00:05:44.900I love to just the intimacy of it is so beautiful and meaningful to me.
00:05:50.120So that is kind of the root of my questions. But I'm also not only a girl standing in front of a hairstyle asking to brush its hair, but I'm also somebody who's, you know, trained in feminist and literary and cultural studies.
00:06:09.040And as I was, you know, in the early 2000 moments, starting to write a lot about popular culture, particularly television, Game of Thrones, it just became really clear to me that hair was a way that you could see what a piece of media, whether that was a book or especially visual media like TVs or movies, wanted to tell you was real or important about a woman character.
00:07:13.140And then there was a specific moment in Game of Thrones, which, as you know, I recapped for many seasons,
00:07:22.520when Daenerys Targaryen, first of her name, is the queen, the dragon queen,
00:07:28.520is spending time with her friend, who is also a formerly enslaved woman that she liberated,0.64
00:07:36.040Missandei, who is Black and who has large, I would say, like 4C curl hair. And Daenerys is0.75
00:07:45.600doing Missandei's hair. And my jaw was just on the floor. I have read and watched so much media,
00:07:55.700And I had, I really, I asked everybody I knew, like, can you think of any 19th century story where a white woman does a black woman's hair? I couldn't think about it. I couldn't find one. I mean, there might be one, but I could not think of one.
00:08:08.840And that was the moment where I really realized that this whole time I'd been thinking about gender. But in fact, I was thinking about race and gender. And I had my framework that I had grown up with never forced me to think about my hair as an expression of my racialized gender rather than just my gender. And that was really the root of this book.
00:08:30.920uh yes and we're going to talk about this throughout this is part of the reason why
00:08:36.280i like i knew that we would get great questions from our listeners but i also knew that like
00:08:42.620some of them would be like oh why like why am i into this hairstyle or why do i not like this
00:08:47.620hairstyle why am i fascinated by this hairstyle and some of it i think our surface level appreciation
00:08:53.060or rejection has to do with sometimes some like unexamined understandings of popularity or like
00:09:00.420I'm thinking about your reaction, which you describe in the book, to Jennifer Aniston's Rachel haircut, which you're like, oh, my God, it's so basic.
00:09:09.140Right. But like what what is the deeper story?
00:09:12.580And each chapter in your book looks at is it the last 40 years?
00:09:17.260Yeah, it goes between the election of Reagan and the first election of Trump.
00:09:23.040And looks at different, like very, very visible white lady hairstyles.
00:09:28.400Yeah. And unpacking their meaning, their reception, like just thinking of them as cultural objects, right, with so many different inputs and outputs.0.57
00:09:38.440Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one way to think about the book is it's seven essays about seven iconic moments in white women's hair between this, in this 40 year span between 79 and 2016.
00:09:53.700And another way of saying that is that it's a book about how whiteness has transformed and wrestled with itself.
00:10:02.720And I think that white women's hair is a great place to look at how whiteness thinks about itself, because as I was saying, I spent my whole life thinking about my hair, writing about hair all the time and was never, never thought I was talking about race.0.55
00:10:19.580I thought I was talking about gender power. I thought I was talking about aesthetics. I thought I was talking about class and taste. And all of those frameworks, all of those ideas or languages are ways that whiteness can talk about itself without using the word white.0.74
00:10:38.180Right. And whiteness loves to do that because whiteness does not want to think about itself as a race. It wants to erase its racial identity at every turn. And especially because women's hair is often seen as the realm of the trivial, the aesthetic. It's like fun. It's pretty. It's just popular.0.71
00:10:56.800um it seems very aslant to you know as i say in the book the university the courtroom the0.99
00:11:04.340the business you know the place where real decisions are made white women's hair is also
00:11:09.980not a place that thinks of itself as powerful yeah and whiteness loves to disavow its own power
00:11:16.140so precisely because of all of the reasons it seems counterintuitive it's actually really
00:11:22.320fruitful. And let me say here, it's a caveat. I think it's really important for white women like
00:11:28.840myself to learn how to do this. Really, the risk of the book, though, is that white women have been
00:11:35.400very carefully trained by people who didn't realize they were doing it to be bad at talking0.52
00:11:41.440about race, to be bad at thinking about race and to obscure and occlude it. So I'm really trying
00:11:48.460to make my good faith best effort here. But it's a, you know, the book is really a risk. I'm sure
00:11:54.540I'm getting a lot wrong. I'm really looking forward to what talking about the book helps me
00:12:01.000learn. Yeah. Which is the cheerful way of saying like, I'm also like quite anxious about it in my
00:12:06.440white lady way. I'm always conscious of like the way that talking about whiteness, especially as0.97
00:12:12.520both of us as white ladies talking about whiteness, that it sometimes like reproduces this like,
00:12:17.880Well, we're always centering whiteness, right? And I'm conscious of one of the first scholars who made me think of whiteness as whiteness was Richard Dyer, his book, White. It's about all cultural artifacts, but he is precious to me as the person who introduced me to star studies.
