LA. As they drive to meet these heroes, we get a little preview via a dossier of the person who will become the focus of the fab five’s energies that week. Each cast member has a specialty: Tan is Fashion (which spills often into feelings on gender, on body image), Bobby is Design (usually home or office, interior design that aims to spoil the hero through texture and color), Antoni is Food & Wine (debatable), Karamo is Culture (usually encompassing personal and interpersonal journeys of healing), and Jonathan (JVN) covers Grooming (hair, skin care, makeup, anything that relates to caring for and loving on the body).

It’s under Jonathan Van Ness’ (JVN) watchful and caring gaze that we find the most exciting transformation of all: the hair makeover. [SPOILER ALERT] JVN actually hand scrubs the dead skin off a hero’s knees on one episode.

In almost every case of hair transformation, the hero of the episode ends up crying. Whether because they didn’t realize that without grunge-core bleached tips they were actually a very handsome man. Or because through their new hair they can step more fully into the gender they are. Or because through shedding hair, a metaphor of leaving the past behind might emerge.

One of the more profound hair transformations of season seven happens in episode six, an episode called “Ms. Mary Quite Contrary.”

The hero of this episode is Mary Henderson-Uloho, who owns a thrift store that employs formerly-incarcerated people and helps to “decarcerate” them, re-acclimate them to life outside. And during her salon sequence, Mary has her twelve-year grown locs cut and conditioned back into her natural curls.

Part of Mary’s own story includes having been wrongfully incarcerated herself, and while she has since dedicated her life to helping others get out into the world, she reveals that her hair has come to represent a feeling of isolation and disconnect. As she sheds this hairstyle, her hair becomes a symbol for leaving the past in the past and forging ahead into a more hopeful future restoring her relationships with family and most importantly herself. By the end of the episode, the salon owner herself is crying.

It is profound to watch a person transform physically through hair over a matter of hours. We know, if we buy into the conceit of the show, that internal transformation is happening. Karamo and the rest of the fab five cast are there to help push gently on the tender spots of the hero’s psyche and coax them into the life they deserve to lead through genuine connection and self love. Through the cheerful, measured guidance of the gays, people are broken down and remolded internally. Their houses or workspaces and closets are transformed. But their hair, their hair is the perfect place to map all of this change happening on the inside, without.

Some kind of energetic shedding happens while getting your hair done. It’s really rather intimate, after all, to let another person touch your hair and scalp. So often the hairstylist is really the listener.

I was recently connected with Dr. Marva Lewis, a psychologist and early childhood mental health specialist, who wrote the book on the importance of touch in the process of mental healthcare in children, and in particular hair care and maintenance as an important space for listening and healing inter-generational trauma. We talked about the importance of touch and ritual in hair combing especially, and the importance of the role the person doing the hair takes in the sitter’s life. It was a wonderful start to a longer conversation.

In her book, Therapeutic Cultural Routines to Build Family Relationships: Talk, Touch & Listen While Combing Hair (Springer: 2021), there is a chapter written by Psychologist and Licensed Esthetician Dr. Afiyah Mbilishaka called “PsychoHairapy Through Beauticians and Barbershops: the Healing Relational Triad of Black Hair Care Professionals, Mothers and Daughters.” Dr. Afiyah Mbilishaka calls her pioneering work in the mental health field “PsychoHairapy,” a practice of healing clients through hair care. From her website:

Dr. Mbilishaka performs therapeutic sessions with clients while doing their hair. PsychoHairapy really underscores the importance of the relationship between client and hairstylist, as well as the energetic potential of healing through hair. It is fascinating and exciting work. To tease out what is special about hair care and hair work in particular, and how hair is an important space for processing emotions, especially in Black culture.

While in this episode of Queer Eye I felt that JVN touches Mary’s hair just a little too much, there is still a sense of communal healing through touch, care, and cutting that happens over the course of the episode and an exchange of emotions that passes from client to hair care workers, that is truly special.

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Hair transformation can be an answer to a long-held question.

And yet sometimes along the hair journey it can feel impossible to communicate what you actually need, which can result in a profound feeling of erasure. The threads of storytelling that need to intersect in this intense, emotional moment of advocacy are needed to form a sense of real connection. The social contracts that govern these interactions are so subtle and subtly coded through feelings and through culture.

“I remember going to get my haircut once in [my hometown in rural Minnesota],” Al said the other day. “I was trying to explain what I wanted to the stylist in this salon,” she said. “You know, short on the sides, longer on the top, like what I have now—and she just couldn’t get the gender of it.”

She had tried explaining what she wanted to the stylist over and over, and the stylist just kept saying “I don’t think I get it? I don’t want to give you a man’s haircut.” And Al would be like, “Well I think my skull is much like any other skull, just treat me like any other skull.” She shook her head, rolling her eyes. “It was a terrible haircut.”

Whether hair is something you hang your identity on or not, a bad haircut is a terrible feeling. When your hair doesn’t feel or look right, it just doesn’t sit well internally or externally. I’m so interested in the texture of that experience. Yet when you get to experience or witness that moment when hair is converted into something you didn’t even know you wanted, or you didn’t even know you needed, as with so many heroes on Queer Eye, the transformation can help someone stand up in their profound internal change, and beyond that, in their own personal truth. 

Everyone in Tears: the Hair Makeover

I’ve been a devotee of America’s Next Top Model since the early days of “smize.” Actually, of all the ANTM franchises Australia’s Next Top Model is my true favorite, but I do recognize Tyra as the matriarch of the franchise and we live for a Tyra moment. My favorite iconic episode of every season no matter the franchise is, DUH, The Model Makeover episode.

The Model Makeover is the episode of every season where all the models are rounded up, taken to the salon, and given completely new looks. The models never have a say in the hair journey they’re about to go on. It’s always the judges and stylists who decide on their new looks, packaged as what they really need to change in order to achieve their full model potential.

I always view this episode as at least one part psychological warfare. The conceit being: you must trust us, you must submit to our ~VisiOn~.

Famously, sometimes these makeovers are rather successful (and, fascinatingly, often reveal the true gays in the group—a story for another time), but moreso these makeovers go disastrously wrong. Giving these young models hair extensions that they don’t know how to care for often results in an obvious shelf where natural hair meets woven hair in clashing textures.

Whatever the result, the most consistent thread of these model makeovers every season is this: tears. So many tears.

And not just at the reveal, and not only because they may hate what they ended up looking like. Mostly the tears come early, at the first snip. The anticipation of the coming change. And then also during, as the stylist tosses their hair this way and that. The emotional release of losing hair. Often, these models come from small towns and they’ve never really cut their hair before, so the makeover is a new experience on top of a life-changing one.

Yet, time and again, season to season, despite a disappointing continual lack of body diversity and (especially in the early seasons) some really toxic, closed narratives about body image, gender, and beauty in general, I often don’t really “see” the judges’ vision for some of the models until their model makeover.

In some cases, the hair change really does transform them into models.

And not just in the looks themselves, but in the act of change their growth becomes more visible.

For now…

…a non-exhaustive list of iconic makeovers involving hair in movies. Can you think of others??

• The Princess Diaries and the pluckingest makeover that ever was plucked. The eyebrow scene is forever seared into my brain.

  

• The twin switcheroni in the 1998 The Parent Trap—when they cut the ubiquitous early-2000s face-framing hair clump on Annie in order to convert her into the care-free Northern Cali cool girl that her sister Hallie embodies.

  

• She’s the Man, in particular the sequence where she tries on all the various combos of facial hair. I particularly enjoy the specificity of the addition of sideburns and eyebrow thickeners as the main way we can tell she is transforming from one persona to the other. In addition of course to the wig itself.

  

• What’s funny about the transformation scene in Miss Congeniality, aside from the fact that it takes place in a government warehouse, is that really all they do is let out Sandra Bullock’s low ponytail and brush her hair. Otherwise, in terms of hair transformations, we’ve got a Carrie-in-SATC moment where we witness the wide-shot leg-up bikini wax and hear the shriek of pain in the distance and we know the process of transformation is complete. Somehow the bikini wax is really what does it: with a shorn bikini line she’s beauty and she’s grace, she’s a “passable” woman.

  

  

• The silly and hopeful-sex-inducing chest wax in 40 Year Old Virgin

  

• And because we can’t pass a roundup without mentioning Sex and The City, of course the relationship-defining back wax of Harry Goldenblatt in season 5, which he reveals in a rashy display at the pool party for Bitsy Von Muffling and Billy Fine’s Hamptons wedding.

  

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Cheers y’all + xo

HAIR CLUB began while I was writing a hair fable. Michal Lynn and I were in the same writing class in grad school and after reading a draft of this fable she approached me saying “you like hair, right?” I had never thought about it that way. “Kelly also makes work about hair, want to apply for this grant to keep talking about hair?”

It changed my life.

This original hair fable was about two friends who woke up one morning to find that their beards had grown together. It was some sort of queer love tale that never materialized because I had this idea that all fables needed to take place in a Medieval European village, and I had a hard time explaining to the crusading knights who kept invading my story why no axe was mighty enough to separate these hair-tangled would-be lovers.

Probably it would have been better to situate this fable in Brooklyn in the 2010s—peak hipster realness. If their beards are stuck together who can say what their man buns are doing..

Yes, this idea has legs.

I want to thank y’all who have written to me recently about your own hair journeys. Sharing hair stories can be so vulnerable: personal stories of transformation and becoming. I am honored to keep those stories, please keep sending them.

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And if you can think of someone who has incredible hair stories to tell, please consider sharing this newsletter with them! Every share helps to support this work.

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Hair as Relation in Time: Mirrors

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Hair Journey in the context of the Hero’s Journey lately: the morphology of folktales / the path obstructed by obstacles. Hair change can be slow and incremental, difficult to see coming. Or it can be quick and decisive, an almost brutal or impulsive moment of change.

Think: Smith shaving his head in solidarity with Samantha—”but your hair is your signature!”—in the last season of Sex and the City (s6e16. 2004). Samantha is going through chemo and rather than lose her hair slowly over time, she decides to lose it on her own terms and buzz her entire head. Smith comes home and, seeing the hair on the bathroom floor, grabs the clippers from her hands (which, rude) and mirrors her by removing his own hair to the exact same length.

Later on, at the Breast Cancer Benefit where Samantha is giving a speech, she cathartically rips her wig off during a hot flash, inspiring others to stand up and do the same. It’s one of the most iconic hair moments on the show.

Hair change may itself signal change—a breakup haircut, or some inward illness, or healing. It is almost always a story of becoming, and endurance. It is a durational performance at whatever length.

What is mirroring but a moment of shared embodiment?