00:12:35.920uh-huh and yeah but he writes too he's like there is a risk of like this being white supremacy0.52
00:12:43.580studies right of like right reproducing the importance of whiteness as like the the object
00:12:49.220of scholarly concern but at the same time if we don't turn the lens on whiteness and understand0.74
00:12:55.720it as like a place of replicating power and value like then we're just like erasing its power0.92
00:13:02.560constantly right or disavowing that like what's going on with blondness i'm like oh i just like
00:13:08.820how it looks my makes my face look right yeah which is kind of like trissy condom says i just
00:13:15.580uh i just like what i like is always a capitalist lie totally yeah totally no and i was gonna say
00:13:22.140that it like it reminds me too about um how sometimes we talk about thinness right that
00:13:40.320And that, you know, it is not a coincidence that all seven of the women who are at the center of this book's chapters, not only do they have hair that became famous, but they are all quite thin.
00:13:52.080And some of them, the story of their thinness is also a part of their fame.
00:13:58.180I often joke about, I mean, this is something that we could dilate on, and I don't know where we want to get into, but another thing I will often tag things on social media in addition to hair studies is hair-thigh nexus, because there's a real correlation between women flaunting their hair, especially white women.0.99
00:14:16.200White women flaunting their hair and the perfection of their hair and the thinness of their thighs.
00:14:26.080An example that I, you know, people don't want to brag exactly about their thinness, but they will brag about their hair or their show it off.
00:14:35.920Demi Moore recently was on, I think it was Milan Fashion Week.
00:14:40.880I could be wrong about the specific fashion week.1.00
00:14:42.820But showed up on the catwalk carrying a dog in a black leather catsuit looking and she had bobbed her long hair. Right. And everyone's like Demi Moore shows new hairstyle. But that allowed people to put the image over and over and over again rather than saying Demi Moore is remarkably thin. Right. Right. Right. Right. Skeletally dangerously thin.0.98
00:15:10.480So the people it's OK to talk about hair. Right. But is really what is being circulated is the thinness. I have a lot to say about this correlation between bodies.
00:15:21.300But Paula Pell was just on Good Hang with Amy Poehler and Amy was complimenting Paula on her beautiful hair and was like you and Tina Fey have some of the most like renowned beautiful hair in our friend group.
00:15:32.940And Paula said very explicitly that like, because I was fat, I worked really hard on my hair because if you have beautiful hair and you cherish your hair, it like allows you to deflect people's attention and actually their eyes away from the rest of your body.
00:15:51.820And so it was her almost like a coping mechanism to be like, this makes me into something like not only desirable, but also respectability to have beautiful hair.
00:16:01.720right like if we're thinking about unruliness of the body like but my hair is exquisite
00:16:07.340is a way to like recenter attention in that way yeah there's a great um essay and i will have to
00:16:15.000send you the name but by a media studies scholar who talks about hair and fat as being what she
00:16:20.940calls motile parts of women's bodies which means that they're always changing your hair is always1.00
00:16:26.720growing and your body is always metabolizing. So they're constantly in motion. And because0.75
00:16:33.200they're constantly in motion, that means that they can always be regulated. You never get to
00:16:37.320the end, right? So they're always sort of sites of pleasure and possibility that can get shifted
00:16:43.180towards anxiety and regulation. The Culture City podcast is sponsored by Tumble. Molly, last week,
00:16:55.600my best friend and her kids were staying at my house for a full week and it was like camp
00:17:01.160Lummi Island at Auntie Blondie's house and our house was like the central house where all the
00:17:07.000kids came so they're just running through at all times and just you know there's like at any given
00:17:13.300time six to ten kids under the age of 11. That's a lot of kids. There was some spillage and there
00:17:21.000It was just, I mean, there's just lots of snacks and stuff like that.
00:17:23.880And the thing that's great is that I just didn't have to worry about it because the spillage happened on my tumble rug.
00:17:30.800And I was like, I'm just going to throw this in the washing machine.
00:17:34.180I love that that can be a new rule for people who have kids in their house rather than like no eating in the living room.
00:17:39.680It's like you can only snack on the tumble rug.
00:25:39.660You know, the thing that I say in the book that there are three things that I think are really interesting about hair.
00:25:45.460That it's, and the first word is the slipperiest, but that it's natural, that it's expressive, and that it's temporal.
00:25:53.220So by natural, I mean that it comes out of the inside of you, but we could see it.
00:25:59.420So it seems like it's this special magical inside part that we could look at. Like, I can't look at your genetic code. I can't look at your brain. I can't look at your soul. I can't look at your intelligence or your heart. But I can look at your hair.
00:26:13.740so there's like something that it like signifies something about what's inside you
00:26:18.800but unlike most of these other parts of ourself it is very available to our expressivity I can
00:26:26.860Annie we were just discussing you and I both dye our hair blonde to be like well is my nature really
00:26:33.180look like the goddess of freedom it does or it doesn't quite but I know what it should like
00:26:38.920So I can express my respect for that sign in what I do to my hair. But then it's also in time, right? It takes a long time to grow out or it grows out too fast or whatever it is.
00:26:50.900So that special intersection of naturality and expressiveness is really what makes hair this really interesting part of our bodies, because it's a place where we can show we understand what our culture's values are.
00:27:09.720We can show that we wish we had them, even if we don't. But we can show that we believe in this currency and that when we do that, culture rewards us in all sorts of ways.
00:27:21.600I keep thinking of the phrase, do your hair.
00:27:24.820Yeah. Right. Like you do it. You act your hair. You either do it or you don't do it. Like someone who does their hair.
00:27:33.700And even when I was like, it's still a way that we talk about it, like within our friend group or like when I was in high school, especially like I got to go do my hair.
00:28:03.080Yes, I go to Ashley and I get my hair done once, sometimes twice a year. And that's really it. I feel and that's partly because of my professional sphere as a professor. I, you know, somebody once told to me, like, you can work the shoes, but you can't work the hair. If you're putting a lot of time into your hair as a professor, it means you're not really serious.
00:28:24.300this is so funny because earlier this summer i was doing an interview about like summer camp and
00:28:30.640we were talking about the sororities the southern sec sororities and how like you can't leave the
00:28:34.900house with one two out of you have to leave the house with two out of three quote unquote done
00:28:39.380and one of those things like you have to either have your outfit done your hair done or your
00:28:44.280makeup done your face done right and first of all we can also talk about like done as like it's
00:28:51.540finished right which another thing um but the inverse is true for the people who are instructing
00:29:00.120those students that like you can't work you can't do all three otherwise it looks like you're like
00:29:07.400it decreases your intellectualism and you know you and i had this experience i think when we
00:29:13.400would attend conferences that like oh like there would be conversations like oh well those grad
00:29:18.300students are treating this like a fashion show yeah or they're gunning right like the gunning is
00:29:25.220really serious i mean that yeah but i want to get back to this great part of the question um which
00:29:31.740is i loved the how can we free ourselves of this obsession right and i um i want to say a couple of
00:29:40.120thinks about that. And I feel this, right? I really feel this. I was really remembering
00:29:48.720that when I was a girl with brown hair, which, you know, despite how I wanted to think of
00:29:53.900it as golden brown, I read this fantasy novel by Melanie Rahn. I think it was called Dragon
00:30:01.100Prince. But I will mention that Leigh Bardugo also mentioned the same series when she was
00:30:06.100on your podcast. But in the book, there's a prince and he's hanging out with all these princesses
00:30:11.720and they have they all have different colored hair. And there's one and she's very beautiful,
00:30:17.360but the prince thinks of her as merely brownish. Oh, my gosh. And I like I have been running away
00:30:26.100from that. Right. That that like, well, there's the red haired one and there's the blonde and
00:30:32.600the black hair. Then there's the one who's merely brownish. And that's me. But the thing to say is
00:30:38.220like this, how can we free ourselves of this obsession? Well, on the one hand, it's hard
00:30:43.060because our culture, American culture for 200 years, has been telling us that freedom itself
00:30:47.800is blonde. So how do you get free from the sense that freedom is blonde when your world tells you
00:30:52.760that freedom's blonde? So it's very hard on the one hand. And on the other hand, our desire to
00:30:59.480have ever more status is not actually oppression right it's not yeah uh to say like i am freed
00:31:07.140by the you know i need to get free i mean uh yes that is powerful like uh i do need to learn how
00:31:16.600to value myself in other ways outside of this correct value system but i am not oppressed
00:31:22.740by my proximity to blondness it is a privilege that i can trade on right and i think it's very
00:31:30.960common for women to for white women to think of that ourselves as um we only register the pressure
00:31:41.380to be ever more idealized white rather than acknowledge the extreme privilege that
00:31:49.180bolsters us every moment we pursue no and also the mistaking pressure for oppression yes right
00:31:56.980right that's a that's a difficult one i think for many people who are are occupying these spaces
00:32:04.080to recognize and that i think we should just let sit there yeah because i think it's a it's a really
00:32:10.340a good one to to let if you are in one of those places whether whatever like if it's about thinness
00:32:17.180If it's about whiteness, like that's. Right. Pressure is not the same as oppression. Right. And I really appreciate I'm not, you know, like whoever asked this question, Rachel, I think I think that framing is actually so perfect as an essence of the affectation of.