This week, I’m thinking about the seventeen-hour performance of artist Marina Abramovic and her collaborator Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen): Relation in Time (1977).

During this performance, Marina Abramovic and Ulay sat in a gallery with their hair tied together for sixteen hours. Once their bodies had reached a point of utter exhaustion, they opened the gallery doors and allowed the public to come in.

According to the artist, the performance was an experiment:

The performance began with the artists facing away from one another, back to back, in front of a white gallery wall, and with their hair tied together. In the top left panel above, we can see the artists in hour one: their tied hair is smooth and defined, coiled perfectly into a seamless rope. As the hours passed and both mental and physical strength diminished, Marina began to slump and slouch, Ulay to lean forward: the knot begins to come undone, a physical marker of their test of endurance.

What I find so fascinating about this performance is that the process of deterioration is kept from public view. It is only through documentation in retrospect that we can see the way their connecting hair cord was originally tied. The public was admitted into the performance at hour sixteen, once their hairy tether had frayed considerably. It’s very possible that, once inside the performance, the public had no idea what to watch for.

The artists’ goal to “use the energy of the public” to remain upright for one more hour is a fascinating conceit. In this performance, the hair forms almost a superhighway of energy between the artists. The hair is of course the physical record of exhaustion: a symbol of fraying tautness between two sagging bodies. Did the assembled crowd know they were being mined for their energy when they entered the space that evening? From which outlet was the energy sapped? Or did it slowly seep from each attendee’s own life force directly into Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s bodies.

Does energy leech out through hair? Hair itself is spent energy made physical: proteins exported from the pores of our bodies. In a way, hair makes a record of our body’s energetic production. I wonder how Marina Abramovic viewed the energy she set herself up to slurp from the lingering attendees like an art vampire, thirsting for survival? Did she visualize it as matter? As beams of light? Where did she imagine the energy left their bodies, and entered hers? Did she envision that it traveled between herself and Ulay, simul-charging them via this external powercord of hair?

Why was it so important that they stay connected through their hair?

Last weekend was my dear friend Rebecca’s birthday.1 We’ve been friends since 2009 (or Year Two After Britney Crisis, depending on your calendar)—nearly 14 years of friendship. In college, we had a habit of showing up the same amount late to the coffee dates we scheduled together (usually ranging from 15 minutes to three hours late), wearing a version of the same exact outfit. 

The winter after we became friends we each bought the same winter jacket—a rust-colored “wool” blend tulip shaped cocoon coat that I still wear—(debate around who bought the jacket first notwithstanding)(I bought the jacket first). After that, we joked that anytime we went out walking with another friend, we looked like the henchmen from The Triplets of Belleville (2003).

A friend meme emerged, one where we questioned whether we actually just happened to show up late at the same rate and wearing nearly the same clothing, or if by some twist of the timeline, we were actually the same person, parallel versions of ourselves caught by some cosmic fluke in the same dimension. At one point, we even debated whether one of us was actually a ghost. 

The morning of Rebecca’s birthday, as we waited to be seated for her birthday brunch, we realized we had reached a new apotheosis of our friendship and, by extension, our ongoing existential questioning. I had been lamenting how I’m not sure the haircut I’m currently striving for is really working for me (bangs and long, something I have always wanted and have never tried).2 Classic Awkward Stage moment of weakness: “I should just cut it back to my regular old shelf” I whined. But she shook her head and said, “I like it.”

Throughout this entire journey, Rebecca has been steadfast: your hair looks great! I think it really suits you! An unending refrain of affirmations, which I do appreciate. The morning of her birthday, however, between longing glances at the posted menu outside the restaurant, the intensity of our hangovers rising with the sun, we sized each other up. Eyes narrowed. Brows furrowed. Glances went up to hairlines where curly bangs met foreheads. 

“I just realized,” she said. 

“Oh my god,” I said.

“Your hair,” she said.

“It’s the same as…” I said.

“Maybe I like your hair…” she said. 

“Because it looks exactly like yours!” 

My jaw fell open. It was true: her hair—like a mermaid’s, a bit redder and with more voluminous waves than my tighter wavy swirls—is gorgeous. And she got bangs last year and they do look great. 

I couldn’t believe it. Another accidental mirror. This time at least we were early for our reservation. But we were still wearing the exact same hair.

Love y’all, real and imaginary.

xo

I am on what in HAIR CLUB we call a Hair Journey.

The Hair Journey, which can be big change or small in scale, epic or the tiniest shift in hair ritual, is a classic HAIR CLUB experiment in embodiment. When we teach our curriculum, “HAIR! HAIR! HAIR!,” in graduate and undergraduate programs internationally, we usually assign a hair journey as part of the coursework.

In the classroom, we task our students to take on embodiment as a central theme of their study of hair. As they do their thoughtful research into a hair topic of their choosing, they must also undergo a hair journey of some kind for the duration of the class, and write about it. Some will decide to stop shaving their armpits or legs, while others will dye their hair blue and document how those around them react. Much of the reflection centers around how it feels to be perceived in a new way through a simple hair change.

Once, we had a student shave their long hair, hair that had been fetishized for years by their parents, hair that they had never cut themselves. Their journey was a short and violent one: they took on the assignment in the form of performance art, inviting spectators to gather and cut a length of their hair, any length, with scissors, and then buzz off sections once it was short enough, until their head was completely shaved.

The performance achieved all the poignancy and vulnerability of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece of 1964/5: a performance in which the artist sat on a stage with scissors in front of her and allowed strangers to cut off sections of her clothing until she felt the piece come to a natural end. From MoMA’s website:

The audience had been instructed that they could take turns approaching her and use the scissors to cut off a small piece of her clothing, which was theirs to keep. Some people approached hesitantly, cutting a small square of fabric from her sleeve or the hem of her skirt. Others came boldly, snipping away the front of her blouse or the straps of her bra. Ono remained motionless and expressionless throughout…

In this performance, the spectator becomes implicated, yes, invited to engage with the artist in such a deeply personal way, but ultimately it is an act of violence to have your protective layers cut away from your body, especially a marginalized body. Ono considers these pieces to be like a musical score: a set of instructions that must be interpreted, and may mark a different pathway or outcome for the duration of each performance. “We usually give something with a purpose,” Yoko Ono said, reflecting back on the performance years later. “But I wanted to see what they would take.”

In the context of our student’s performance, it was powerful and honestly devastating to watch as they impassively endured being shorn in this way, with no control, at the whim of others. I cried while watching, and as much as I wanted to support them by participating, I could not bring myself to touch their hair. I watched as others gleefully participated, laughing as the hair fell away in a blanket around the performer’s body. They sat resolute, spine like a column of stone, face impassive, but tears streaming down their cheeks. I wondered how anyone could feel so free with another person’s matter: hair is dead but its power is undeniable.

Afterwards, in their own reflection of their Hair Journey, they reported that an exhilarating calm fell over them, as though they had been released from all the burdens and obligations they had once carried in their long hair. I thought: how beautiful.

In the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, Roman noblewomen would have their portraits carved in elegant marble busts. While some emperors commissioned idealized portraits of themselves looking their best: young, virile, strong, gods-like. Others had their portraits carved in startling naturalism, the crags of old age all present and accounted for. 

Perplexingly, it’s been found that occasional marble busts of Roman noblewomen are fashioned effectively bald, or with a subtle hair texture carved close to the dome of the scalp, with evidence that something else had once been affixed to the top. It is well known that Roman women favored wearing wigs, but could there have been portrait wigs? Wigs carved from marble to adorn the portraits themselves? In fact, many Roman portrait busts have been found with accompanying marble wigs to place on top of their portrait’s head, which could be switched out as needed or desired. 

Some historians say these marble wigs, carved specifically for certain portrait busts, were commissioned to more easily keep up with changing hair fashions, and to save on the expense of entirely new busts as the women grew older. Hair fashions tended to change with the passing of one empress to the next. But this scholarship has since been debunked as a misogynist desire to frame women of this century as vain and more fickle toward their hairstyles than they really were: the assumption until recently was that women were consumed by an obsession with their outward appearance, hair included.1

The interchange of marble wigs on Roman statuary more likely has to do with testing out carving techniques for different hairstyles and textures, as they changed on a more empire-wide scale, rather than on an individual scale. In fact, some Roman statuary exists as the best evidence that Roman women of the 1st and 2nd centuries wore wigs recreationally, as with the portraits of Empress Julia Domna, second wife of the emperor Septimus Severus.

Whatever the reason for these marble wigs, I like to think of it this way: to have a closet in your house, or domus, a shelf of carved marble wigs of all the hairstyles you sported over your entire life. What a dream. What story would that shelf tell? Tales of your youth? Of regret? Breakup haircuts? When you thought you could pull off the Flock of Seagulls in the 80s?

I recently sculpted for myself a portrait bust in the classical style out of paper clay, and have been creating sculpted wigs of all my more iconic hairstyles in my lifetime to place upon it. I’m interested in the narrative potential of hair: to tell a story of my own maturation through my hairstyles, each one a journey of realization.

Even if the shape of my hair right now isn’t quite right—I am deep in the Awkward Stage—it’s always a hair journey. Always in flux. In grad school I worked long and hard for the Didi Pickles from Rugrats: flat-bottomed and wide triangle shaped (maybe without the top triangle). I really did visualize this for nearly two years! Once I achieved that, graduated and moved back to Baltimore, I wanted something different. I grew out my bangs and found Jane Lane from Daria—side-parted and still flat-bottomed—rocked that for a while.

Now, I’m growing my hair long again, and keeping the bangs, something I’ve always wanted to try. Right now, I’m hovering more in the range of Joanie and Chachi, a personal fear of mine.

We’ll see if I make it.

As I continue writing from this body—something I NEVER thought I’d do—I feel like I’m tracing the contours of my being in new and strange ways. I have spent much of my life avoiding really looking at myself. Continually examining my hair keeps placing me in context with the physical edges of my body in a way that makes me suddenly more aware of the real space I take up, as opposed to the energetic space of my floating brain. Hair after all marks the boundary line: the contour drawing of my body from any angle would be done in hairs, both tiny and long.

Soft sensing hairs make the wind a ripple, help to regulate my temperature by standing on end, ensure the future growth of thicker hair to protect me from colder temperatures. Long hairs float in the breeze, more perceived than perception, become “Suzanne on a windy day” or “Suzanne dressed up for prom.” 

Alongside this exploration of my edges, I come to a new understanding, or perhaps a more complicated understanding, of where I begin and end. I’m no closer to feeling how big I am in this world; the scale of things is constantly throwing me off. But I am starting to sense the wisdom of my own body, and growing more and more comfortable with the amount of energetic space I take up. 

As I move between styles and lengths, I wonder: can transitions happen in sharp edges, in angles? Or is it always a soft ballooning into the right shape? Until my hair is the shape I want again, I won’t feel like myself, because every time I see myself reflected I do not recognize myself, that distance is felt in my bones as essential dissonance.

When my hair isn’t right, I’m not right with myself at all.

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Sending love as summer glides in.

The Hair Journey

What type of Hair Journey are you on? Can you think of your most significant journey with your hair? What did you learn? How did it change your hair rituals? What does it mean to you to have a Bad Hair Day?

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I’d love to hear from you.

Gorgeous weather swept into Baltimore and the school year is winding down. Every student needed seven extra days to tell me they didn’t understand the assignment and I get it. My brain was on fire yesterday and I could only think in images, so this is a late missive. And short !

My brother is in town visiting and yesterday he told me about growing his hair out long. He has dark, thick hair like mine and (also like mine) it grows into healthy stubble on his face and thick at his eyebrows. He looks great. Currently sporting a mustache like our dad did before he betrayed us all by shaving it.

So my brother has been on a journey with his hair. He was living in Hawaii for many months and while there, he grew his hair out long, longer than he ever had before. He tried growing a beard also. He reflected on how it felt to have longer hair, what it made him think about himself, how others might view him. He felt he started to look like other guys on the island where he lived, like he was morphing into a sort of type, and ultimately decided that more clean shaven felt like himself. (Clean? Shaven? more on that later).

Changing seasons is a great time for a hair journey, or a ritual shearing.

Where is your hair showing up for you this week?

Where have you found it lately? What shape, line or form does it take? Is it thick, wiry, curly, slim, wispy? Does it catch the light? Do you hasten to sweep away the evidence? This week we’re thinking about remnants, where hair goes immediately after it comes off the body.

I’ve followed the writer Harling Ross Anton since she was a fashion editor at the now-defunct Man Repeller. I enjoy how she makes dressing feel manageable and approachable through unexpected styling and funky silhouettes. She made me believe in tiny sunglasses.

In her post “Styling Shorts: 2 Simple But Effective Outfit Templates” on her newly minted substack ((👋 Gumshoe)), she opened with the following:

Hair moments are everywhere. Especially as we wiggle out of our dark winter holes and come sneezing out into the sunshine. Do you have hair rituals that mark the changing of the seasons?

I think I may try a leg wax this year. I’ve never done it but it seems like it would be cathartic—I can feel the sound.

Looking over the drawings I’m sharing this week, for whatever reason they just feel super gay to me. So I hope you enjoy these gay drawings.

I showed one or two of them to friends to make sure they didn’t seem like “Rugrats" fan art, and while no one could really confirm that they didn’t, what I found most interesting was that everyone had a different name for the hairs left behind. For some they were “yeah, pubes” or “oh, clippings” for others they were “shower hair!'“ or “I just plucked my eyebrows too.”

But friends, I never said those were eyebrow hairs..

This is an ongoing exploration of where I leave my hair,

xoxo

Yesterday, standing in my kitchen in the afternoon light, a dear friend said “the universe is so gay, though. math itself is super queer.” I think, if math is queer and infinite, then the multi-verse that math describes can only be the same. We ask the world to be definable and yet, so much of it lives in possibility. What is a shifting, changing reality but one in transition, signal-switching. If the universe is tied up in literal knots it’s no wonder we can’t find a straight path to empathy.

I suspect I have a good head of hair. On good days, it’s glossy and nearly-black, tinseled with silver. I know I am destined for salt and pepper futures. On the Gold side of my family silver springs evenly from center parts amid shiny dark brown hair. My paternal grandfather used to slick his hair back to reveal an elegant widow’s peak. In this way, I’ve always felt that I am somehow descendant from The Count on Sesame Street.

As much as I love my hair for these features—glossy, thick, growing saltier by the day, luscious curls I can pretty much shake into submission thanks to developments in curly hair-cutting—I have a really difficult time accepting, and often fear seeing hair elsewhere on my body. 

Post-baby, I catch a glimpse of my midriff in the mirror one morning and am surprised to see articulated obliques, surprised to feel like the hot girl writer I watch parade around on instagram in a white t-shirt and gray undies, head turned or just out of frame. I am reminded of another writer a friend posted about recently who exposes an entire hairy armpit in her headshot. In the photo, her left arm is lifted over her head and you can see the unmistakable tuft of hair peeking out from the parabola of her t-shirt sleeve. I think, she’s hot. She’s beautiful, of course. I’m sure she’s a great writer because the writer who posted her is also great. So of course she can have armpit hair.

I catch myself in this thought. I think, she’s allowed to have hair there, to push herself out into the world with visible hair. But, I wonder, am I allowed? Am I hot enough to have visible hair? How fucked up is this line of thinking? I work hard to be okay with the body I’m in. I think, it’s okay to be the body you are, but is it okay to be the body you are and hairy? Is it because she’s slender, able-bodied and conventionally good looking that we accept her hairy armpits? Is it because she’s blonde?

Would it be different if I put my armpit on display in my headshot? A spot I had to treat with laser hair removal during college because the hair was so dense the thick hairs created a dark shadow under my skin. I’m still pit-shy. I think, maybe all of this is only my problem. Maybe I am the only one who thinks this is risky behavior. Maybe I am jealous because I’m not sure I could ever be brave enough to show hair where it’s not expected to be.

I’d like for this to be a rumination on belonging and letting go. At the moment, I feel overwhelmed by the possibilities.

Hair Moments in Pop Culture No. 2

[1] - them’s queercuts

This them article, written by Sofîa Aguilar in April of this year, proposes several classic queer haircuts, as identified by queer hair stylists. This writer speaks of hair as a signal, as a beacon for other queer people; in the queer community, hair may flag. I love to think of hair as a space of safety, of coming-into-oneself. These hairstyles offer a codification, they pin down certain styles and claim them for the queer community, beyond the gender binary and beyond the ways and whims of what’s trending, and I think that is so beautiful.

[2] - The Circle comes full circle

You didn’t think you were getting off the hook this month with a pop culture roundup that didn’t include at least one anecdote from The Circle? Surely not. This month’s Circle hair moment comes from Season 5. The player Sam Carmona closes her introductory featurette in the first episode by dedicating her game to “all the girls who have to shave their toes because like four hairs grow there!” (The Circle, s5e1). And when the season is over (SPOILER ALERT), Michelle Buteau closes the entire season saying “Sam, never stop reppin’ for real women everywhere,” after Sam, sitting on the couch having just found out that she is indeed a finalist, says she needs to shave her legs before meeting everyone. Looking down at her leg, she says, softly, “It’s giving bigfoot” (The Circle, s5e13).

[3] - both classic and beloved: a hair moment from Broad City

“I think I finally figured out my eyebrows,” Abbi says to Ilana in season 2 episode 10 of Broad City eating a dollar slice on Ilana’s birthday (20:07). “They’re sisters, not twins!” They both nod knowingly. A revelation put so simply.

This after the Tree Man returns Ilana’s wig to her.

[4] - Hairy pits sell at Wildfang

Pop culture naturally includes media advertising and I’ve been watching ad pits for a while now, waiting to see full on pit hair front and center, selling a product. The day has finally come, thanks to Wildfang. The “EMPOWER” high waisted V-Neck jumpsuit and their model, rocking a hairy pit.

[5] - Beyoncé

Closing out our roundup with this beauty. Big thanks to the bud who sent this to me this week. What a beautiful rumination on hair and belonging.

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Set a timer for five minutes, choose a question below, and just let the thoughts flow. Feel free to share a snip in the comments or as a reply to this email !

• Does anyone else put off eyebrow maintenance until it feels like a mental health imperative?

• Do you also overpluck your eyebrows when you’re too excited?

• If you get your eyebrows waxed or threaded—how do you convey the shape you want? Have you ever received push back when you wanted to change the shape you normally go for?

• Do you ever feel like your eyebrows are stuck in another time?

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“Look at the brow on that baby!”

—is something I never expected to love hearing, let alone overhear from strangers. I had a kid nearly eight months ago and since the moment she was born, she’s had my face, and my unibrow.

When I was little, I bemoaned my eyebrow. I cast around for blame, looking at the grisly men in my family and pointing a shaking finger at them saying “you! you did this to me!” I was in a constant battle with the hair that sprouted up in places it shouldn’t, or thicker than I liked, or darker than I wished.

But now, I look at Arlo and I am genuinely at peace. It feels crazy to fall in love with my own unibrow through hers, but it’s happening, and I’m here for it.

Yesterday, scrolling through instagram, I happened upon a video of Julianne Moore complaining to Vogue Magazine that she can’t grow her eyebrows after “destroying” them too many times when she was younger. A few years ago I remember reading that Cameron Diaz came forward to say that she regrets getting so many Brazilian wax treatments in the early 2000s because now she can’t grow very much hair down there. And actually, what follows is a very satisfying tirade on the Graham Norton Show during which she folds herself in half to ask her pubic hair directly “WHY ARE YOU THERE?” pulling the point—to every masc person in the room’s express discomfort—that hair has a purpose, and people should not feel so much pressure to follow any trend that would remove their hair “forever more” (this last bit of linguistic flourish is provided by another guest, Kylie Minogue, which she seems to instantly regret after Cameron Diaz takes it as the oath of hairy ally-ship).

So many times specifically since 2010 I’ve had strangers on the bus or on the street tell me that I have fabulous eyebrows. This feels nice, of course. I do feel a certain degree of smugness about never having succumbed to the trend, even during my most embarrassed teenage years, of waxing my eyebrows pencil-thin. But that happened more out of trauma than anything else.

I’ve only ever gotten my brows waxed once, and it was so traumatizing that I never did it ever again, even though every time I get my nails done to this day the esthetician will insistently nod at my face and say “brows too, right?” I will shake my head ‘no’ while trying to conjure up the lady’s face who told me my eyebrows looked great on the cross-town bus in 2014.

The thing about telling people you’re in HAIR CLUB is that everyone wants to know what it is and why. No, that’s not really true. When I say “HAIR CLUB, yeah!” people will maybe nod and raise or furrow their eyebrows and generally wish we would talk about anything else immediately. But when I force it, when I explain that hair itself is a storyteller, and that everyone has hair somewhere on their body and if they don’t there’s usually a reason, people might nod indulgently. And if I say that hair is meaningful, maybe they’ll frown and glance across the room. I suspect those people don’t have hair that bothers them. Maybe their hairiness falls within an “acceptable” range such that they don’t notice it, or the maintenance they inevitably devote to their hair has been folded so deeply into their routine that it doesn’t feel cumbersome or meaningful in any particular way.