00:32:34.480I mean, like what it's it perfectly captures the experience and framing it that way is the necessary step to moving towards a different framing, which is also the answer to the question. Love it.
00:32:46.300Okay, our next questions are about basically like grandma cuts, mom cuts. We're going to read them back to back. The first one comes from Elise.
00:32:56.620I always thought when I got older, I would suddenly cut my hair short and get it set every so often, like my grandmother and so many of the older women I knew.
00:33:05.320However, not long ago at her 90th birthday, I saw photos of her when she was 20, and she has had the same hairstyle for 70 years.
00:33:13.720I was baffled by this, but came to realize I wasn't going to change. I was observing a whole generation's hair instead. So what is the future of millennial old lady hair? Will we all look exactly the same as ourselves now or as each other? How does ethnicity impact old lady hair? I am most commonly aware of white old lady hair.
00:33:33.960And then our next question is related to this, and it comes from Elizabeth.
00:33:37.640Can we talk about the mom cut? I feel like this was a thing in the early 2000s. I distinctly
00:33:44.600remember the day my own mom came to pick me up from second grade after the big chop. I didn't
00:33:50.820recognize her, and I was so sad that because my hair was still long, we didn't look the same
00:33:57.260anymore. Lots of women framed this haircut in terms of practicality or streamlining a busy
00:34:03.580routine? Was it also a rejection of additional labor? A mark of rebellion? And where did the1.00
00:34:10.960mom cut go? I feel like this trend has phased out, even though many of the factors seem the same.
00:34:18.660I know this is like a triple-decker, a quadruple-decker question, but I like thinking
00:34:25.680about like as we age or even just like generational hair trends or that sort of thing. I like
00:34:33.440pairing these together so yeah where do we start where do you want to go first well i guess i have
00:34:39.460a question for you did you did you do you have a sense of you know when i'm an old lady i will wear
00:34:45.920purple and i will get x haircut sorry that was a real gen x reference i don't know yeah no i i get
00:34:52.920the reference but do you have a sense of this is what i think my future is someday i'll be done
00:34:58.500with this and I'll get my future I thought that when I was older and again I grew up almost0.87
00:35:03.660entirely surrounded by by white people and I thought that when you're older when you go to
00:35:09.680the grocery store you wear the like plastic thing over your hair like the almost like a kerchief a1.00
00:35:16.860plastic kerchief which I understood when I asked my mom that that's because those ladies were1.00
00:35:21.840getting their hair set and they were covering their hair to protect it from getting wet when1.00
00:35:28.540they were at the store and so i thought again short short hair for sure and then maybe a little
00:35:35.620curls but i do think that that that mom cut experience is not something that happens as
00:35:41.760often now because of the things that elizabeth is pointing out in terms of like millennial hair
00:35:47.920now the expectation is like, oh, well, you should always have hair that looks like an 18-year-old's.
00:35:54.340Right. Yeah. Okay. Well, so here, I mean, again, as every time we talk, I am a crucial,
00:36:00.240I think, six years older than you. So I'm definitely young Gen X. And so for my mom,
00:36:08.120when I was young, had what all my friends referred to as cut and perm.
00:36:14.720Yeah. My mom also tried to get a perm. Yeah.1.00
00:36:17.220Yeah. So short and permed and then sometimes curled on top of the perm. And so my and that was what I remember from my young childhood. So it was not just mom hair at that moment, but the early 80s were a huge moment of haircutting.