But giving them a moment to consider their hair, they might in spite of themselves recall an anecdote, a hair-related memory or ritual, something their mom forced them to do as a child, or that time when every kid in the family had a bowl cut, and tugging that thread might unravel a whole story or forgotten feeling. Their first shave, or their grandmother’s invisible chin hair they would compete with their siblings to spot when it got long enough to catch the light, or a childhood bully, or when they realized pubic hair could have a shape, or when they realized that it didn’t need to be shaped after all. Hair stories open up tales of maintenance and unattainable beauty standards and issues of respectability politics and also sometimes painful moments of discrimination. 

When I was in middle school, I was often prodded by bullies about the thick, dark hair on my arms. I remember a particular kid who liked to suck the ink end of magic markers chasing me down the hall yelling “you have a mustache you have a mustache.” In high school, I was tormented maybe a little more subtly by popular culture about the hair on my face and legs. I can still remember the smell of Nair, the chemical defoliant that became popular in the early 2000s, and the way my skin burned red and the hair just sort of melted off.

The first time I got my eyebrows waxed, I cried. It was the early 2000s and the guy had taken so much off that I felt actual grief, and on top of that, he had also trimmed the top. While the rest of my brows did eventually grow back, I still have to trim them, and for this I may never forgive him.

I looked in the mirror that day and found the startled look of Rachel Weisz in The Mummy (1999).

For some reason the first several times I got hair waxed off my face was in New Jersey. It was like my mom thought we should leave the state for hair maintenance, so no word of it could get back to people who knew us back in New York. I know it wasn’t really like that, but in my internal “my life is a movie” tween brain, I felt grateful every time we would return under cover of night, my face red and blotchy, scurrying to the elevator to hide myself away. Even though we lived within walking distance of several nail salons where I could easily get my face waxed, somehow this ritual got folded into several others—visiting friends in another state, learning how to scrape layers of buttery artichoke specked with softened garlic from toughened leaves, petting the big fluffy dog named Ed, and getting my lip waxed.

But after that first and only eyebrow wax, I was so embarrassed by my new pencil brows that I refused to sit at the dinner table with everyone that night. I sat in the living room and asked them to deliver my spaghetti to the new zip code where I’d be hiding out forever playing Donkey Kong—another thing that only happened in New Jersey was video games—and cried.

It was summer, and the next day I arrived at camp nervous what the other kids would say when they saw me. I truly felt like I looked like an alien. When I walked into our room to check in that morning, my counselor called out my name, saw my face and said “Wow!” I waited for the laughter, the judgement, the ridicule.

“You look beautiful!”

I was stunned. And I know I looked startled—my eyebrows gave me no choice. Two tiny tweaks—slim eyebrows and a hairless upper lip—and suddenly someone could see me. It was the first time anyone in pubescent memory had called me beautiful.

So hair removed makes you pretty. My brain calculated the shift as my cheeks burned red and everyone looked in my direction. By removing my hair I had somehow signaled to others: I’m here to be looked at. And not only that, but: I’m here to be beautiful.

Where (and when) one sees oneself

A couple of weeks ago the painter Amy Sherald came to visit the art school where I teach Art History to a group of talented and curious high schoolers. She came and spent some extra time with my students after the grade-wide assembly of gathered interdisciplinary young artists. Amy said many wise and inspiring things, and told the story of coming up in the art world, and working in quiet dedication for many years, decades, until her discovery and blast into the big leagues when she was commissioned to paint the portrait of Michelle Obama, unveiled in 2018.

We had looked at a lot of Amy Sherald’s work in Art History, and many of my students had prepared questions they wanted to ask her as young, aspiring painters themselves. One student asked “why do you often portray the figures in your paintings without a background, or with a single color and when do you decide to paint them in a setting?” I beamed and nodded at them when they glanced my way. It was a good question and I was proud. I had my pen poised on the page of my notebook, excited to hear Amy Sherald’s answer.

Her response surprised me, but only because it was also about eyebrows.

She began by describing a time during college when she travelled away from the United States to study with a painter in Norway. She explained that it was the Bush administration and many Europeans had strong feelings against Americans at this time. As a Black woman artist living outside of the US for the first time, she experienced being read as an American first, and as a Black woman second. She reflected on how growing up in the South in the US, her blackness was always the first read of her, and she had always considered her Americanness to come sort of second, certain versions of patriotism unavailable or unattractive to her because of its entanglement with racism.

But in this role as the only American around where she was studying in Norway, she was forced to consider what the texture of that relationship to her American identity really looked and felt like. She resolved to devote her painting practice to depicting her America.

In the Art21 series “Everyday Icons,” Amy Sherald aligns her art practice with American Realists like Bo Bartlett and Edward Hopper and “Andy” Wyeth. In our brightly lit drawing studio at school a couple weeks ago she articulated this alignment another way. She said, “I want my imagery to feel eternal, like theirs.” For her, that meant finding the fine line between specificity and the universal. This relates to her practice of painting her figures with skin tones in grayscale. While she is clearly interested in painting Black American people, she does not want their skin tone to be the first read, or the most important aspect of their identity. She wants to make it clear that her American figures have always been there, even in the face of the absurd erasure of images of Black people and African American history from school curriculums nation-wide.

“Where else are you going to find an education than in visual culture?” She asked, citing her own work alongside artists like painter Jordan Casteel, collagist Deborah Roberts, and conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, as adding to the visible record of history.

“And like,” she exclaimed, her arms spreading wide above her head, “it’s like eyebrows, right?!” We all waited for her to go on. Of course it’s eyebrows, I thought. Tell us why.

“If I were to paint someone with a very specific style of eyebrow, it would lock that person in a place, in a time.” She paused. “I want to be very careful,” she said. She wants her figures to achieve the eternal, and in order to do that, she explained, she needs to be very mindful of the specificity of small details, like eyebrows, which have the amazing ability to tell a story. The shape or spread or angle of a brow might potentially lock a person in a specific place and time.

“So it’s the same with the backgrounds,” she says, bringing it back to my student’s question. If Amy Sherald were to place every figure in a particular setting, it might be implied that that this person only exists in that one setting. By choosing when to put figures in a front yard or at the beach or against a bright blue background, she can control the narrative. Her figures—her version of American culture and identity—are everywhere, and they will be, always.

Share Pull out your own Hair

When I really scrutinize what it is about the ladies on Selling Sunset, aside from the gleam of botox and the fashion, that fills me with glitter-green envy, it’s that they always arrive at the poorly attended and horridly boring house party completely and totally properly coiffed: not a single hair out of place. And really, not a single one of them has curly hair.

What is this? Unhealed early-2000s hair trauma? Countless Supercuts haircuts where they’d spray my hair with water, comb it straight and blunt-cut it only for it to dry into a frizzy lopsided mane?

In a euro-centric culture, for so many complex reasons rooted in racism and xenophobia which we’ll delve into in future newsletters, straight hair has always been read as more “presentable.” The chemical straightening trend of the early 2000s, the hot-comb so-called professional “imperative,” the rise of the Dry Bar franchise. I need a thousand hours of therapy to understand why my brain still places these women as the standard of beauty. But it’s really not so surprising, is it?

It wasn’t until relatively recently, through powerful legislation like the CROWN Act, that natural and curly hair textures have become more celebrated, nay accepted. Curly hair has been increasingly embraced by the curly-haired themselves. Salons now offer curly cuts and dry cuts, cuts that honor the ways and whims of the curl.

So why can’t I unlearn that my curly hair just isn’t considered polished?

The answer, as you might expect, might be witches.

The “Unruly” Hair of Witches

Hair achieves literal unruliness in a multitude of forms, and in that unruliness itself often conveys a sense of marginalized identity. Margin-dwellers, those who live on the outskirts of towns and villages, those who dwell at the edge of the forest, mark those whose identities, whose narratives, are felt by the dominant culture to exist tangentially to its major themes: a threat to the status quo.

Witches, of course, occupy such a spot in history. Literally, witches were identified in Heinrich Kramer & Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches, 1486) as single, unattached women living on the edges or the outskirts of the town. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger were two knights of the crusade—the king’s henchmen for rounding up witches, i.e. single women across Europe.

In their How-To text, they outline the special locale of the witch’s power as trapped within her long, unruly locks of wild, curly hair. Further, they warn, that if a witch shakes her hair at you, the hexes and spells she has cast upon you will double in their damning power, and consume you. Well, okay. Maybe we’re onto something.

Many retellings of the fairy tale Rapunzel feature a tall tower and an ugly, jealous witch obsessed with youth and beauty. They feature a tall and handsome prince who falls in love with the golden-haired Rapunzel kept locked away in the tall tower with one window, no doors. In classic tellings of Rapunzel, the witch and Rapunzel herself are at odds: Rapunzel desires her freedom and the witch desires Rapunzel’s youth and beauty, and the social power that comes alongside those qualities. The narrative of hair and power is undeniable, no matter the retelling. So let’s unpack a bit how witches and hair and power have gotten so tangled up.

Witches are often portrayed with curly or messy hair or otherwise marked by “difference” in popular culture. Take, for example, the Sanderson sisters in the 90s classic Hocus Pocus (1993). Winifred Sanderson, played iconically by Bette Midler, has two massive mounds of curly red hair that curve like devil’s horns. Her sister Mary Sanderson, played by Kathy Najimi, has hair that looks like it got caught in the vacuum cleaner she uses as a broomstick. The youngest Sanderson, Sarah, played by the flighty Sarah Jessica Parker, has long and wavy blonde hair. The fact that her hair is down conveys her youthfulness.

In the Victorian imagination, hair occupied a place of power and sacredness. Hair left long and flowing would have been worn by young girls, signifying their health and especially their youth. When they became old enough to bear children of their own, their mothers would fasten their magnificent hair into the updos of the married and childbearing aged, signifying to local bachelors that they were ready to be married off. The Brothers Grimm, living in Europe during the Victorian era, would have been aware of the power and significance of hair as they retold the classic story of Rapunzel, after Giambattista Basile and Charlotte-Rose Caumont de La Force’s Petrosinella and Persinette, versions which predate the Brothers Grimm version of 1812. 

Powerful hair arises in ever more witchy figures across popular culture. For example, the sea witch Tia Dalma, of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, who debuts in the human form of Calypso (played by Naomie Harris) in Dead Man’s Chest (2006), has loc’d hair. While Caribbean spiritualities like Rastafarianism arose in the 1930s, much more recently than the 19th century pirates portrayed in the film’s franchise, loc’d hair would undoubtedly bear a cultural resonance and a spiritual significance to the African diaspora. Calypso has also been referred to as a mami wata figure, a siren, calling to sailors and demanding their undying love and fealty.

In 2006 when the film was made, the locs may have been a reference to spiritual beliefs of Rastafarianism. Rastafari take the Nazarite Vow to not cut their god-given hair, and therefore preserve their hair in the protective style of locs. Hair in this belief system contains the power of one’s own life force, and the protection and omnipotence of god. A reference to god’s power might underscore the power of the sea witch herself.

In 2017 another mystical femme figure also bearing a non-western identity entered the franchise. Shansa, a sea witch with a shaved head played by Iranian-French actor Golshifteh Farahani, shows up In Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017). Although we are used to white witches being portrayed with unruly, messy, often curly hair, it is interesting that two non-western witches in the Pirates franchise are furnished with powerful hair stories of their own, whether styled with locs, or a shaved head.

In many cultures around the world, a bald head may be a sign of tonsure, or ritual head shaving. Ritual tonsure is found in Christianity—when we see the bald-headed young priests with their halo of hair, we know that they have recently devoted their lives to the pursuit of divine worship. In India, ritual tonsure is a practice in many Hindu temples as a marker of coming-of-age. It is also how the temples make money, by ritually shaving devotees’ heads and conditioning the hair for the global hair market, where it makes its way into the highest-quality wigs and weaves. For Muslim men primarily, it is forbidden to shave one’s beard hair except for ritual purposes, at the start or end of a religious pilgrimage. We might view Shansa’s shaved head within the lens of the actor’s Persian heritage, and as evidence of the highly spiritual nature of the sea witch herself: her ongoing spiritual pilgrimage.

In each of these portrayals, the witches of non-western identities are portrayed with hair that references spiritual power, with special allusions to non-western spiritual traditions. These are still presented as marginalized hairstyles—hairstyles that evoke difference, or choice. And the hair, or absence of hair, directly references the witches’ symbolic powers.

The disintegration of the self in real life is usually symbolic, metaphoric perhaps of a splintering of the physical surroundings that an individual identifies themselves with. “My world is falling apart,” or “I split into a thousand pieces.” In fairy tales, however, it is possible to make the symbolic literal. The story of Rapunzel (in any retelling) might in fact showcase a splintering of the witch’s own identity such that Rapunzel and her hair become symbolic of the witch’s power itself, through the trauma of being systemically and historically hunted by figures like Kramer and Sprenger, witch-hunters.

Rapunzel’s witch is portrayed as obsessed with the power of Rapunzel’s hair to restore her youth and beauty. She is portrayed as jealous and ugly, as society sees her: a witch, an old crone. As we know, in The Hammer of Witches (1486), Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger identify the locus of a witch’s power to be her unruly tangle of long, messy hair. It is possible that the constant threat of persecution and death—for the text itself warns “thou shall not suffer that witch to live!”—caused the witch to create a talisman outside of her physical body to contain that power. In this way, we might understand Rapunzel as the witch’s power personified. 

In the witch’s domain, hair itself is not only symbolic of a witch’s power, but it is seen as a powerful symbol of youth and beauty—perhaps further, a witch’s true nature suppressed by the encroaching blanket of Christian morality propagated by the hetero-patriarchy. If we understand Rapunzel to stand in for the witch’s power personified, then the tower is symbolic of that repression of self the witch is forced into; to updo her youth, her beauty, her potency in the figure of Rapunzel and, most notably, her hair, by relegating it and her to a tall inescapable tower.

One of my favorite substacks, , recently wrote an essay on the impressive (and complex) figure of Christine de Pizan, an Italian-born French noblewoman and intellectual of the 15th century, who is widely regarded to be one of the first published feminists. The essay contains lots of great information about her life, with gorgeous illuminations (medieval illustrations) from her published works.

There is also a great passage in the essay on Medusa, yet another of HAIR CLUB’s mythical icons, where Christine de Pizan offers an alternate read on the stunning power of Medusa’s beauty, mentioning in particular her “long and curly blonde hair spun like gold…” which, as we all know, was metaphorically cast as a tangle of ugly snakes with the damning power to turn men to stone.

Christine de Pizan’s most famous work was a treatise on the innate power, capacity, and intellect of women called The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). The more I delve into research on Rapunzel, the more Christine de Pizan’s text seems to arise. Some scholars liken the witch’s tower in Rapunzel to Christine de Pizan’s utopian windowless city built to contain and protect women from their male counterparts. Obviously, I like this idea very much. If we can leap to understand the figure of Rapunzel, with her long flowing hair, as symbolic of the witch’s own power, then perhaps we can imagine the witch from within this proto-feminist lens building a tall tower to contain that symbolic feminine power and protect it from the encroachment of powerful censoring forces that wish to squash it out (i.e. the crusading church) or exploit it.

When does your hair feel “unruly”?

Throughout popular culture, unruly hair is often used to portray the over-sexed. Julia Roberts’ seminal role in Pretty Woman (1990) has her sporting the all-out 80s frizzed out curly mane that Flashdance (1983) made so popular.

Two women occupying roles that are slightly threatening to men: an empowered sex worker and a machinist. Edge-dwelling women with curly hair challenging the status quo. In fact, it isn’t until silver-foxed Richard Gere has her as a kept woman in his hotel room that her hair starts to transform: loose and wavy curls are tamed into “respectable” up-dos, or hidden under conservative little hats.

As I think about these movies, I find myself wishing the witch from Rapunzel would come swooping in and take them to the safety of her tower of powerful women, where they could all live undisturbed and unbothered, moisturized, in their lane, and happy forever after.

This is your hair on art.

Some people report a physical sensation while viewing art: Stendhal Syndrome is the weakening of the knees, the quickening of the heart-rate, the slowing of the breath when in communion with something wholly beautiful: it engages the entire body, it resonates with the entire being of you, beyond you. Beyond aesthetics, Stendhal Syndrome speaks to a certain holiness in the art experience—a rarified glimpse into what may lie ahead, what futures are possible.

Museums have often been referred to as cathedrals to culture. Encyclopedic Art Museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, PA), and the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD) are all designed after the Neoclassical temple: wide stone steps bring you from the plane of the living to the plane of the eternal, tall columns draw the eye upward, toward heaven.

Neoclassical, cathedrals, spaces where light divides between a cavalcade of heaven-inviting windows and the brief spaces between columns mete out a rhythm of shadows that hide the light. They are also spaces that hoard the collections of colonizers. Sir Hans Sloane, an Irish physician and naturalist, amassed the seedling collection of the British Museum in London, UK, when he bequeathed his collection to the “nation” of Great Britain in 1759. The earliest institutional museum spaces were meant to be literal spaces of wonderment: wunderkammers, they were called. The wunderkammer of his original collection of artifacts has been installed roughly intact. Yet which inspires more wonder? The eagerly-taken artifacts with spotty attention to provenance collected on wide-sweeping tours of colonized countries across the African continent and beyond? Or the sheer audacity of these early “explorers,” these privilege-fueled collectors of ancient “curios”?

Where art lives and how it gets there is a principal topic of conversation in my Art History classrooms. What is it about a museum or a gallery space that can achieve that rarified air of wonder? What is it about certain art that makes us go weak in the knees, transcend from one plane to another, become transported? And when is pure wonderment a distraction from grounding information, a ruse?

There are many examples of radical interventions of museum facades where they are made to better reflect either the nature and culture of the collections within, or to better mirror the communities that the museum itself is situated within. Two in particular come to mind.

Mickalene Thomas’ re-design of the visitor entrance of the Baltimore Museum of Art, A Moment’s Pleasure, which remained installed from 2019-2021, is a perfect example of this reclamation. According to the American Alliance of Museums core statutes: a museum must hold its collections “in the public trust.” It must vow to serve its local communities first, and it must place education at the center of its mission. There has been a move away from collection development and toward community engagement in these historic spaces. The expansion of the visitor entrance alone is yet another example of the museum’s investment in visitor comfort and welcoming—most visitors enter here at the side entrance, and the wide stone steps of the museum’s original Neoclassical facade are often forgotten.

For Mickalene Thomas’ intervention, she re-imagined the visitor entrance to the museum as a Baltimore City block of rowhouses. Entering the museum during this installation felt like skipping up the stoop steps of a characteristic rowhome, and throwing open the door into someone’s living room. She also transformed the lobby of the visitor entrance to reflect the textures and patterns she might have encountered in the warm interior spaces of homes she remembers visiting as a child growing up in Black neighborhoods in New Jersey.

The second, of course, is the Metropolitain Museum of Art facade commission of Wangechi Mutu’s four bronze caryatids.

From September 2019-November 2020, the artist Wangechi Mutu was commissioned to install four bronze sculptures in the ever-empty architectural niches of the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Series was aptly called “The NewOnes, will free Us.” Individually, the sculptures were titled “The Seated I, II, III, and IV” (2019, cast and patinated bronze). In Wangechi Mutu’s work, these rooted sentinels are mythic protectors, interlocutors between the living and the divine.

The artist had been looking at caryatids, a Classical convention of column design that fashions a traditional column into a sculpted femme figure. Some of the most famous caryatids are on the porch of the Erechtheion at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Marble carved women holding up the mantle of the porch’s frieze: evocative of women’s labor, what women carry. In Mutu’s re-imagination of the form of the caryatid, she envisioned a world where women are freed from the burden of bearing the weight: her figures exist separated from the institution, and with the freedom of movement.

Coiled forms which she describes as “fleshy” wrap and fall around the figures’ bodies like armor. One could argue they resemble large coils of protective hair. Mutu also uses actual hair extensions in her multi-media sculptures.

Wangechu Mutu currently has a solo exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City: Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined. If you’re a NY-dwelling babe, I highly recommend you go and check it out. In this exhibition, the full breadth of Mutu’s work is on display, from her monumental Sentinel sculptures to her large and small scale mixed-media collaged paintings.

The Sentinel series, which is currently on view on the third floor of The New Museum retrospective, features figures adorned with hair. In these sculptures, the hair combines with natural elements of soil, wood, and carved clay, to create a clashing sensation of the organic with the divine. Hair as rooted and distinctly human falls evocatively from the monumental figures, which are arranged in gendered poses meant to evoke the “feminine” divine. In these sentinels, we find hair draped from the head, along the arm, and sprouting from between their massive, strong legs.

Wangechi Mutu’s work is often discussed in the context of Afrofuturism, a term invented in the 1970s and popularized by artists like Sun Ra. Afrofuturism imagines a liberated world where African-rooted aesthetics, spiritualisms, and culture becomes the dominant culture over the westernized, white-washed colonizer aesthetic that dominates today.

Mutu splits her time between studios in New York City and Nairobi. In an Art21 video about her studio practice, Wangechi Mutu talks about wanting to honor the divine feminine, unravel the hypocrisy of worshiping women for life-bearing while denigrating women for life-having. When she’s not working in cast bronze, she is conjuring forms from the very soil of her home country of Kenya, bringing the energy of that grit to her pieces, which travel far beyond their native lands to stand in the voided-out spaces of white cube galleries. 

Wangechi Mutu’s Waterwoman (2017, cast in bronze 2018) graced the flex gallery in the European wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art for several years after the museum acquired it in 2018. As with all her sculptures, this figure felt immediately planted, rooted to its spot, like it grew up naturally there: a coiled and elegant mermaid—mami wata—figure, seated on one hip, her tail curving around, her torso upright and strong: all in black, patinated bronze. Her body leans long on her elegant arms thrown back behind her, torso serpentine but not like contrapposto. Non-western like Akhenaten, round-bellied, kingly in his way that said: family. When Waterwoman left, was removed from the gallery to live elsewhere, I remember feeling dazed, a distant longing. In that moment, I was a hapless sailor falling into her energy vortex.

Mami Wata are mermaid figures of African folklore that are venerated in some form from West to East Africa, thought to have originated in Nigeria, that now make appearances across the United States and in many other communities in the Caribbean and across South and Central America where the African Diaspora has rooted. Sometimes called La Sirene, mami wata are most often shown with attributes of the mirror, a comb, and a watch. Many legend, myth and folktale feature the mami wata as a figure both terrible and beautiful, who might kidnap her followers and return them to earth changed, mainly into more charming and attractive individuals, that is as long as they remain faithful to her alone. 

In HAIR CLUB, we consider mermaids to be hair tropes figures of widespread and mythic proportions. In the western world, mermaids and sirens used to share an equal and fierce intelligence. In illuminated manuscripts they would be presented as they were: half woman, half fish or half woman, half bird with attributes (small identifying artifacts in visual culture) of books and spyglasses representing wisdom and sight or vision. With the spread of Christianity and its moralisms, we begin to see a shift away from the apparent far-sighted wisdom of mermaids and more towards a narrative of seduction and vanity. Books and spyglasses were replaced by mirrors and combs. Michal Lynn is our resident mermaid scholar. She draws our attention to the bitchy, self-involved mermaids of Disney’s Peter Pan (1953), checking their reflections in tiny shell-shaped mirrors. Flattering, eyelash-batting, judgmental, vain. A preoccupation with hair. 

Wangechi Mutu’s Waterwoman defies all the western brainwashing of the desire to frame mermaids in the pose of frail vanity. She is unbothered, strong. A goddess, her magic coiled around her, sometimes literally personified as a snake. Her confidence isn’t borrowed or jealously guarded. She is allowed to be as she is. 

Hey all and welcome to another installment of Pull out your own Hair. This week, we’re altering the format a bit to generate our first Hair Moments in Pop Culture round-up.

So let’s begin with the question:

As I mentioned last week, HAIR CLUB persists on a healthy diet of both high and low brow reference, something we affectionately call “UNIBROW.” Hair is often asked to shoulder the burden of a story’s dramatic tension. Through these round-ups, we’d like to map out how hair is actually used to tell stories.

I come across hair moments in pop culture all the time. I’ll be watching a movie or a TV show, taking in internet content of any kind, and a character or a real person might invoke a popular hair saying, or hair change will become a major plot point, a way to signal a shift in the narrative, a way to take back control (i.e. a breakup haircut, etc.). In HAIR CLUB we call these “hair moments.” They can be loud or super subtle, and they can belong to hair on any part of the body. Defined simply: hair moments are moments when hair is used in a colloquial or metaphorical way to convey something more complex about the character or narrative, plugging the story into a broader cultural context.

I know y’all know what a hair moment is because so many of you send them my way when you find them. We’d love to use this space to gather up as many as we can find.

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It feels important to pause here and acknowledge that we all have our own frame of reference. As much as we in HAIR CLUB aspire to a complete understanding of how hair achieves meaning across art, culture, literature, spirituality, etc., we are only as complete as the narratives we have access to! I am just one individual with one embodied experience. When I write, I write from my own (limited! learning!) perspective, guided by the values that make me who I am, and shaped by the culture and communities that have held and shaped me both in my lifetime and generationally. Clinging to the myth that any single person can write unassailable Truth without acknowledging their subjectivity is a dangerous and colonial mindset that tends to erase the gorgeous nuances of human experience.

This expansive, associative, and socially-engaged methodology is at the core of HAIR CLUB’s scholarly functioning. Not least of which because a discussion of hair will always be as personal as it is universal. Which is why I hope that you will chime in with your own experiences and your own references! Help us map what hair means across time and cultures.

As you move through the week, I’d love to hear about any hair moments you notice. Or perhaps reading through this newsletter you remember iconic hair moments from your favorite movies or TV shows. Go ahead and screen cap, copy/paste, link, and describe those moments in the comments!

Our goal here is to amass a growing archive of references to hair in pop culture, music, TV, film, science, art, and life in general. Through this exploration, we hope to understand a little bit more about how hair is used as a metaphor in storytelling.

Can’t wait to see what we can come up with together.

The unexpected glass hair moment of my week

This week, I watched the documentary about volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft called “Fire of Love” (2022). The film features their own substantial archive of volcanic footage from the 1960s through their deaths in 1991, and traces an unlikely and intense love story between two obsessed scientists.

It’s astonishing to see them walk up to a giant wall of powdery ember-rock blocking a roadway near the base of an active volcano. Or to see the skin burned off by hot mud, or to watch the theory of plate tectonics play out in one scrolling obliteration of crust under crust. 

In this documentary, I learned—sitting bolt upright on the couch—that when a red volcano erupts and hot magma shoots into the sky, the wind stretches the cooling rock into instant strands of liquid glass which get tangled in trees miles away, where they web, cooled by the winds that made them.

This natural phenomenon is called “Pele’s hair” after the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. Watching this, my jaw dropped. I nearly missed it and had to go back, rewatching the segment about Pele’s hair twice. I immediately texted every person I know about it, and posted a BeReal of the wikipedia page for “Pele’s hair,” my face opposite frozen in awe. Pele’s hair has been found in Nicaragua (Masaya), Italy (Etna), and Ethiopia (Erta’ Ale). Birds sometimes use Pele’s hair to make their nests: round orbs of delicate silicate glass for them to perch upon. Strands of volcanic glass are also found in Iceland, where they’re known as nornahár, or “witch’s hair.”

The audio of the documentary pulses, muffled by my heart beating in my ears. This is what it feels like to be truly surprised by hair, to experience a hair moment in a place you never thought you would—hair in a documentary about love and volcanoes, sure, of course!

“The unknown is not something to be feared,” the voice of Maurice Krafft breaks through the churning chatter in my head. “It is something to go toward.”

Lacework of falling embers on the screen. A sheet of liquid rock.

I am reminded again of geologic time. 

I realize that if rocks can be read, so can hair.

Hair Moments in Pop Culture #1

A Round-Up:

[1] - “Love is Blind” and Hair is all we care about

The first hair moment of the round-up naturally has to come from Season 4 of “Love is Blind,” which recently aired and which is all I’ve been thinking about for weeks. My favorite hair moment from this season is a small one.

Setting the scene: we are meeting Brett’s father and brother for the first time in what looks to be some sort of hotel lobby. Brett and Tiffany hold hands across the armrest of mid-century modern armchairs. Brett’s father Herbert and brother Angus sit opposite them so we can see all of them in the shot. According to the edit, Angus doesn’t say much during this meeting. As Brett’s father speaks eloquently about love and relationships and making “that connection,” bride-to-be Tiffany nods along, casting prolonged looks of longing at Brett.

It’s the end of the conversation, and everyone is preparing to leave. Before they stand up, however, Angus turns to Tiffany as says:

“One question. Do approve of my hairdo?”

Tiffany blinks, leans toward Angus, “Huh?” He repeats the question more pointedly, “Do you approve of my hairdo?” Tiffany laughs, “I want people to be themselves!” She says and waves off the question with a manicured hand, glancing back at Brett, who laughs. They all laugh.

“Thank you,” Angus says, extending the hand of friendship to her. “I really like you now. I appreciate it.”

It feels like the final mark of approval for this season’s fan favorite couple.

[“Do you approve of my hairdo?,” Love is Blind, s4e11, ‘You are Overpriced’ aired on Netflix April 2023: 12:15-12:28]

[2] - Sex and the City: “Charlotte is married too and she isn’t growing a national forest!”

It made sense to me to bring out a hair moment from the vaults, an iconic hair moment in pop culture, and one that sits in the HAIR CLUB canon. That would be the moment from Sex and the City: The Movie (2008) when Samantha (played by Kim Cattrall) savagely berates Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) for wearing a bathing suit with her visible bush poking out at the sides. This scene occurs when they all find themselves on Carrie’s (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) honeymoon in Mexico after Big left her at the altar.

Samantha pulls down her sunglasses to see into Miranda’s crotch better, a look of horror spread over her face.

“Jesus honey, wax much?”

We could (and probably will) spend an entire newsletter (or series of newsletters) discussing the various hair moments of the SATC franchise, from Season 1 thru the second and (thank god) final movie. Carrie’s own hair journey—anyone care to map Carrie’s hair as it bounces between straightened and curly, coming to a fever pitch when she asks Big exasperatedly whether he’s noticed that she straightens her hair now and will he please make room in his bathroom for her straightener? Not to mention the Miranda going gray to (spoiler alert) switching back to her vivacious balayage of reds after she comes out as gay in the post-pandemic reboot “And just like that…” !

But for today, I will leave you with this one.

When Miranda is obliquely accused of “letting the sex go out of her marriage” as evidenced by forgetting (or “not having time”) to get her bikini waxed, a level of neglect that is leveraged against Charlotte’s (played by Kristin Davis) pristine bikini line, who, it is argued in the scene, is also extremely busy, married, and has a child of her own.

“I could be on death row and I’d have that situation covered!” Samantha replies.

This scene cements the notion of the moral imperative of waxing and hair maintenance as a woman’s duty in the early 2000s. A seed that is planted as early as Season 3 of the TV show in “Sex and Another City” (s3e14, aired September 17, 2000), when Carrie goes to Los Angeles and gets a Brazilian wax for the first time.

“I feel like walking sex,” she says with her characteristic squeal.

[“Jesus honey, wax much?,” Sex and the City: The Movie, 2008]

[3] On Wellmania, it all hinges on a hair moment

I wanted to include a hair moment that I noticed while binge-watching the raunchy comedy-drama Wellmania (2023) last week. Has anyone else watched this show?

Wellmania is based on the book Wellmania: Misadventures in the Search for Wellness (2017) by Brigid Delaney. The story follows a writer named Liv (played by comedian Celeste Barber) who is at the precipice of a truly career-defining moment, and is forced to confront some hard truths about her mental, emotional, and physical well-being before she can finally, hopefully, catch the carrot. The hair moment I’d like to focus on in this season happens toward the end of Episode 5, between Liv’s best friend Amy (JJ Kwong) and her husband Doug (Johnny Carr).

Amy has spent several episodes trying to get Doug’s attention and root out the cause of why they—a happily married and financially-comfortable middle-aged couple with kids—aren’t having any sex at all. In a previous episode she tries to spice things up by turning up at his work site completely naked and clearly having waxed for the occasion. She is rejected by way of neon orange safety vest hastily wrapped around her naked body.

Amy finally confronts Doug, asking point-blank if he’s cheating on her or if he’s depressed. “What’s going on with us?” She asks.

Doug finally sits down on the bed next to her, runs a hand through his hair and says, with a deep sigh.

“I’m going bald.”

“No you’re not!” Amy says.

“…I feel fucking old and gross,” he says, falling back onto the bed.

Amy considers this for a second, then volunteers her own existential hair drama.

In this moment, Doug admitting to his fear that “his best days are behind him” is filtered through this physical experience of losing his hair. His receding hairline becomes a marker of age, a symbol of his slippery youth. Doug’s preoccupation with losing his hair has put up a barrier between them; disappearing hair creating new and painful distance.

This vulnerable act of sharing mutual hair stories of aging—Doug’s existential hair crisis and Amy’s constant chasing after and plucking of gray hairs all over her body—becomes the key to unlocking the barrier to intimacy between the couple. What happens next is that Amy shaves Doug’s head, and then his pubes, and then they pretty much don’t stop having sex for the rest of the season.

This hair moment is a major hinge point for the couple’s storyline, and also serves as a symbolic turning point in the season, when we experience a tone shift toward more radical self-acceptance across the narrative board of the entire show.

[“I feel fucking old and gross,” Wellmania, s1e5, ‘Hall of Mirrors,’ aired on Netflix April 2023: 21:50-24:35]

[4] Mae Martin “Feeling crisp feeling shorn” in their new comedy special SAP (2023)

In Mae Martin’s newest Netflix comedy special, “SAP” (2023), which is based rather flimsily on a Buddhist allegory about enjoying the good things in life even when all around you falls to chaos, there is a story about a time they unexpectedly encountered their big traumatic ex at a bar after a show.

“I hadn’t seen my ex in like a year and a half or had any contact with her. And I was in London and I was doing a show. And I was feeling good that night, you know what I mean? Fresh haircut. I was freshly shorn. You know the feeling?…”

They set up this big encounter by explaining that they had started out the evening feeling good and crisp and fresh, in particular, “freshly shorn.” They assume through linguistic flair that everyone knows exactly what they mean. And maybe we do. We may all know what it’s like to have a fresh cut or new styling, and what that feels like, and what that innately means for our self confidence, the way we hold ourselves, the way we hold hope for the future. Common experiences of hair can unite a crowd in this way.

This newly shorn-ness seems to hold a lot for Martin: they describe a really good set, a good night, a night where they felt confident and self-assured. Through this small description of hair, we are meant to understand the full height from which they are about to fall, face-first, into all the hilarious cringe of what follows. Through hair, we can access that height of feeling, that goodness and readiness for the world and, by contrast, whatever pit of despair lies ahead. Their crisp shorn-ness signals the inevitable dreaded turn, the moment when everything definitively goes to shit.

[“Feeling shorn,” Mae Martin in SAP, Netflix Comedy Special, aired April 2023: 19:36]

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What hair moments out in the world will you notice this week?

The more I look, the more I find !

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Last week, a few of you shared what would be done with hair that you had shed or cut. Scattering in the woods, giving it to the birds for nests. It made me think about rituals surrounding hair, what happens when you let matter have another life beyond the one it lived on you. What happens when you simply let hair go.

In high school, I would often find old balled up tufts of hair in the pockets of my (very tight, very low-rise) jeans. I was constantly losing hair, and back then I had long, center-parted “Botticelli hair”—according to the Curly Girl Handbook, which came into my life in 7th grade by fluke. I would pull idly-fallen hairs from my shirt or scarf until I’d look down and realize I was sitting in World History holding a fistful of my own hair. Hasty glance around classroom, painful teen heart spike of terror. I’d rub my hands together until the hair formed a tiny ball.

The sense-memory of that scratchy, crunchy hair ball brings back all the biting-down-on-tin-foil cringe of teenhood. I’d hastily shove the tiny hair ball into the shallow pocket of my jeans, poking at the hairs to stick them all inside. Then find it again later pulling my school ID out of my pocket, inevitably flinging the hairball into the air where it might arc, to my horror, in slo-motion.

Now, I try to be more intentional, mindful of the ways I recapture fallen hairs. Lately, balled up hair has been accumulating in a soap dish in my shower—a poor excuse for a Victorian hair receiver.

My sister came to stay with us a few weeks ago and on her first morning after breakfast she said “okay, I’m going to hop in the shower.” I froze. “So um,” I said. “If you see—don’t be alarmed—” “Oh,” she said. “You’ve got a project going in the shower?” She smiled and knew I meant hair.

Making Hair Sense

Beyond beauty and maintenance and ritual, hair has a function. On the body, the most sensitive and integral spots are defended by a layer of hair. Thickets grow over precious glands that govern hormones and the timed cycles of the body. Pubic hair, armpit hair starts growing when you need it most: at puberty, when your hormones make you the most sensitive creature, an exposed nerve trembling in the wind.

When Arlo was just a few days old, her eyelashes were short and trim, a delicate ring around her big bright eyes. Eight weeks in, they tripled in length. As I’ve watched her eyelashes grow, I’ve watched them repel countless incoming hairs and shmutz. She works them out by blinking while we grow besotted, blotting her constant tears. I realize I am grateful to those eyelashes. They exist in partnership with me in protecting her. 

To single celled organisms like paramecium and other ciliates, tiny hairs, or microscopic cilia, help to propel them around the liquid landscape in which they thrive, eat, and put out waste. Hair on the move navigates, acts as tiny sensors helping these organisms swerve and change directions when they encounter any obstacle. Scientists have observed that ciliates will flap their hairs in synchronized movements when operating in a larger group.

Some organisms will have a couple single longer hairs, called flagellum, which help them change directions swiftly. While others, like gastrotrichs, otherwise known as “hairybellies,” have ciliated crowns, waving hairs that crest their leading edge, micro-cilia leading the way.

Ciliated crowns. What a beautiful way to describe the synchronized frazzle of hair on one’s head, especially hair that guides or governs, senses the environment around us for danger. Biologically, very short hairs tend to act as sensors, detecting or filtering the microscopic or the sound wave into constituent, safe, and digestible parts.

We share the quality of hair with precious few other species on our planet: some dogs, horses, and orangutans, for example, as compared with fur. But insects and arachnids also grow hairs along their exoskeletal bodies. The tiny hairs on the exoskeleton of an insect may be able to detect air movement as slight as the width of a single atom.

A 2011 study on the trichobothria, the tiny sensing hairs, of hunting spiders suggests that each hair on the spider acts like an ear, filtering sound and detecting prey from afar. Whereas the cochlea of the inner-ear in humans act in unison to decipher and compartmentalize sound waves into digestible chunks of information, filtering background noise and amplifying more relevant nearby noises to increase legibility and hearing, the trichobothria on spiders each have that capacity.

The hairs actually serve to amplify sound. Scientists measured this ability not by how fast the hairs wiggled when exposed to sound waves, but by how far each hair moved. Through these experiments, they were able to deduce that each hair can actually detect sounds from about 40 Hz (distant thunder rumble) to 600 Hz (a car horn), whereas the human ear can detect around 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. We know that spiders have many eyes, but it is actually their hairs that do most of the sensing and parsing of the world around them. These are survival traits. 

The tiny hairs on our body—also called peach fuzz—protect us and help us remain sensitive to the world around us and attuned to our surroundings. When we are gripped by a sudden chill, or become frightened, the smallest hairs on our body, or the hairs on the back of our neck stand up. Scary circumstances are idiomatically “hair-raising”, which derives from the actual phenomenon of hair standing on end.

References to this phenomenon are woven throughout literature and history. In the Book of Job: “Fear came upon me, and trembling…the hair of my flesh stood up” (4:14-15). And in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1602):

Goosebumps—“goose-flesh” historically, or, according to seventeenth century English lexicographer Thomas Blount, “horripili” (horripili!!!)—break out all over the body when the tiny muscles in our hair follicles are activated, causing the hair within the follicles to be pulled upright. We might think of goosebumps as a skin phenomenon, but it is actually the activation of the tiny hairs all over our body standing at sudden attention, triggered by a natural danger: colder temperatures, or fright.

In animals, this might cause their fur to stand up and trap heat, but humans have long evolved away from having body hair long enough to regulate our temperature this way. According to a recent NIH study, humans may actually get goosebumps not to keep themselves warm, but to stimulate hair growth. In this 2020 study, when subjects were exposed to colder temperatures for longer periods of time, the stem cells within the hair follicles began to grow a completely new coat of hair.

Arlo came out covered in a plush werewolf coat of soft, visible hairs: it swirled over her shoulders and eddied at the small of her back. I can still see their remnants on her chunky calves and surrounding her face as if haloed. Newborns notoriously cannot regulate their body temperatures. We trolled the internet for the best wisdom on how we should be dressing her through her first winter. Babies don’t develop immune systems until about three months, and their bodies begin storing enough fat to help insulate them from changing temperatures, but for a while there, it’s just the tiny soft hairs trapping what heat they can from escaping her body: what we might call a lingering evolutionary memory.

As hair reads or senses our immediate environment, scans for dangers as minute as the width of a single atom, it protects and keeps mammals, insects and arachnids alike attuned to their surroundings. In microorganisms, hair moves and steers them clear of obstacles. Hair is often in the business of repelling danger, signaling or alerting us to whatever information might be close at hand, or, if you’re a spider, surprisingly far away.

Introducing our Pop Culture Roundup of “Hair Moments”

Next week, we’ll inaugurate our Pop Culture Roundup of “Hair Moments.” Hair Moments are moments that speak to or involve hair found in popular culture, media, advertising, TV and film. Every fourth newsletter will take this form!

This is part of the overall project of HAIR CLUB: to gather an archive of hair moments, large or small, obvious or extremely subtle, throughout the landscape of popular culture. Essentially crowd-sourced and personally-derived archives that speak to larger cultural themes. If we can map hair over the constant waves of content crashing over us, we might be able to categorize hair into larger metaphoric threads. As always, this inquiry exists on a combined diet of high brow and low brow: what we call UNIBROW.

Over the next week, if you notice any “Hair Moments” as you’re watching TV, or even as you move through the world, jot them down, and add them to next week’s newsletter post!

Since this is a hopeful archive (an archive that will never be complete), I ask that you submit your “Hair Moments” in pop culture in the following format:

[HAIR MOMENT described in summary or written as dialogue in scene, characters involved, Show Title: s(eason)#e(pisode)#, YEAR.]

For example:

“When drama starts, the hair goes up!” [Chloe sits up, leans forward in her chair and pulls her hair into a ponytail to prepare herself for whatever Trevor and Mitchell have to say in the group chat, The Circle: s2e12, 2021]

Good lord, if there’s a Chicago MLA style that better suits this citation format, please let me know !

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What is your hair sensing today?

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// Some Qs for your own brain //

• When is hair gross? When is hair “inappropriate”?

• Have you ever given, or been gifted, a lock of hair?

Share your thoughts in the comments below !

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An old faculty advisor of HAIR CLUB’s once told us a story she’d read, about a traveling circus troupe from France coming through Chicago on a US tour in the 1920s. The women in the group had left the hair under their arms untouched, unshaven. At the rehearsal, the venue manager approached the troupe and said “listen, if you want to perform here, the women have to shave under their arms.” “But why?” they asked. “Well, there is a concern that it will remind the audience of the hair between their legs,” he said. “It’s too raunchy.”

What is it about hair that reads immediately as sensual? Does hair in any crease remind us of sex? In the Talmud, there is a passage that explicates the biblical phrase “your hair was like a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead” (Song of Solomon 4:1), which forms the basis for the custom of a woman covering her hair under a sheitel or a wig for modesty in Jewish Orthodoxy. Goats as sensual, animal beings, goats as suitable dowry fodder. Hair is by nature intimate; can it also be by nature holy? Showing hair, even where we expect to find it, can often be a radical act.

I remember a moment of pure horror in grad school when I realized that the wool coat I was wearing—camel-colored and dolman-sleeved—to stave off the Chicago winter, had gathered a small collection of linty hairballs on the outer pits. In my steady march over piled snow, scooting along the benches of the El train, flapping my arms trying not to slip on the steps to the museum, I had been colonizing my exterior coat-pits with all the collected errant hairs that had fallen off my head.

When I finally discovered this collection of hairs that had gotten stuck to the scratchy brushed wool and migrated into the low-slung armpit: I felt pure horror. The secret perverse thrill I felt finally pulling the hairs off the rough finish of my coat was so palpable, I thought I was going to throw up. I was so embarrassed. In this beige coat I looked like a bad drawing of a comically-lumpy body, with squiggles of hair marking the modesty zones. Even as someone who talks about hair for a full third of their career, that I could still be so susceptible to the shame of finding hair where it had no business being, where it doesn’t belong, was shocking and a little disheartening. Fear of visible hair and especially unexpectedly visible hair, has deep roots. 

That hair itself, even in presumably public areas of the body—as with the circus troupe’s hairy-pitted femme performers—can be reminiscent of sensuality or defy a sense of propriety, that it might remind us of our animal nature speaks perhaps to the puritanical underpinnings of colonial American culture. Could intimacy be locked into the material meaning of hair itself? Hair in any crease could be a reminder of pubic hair, one’s own regions. That we should be prevented from seeing it, or feel moved to remove it, foils fascinatingly with the fact that it’s really there to protect us.

Hair memorial: Where there is and isn’t hair

Hair holds within it the alchemical potential of transformation: it can be as precious as a single person’s brain, as forgotten as a clump of vacuumed dust. On the body, hair is meticulously kept, brushed, conditioned, braided, loc’d. Off, the stuff gets flushed down the drains or swept into the dust bin, forgotten forever, and often with some relief.

Even so, some disembodied hair achieves saintly status.

Saint Clare of Assisi’s curling, silver locks are kept in a rectangular glass reliquary with pewter edges in the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi in Italy. Devotees who have dedicated their spiritual practice to her make routine pilgrimages to the church to visit upon her sacred hair and pray before it.

St. Clare was born in 1193 to a wealthy family in Assisi, Italy. She was rumored to have long and beautiful hair. When she decided to dedicate her life to the church and the benedictine order, St. Francis himself cut her hair as a symbol of her new spiritual path. In fact, many monks perform the sacred act of tonsure, or ritual hair removal, as a signal of the start of their spiritual journey. Now, St. Clare’s hair forms a holy relic pilgrims can visit in order to be closer to her former embodiment. Interestingly, St. Clare of Assisi is also the patron saint of Television, which I love.

In this context, hair is a symbol for devotion: both the physical locks and the ritual act of removing them. The way hair may become a proxy for a holy life lived. We clutch hair for the memory it contains, or the memory that it represents. Hair is memorial.

Locks of Beethoven’s hair have circulated the market for many years. Recently, a pair of American Beethoven enthusiasts purchased a lock of his hair at a Sotheby’s auction and performed a series of tests on the specimen to learn more about the circumstances surrounding Beethoven’s death. Ultimately, the lock of hair was tested to reveal high amounts of lead, which had researchers convinced for a long time that he may actually have died of lead poisoning. More recent tests have debunked that theory. Now, the tests that are being done exist to try and understand what about Beethoven’s genetic makeup made him a musical genius.

We’ve all heard stories about locks of hair being given to loved ones. My partner Allison’s college boyfriend once handed her a plastic baggie of his newly shaven beard hairs, saying “I know you liked my beard. Now you can have it.” In fact, she’d like me to tell you that she had only pretended to like his beard, because it had seemed important to him.

In Victorian times, it was customary to collect the hair of a loved one and weave it into mourning jewelry or preserve it in lockets. Decoratively woven hair of entire families would be made into hair wreaths as a memorial to the life of the departed.

The story with Beethoven’s hair is that within three days of his death, Beethoven’s entire head was shorn, lock by lock clipped by visiting mourners. Among the aggrieved was a devotee of Beethoven, a young composer named Ferdinand Hiller, who also snipped a lock of the dead composer’s hair while he lay on his deathbed. Recent studies of the Hiller hair specimen, which was passed from generation to generation of Hillers, and was eventually gifted to a Dutch physician named Kay Fremming in gratitude for helping Jewish people escape Nazi Germany during WWII, actually showed that this specimen did not belong to Beethoven himself, but likely to a woman. Somewhere along the way, the hair must have been swapped.

Through these hair specimens, and especially those that have since been confirmed to share DNA with Beethoven himself, we can fill holes in the story of the composer’s life and death, while we can only speculate the reasons why Hiller and others wanted a clip of Beethoven’s hair in the first place. Did he see the hair as a stand-in for the composer’s body? Did he want to preserve a trace of his genius? The fact that the hair specimen stayed in the family for so long suggests that the reasons were personal and not financial, although clearly the specimen had value. Various specimens of Beethoven’s death hair have sold at auctions for a total of nearly $140k in the last forty years.

What is it that keeps a lock of Beethoven’s historic hair sacred as a saint’s relic, yet when we discover other people’s hairs on the bathroom floor, or, perhaps not so anonymously, in our own underwear, or worse yet, in our food, the feeling churns from reverence to disgust? How can hair hold all of these metaphoric possibilities in a single strand? That the same material knotted and shiny could inspire literal gags of disgust or even sniffs of disapproval when found in another context is testimony to hair’s true multiplicty.

In HAIR CLUB we spend a lot of time parsing this question: whether hair is on or off the body, when does it become gross? When does it suddenly not “belong”? On the body, hair fuels a nearly $600 billion beauty industry, products promising to shine, shimmer, silkify, or disappear hair from every inch of the body. And yet, when a hair falls off, it could transform immediately to dirt, something disgusting or comical, or it could become the last clue to unlocking the mysteries of creative genius.

Hair that is chopped off with intentionality to the purpose of being saved might achieve a sort of memorial status whereas hair that is discarded might go the way of dirt. When hair is anonymous, unidentified, or sprouting slyly from areas society has deemed inappropriate or at the very least subversive—a femme’s armpits, legs or face, for example—hair trades cruelly with disgust.

During the pandemic I was in the habit of saving the hair that fell out or that I removed from my head and body. I don’t know why, but hair became a marker of time for me. In the absence of a performed outward beingness, a public-facing visage, I was free to embark on more hair journeys, noticing when and how long I could grow my hair before cutting. At the end of two years, I had a collection of my body's most basic measure of productivity.

Yesterday, as I was contemplating whether to mention this jar of hair that has lived in my closet for a few years, something I swore I’d never even tell Allison about, I imagined a scenario where some future lucky progeny might find it after I’m gone. “Oh and here’s grandmother’s pandemic hair, yes. How nice.” Would this be a gross thing to find among your grandmother’s possessions?

Maybe they’d put it in a nice glass box on the mantlepiece under the TV, a little homage to St. Clare.

In future newsletters, we’ll delve ever more deeply into the relationship between hair and information, especially regarding length of hair and what that signals across cultures and belief systems. For now, I’m thinking about partings and split ends. What changes in hair as it leaves our bodies? New technologies innovate ways to use hair—a renewable resource—to soak up oil spills or strengthen bricks and mud constructions, but for the most part, hair leaves but always lingers. Many people across the world comb through gutter-detritus and make a living off the hair they collect: from there, they comb and condition the hair into parcels that they can sell. In this way, perhaps, we come full circle: discarded hair becomes the stuff of the global hair market, and that, an $86 billion industry, makes it gold again.

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:: The Hair Journey ::

For months after giving birth, hair wasn’t even a worry. I stopped losing it, like my body was pulling in all its resources, a wave gathering. It was the first time in my life I wasn’t constantly shedding. I thought I’d be relieved by this, and in a way I did feel all the protein strength of it, but it was so alien to me that I began wondering if I would never lose my hair again, and this frightened me. I started imagining all the hair ingrowing, running out of real estate on the surface, stuffing me from within.

When I finally did start losing my hair, finding it twined in Arlo’s tiny fingers and sticking to my clothes, hanging unnoticed from my dog Lucy’s mouth, littered on the bathroom floor, streaked on the shower curtains, I started to feel like myself again. Do I need to leave traces in order to remember I exist? My remnants returned me to some former balance.