00:36:37.500yes and I mean I really talk about this with Mary Lou Rutten yes uh in the book and what it meant
00:36:45.380for this figure of girlishness to not have a ponytail but to have this short practical do0.87
00:36:50.440that looks a lot like Nancy Reagan or something like that Nancy Reagan and my mom and um Mary0.99
00:36:58.100Lou Rutten all had similar hair now I will say my mom has uh a few years ago is so great she was
00:37:05.760like, I don't want to spend the rest of my life coloring my hair. And she stopped dying it. And0.78
00:37:10.560she has a great bob and it looks, but just very casual. So for me, it's completely goals.
00:37:20.080I, you know, it was really only reading this question from Elise made me realize that I have
00:37:26.800often thought that at some point I'm going to retire. And the whole, the fullness of my vision,
00:37:32.620Annie is that I'm going to start volunteering full time at a museum and wear like a scarf
00:37:36.660and a piece of jewelry that's silver with a dent and I'm going to have a really good bob
00:37:41.640that's that I always miss my future I always thought like at some point you do get to maturity
00:37:47.840and you have you have like not just my I've had the same hair since I was since ever but now I'm
00:37:55.480like well I don't know what's going to make me give up my hair I think I'm going to go full
00:37:59.740Patti Smith like really go crone that's my goal I remember asking my mom like why why don't old
00:38:07.540people have long hair and she said you know when you get older your hair gets a lot thinner and
00:38:13.580so you like there's just so much that you can do with it and then from that point I just I like
00:38:18.860this is all coming back to me as we're talking when I was walking down like the pews I would be
00:38:23.880like from i don't know going to children's time or something i could see the tops of the ladies
00:38:29.440hair and you could see their scalps and i was like where did the hair go yeah right and this0.89
00:38:35.400idea like what have like a fullness of hair right this aspiration for thick hair you can't just have
00:38:42.100long hair it also has to have this like voluptuousness but not too much voluptuous right
00:38:47.740It has to be, like, a specific type of now the ideal is beachy waves.
00:38:54.080Still, somehow this, like, the hold of beachy waves on us, I see as you touch your beachy waves.
00:38:59.720I was like, that's what I'm going for.
00:39:01.560I'm, like, kind of pulling it out of the way.
00:43:41.400But also like maybe like a little bit of Ivanka face in there, like Fox News caster face.
00:43:48.400Like it's conformity, but there's also like there's a tackiness element involved, which we can unpack my use of that word.
00:43:55.800Well, yeah. So things that I would say about it. One is that it is conformist. It's the style. It's recognizable as such. It is visibly artificial. It looks like you have had work done. Nobody is pretending that they haven't had work done.
00:44:14.560their showing that they have and also that they can afford to. And it is a slant to conventional
00:44:23.600beauty norms in a way that we could find tacky that, I mean, I do think it's really, I find it
00:44:31.480offensive. I mean, I often describe it, you know, and people talk about this with like
00:44:36.440Mar-a-Lago makeup as well. I was talking about it once with a friend, Christian Richardson,
00:44:40.820who i think you know um who's great uh and we were like it's kind of like um if you made a
00:44:47.460cyber truck a face highly planed right um yes very visible aggressively demarcated lines and it
00:44:57.780it's announcing itself right uh-huh it's a flex in much the way that the cyber trucks does
00:45:03.500And yes, and I think in that regard, the I mean, this is the face, but the the slight the way that it is a flex of resources that works against what most of the rest of culture has trained most of us to consider beautiful is part of it also because it is.
00:45:28.000I mean, I think this happens on both the right and the left, that by embracing counterintuitive aesthetics, it has a coercive pull.
00:45:38.860Like, if you want to be attached to the resources that we have, you need to abandon your taste, all ye who enter here, and accept this other thing that the rest of the world doesn't see as beautiful, but we do.
00:45:53.960And if you agree that it is, you can be one of us and maybe have access to our resources.
00:46:16.420But I don't think of camp as being coercive in that same way.
00:46:21.760That's what I want to say. I feel like it's my sense is like it's so inflated that it looks like drag performance because the way that it underlines these markers of masculinity or femininity are notched to 12. Right. Turn the volume up to 11. Yeah. Yeah. We wish it were camp. We wish it were in a, you know, we wish it were spinal tap, you know, but it's it's not it's not Dolly.
00:46:49.940um okay but the the relationship of white lady hair to mar-a-lago face is really interesting
00:46:56.360and i want to get to that um yeah i want to say two things one you know i said that hair has this
00:47:02.260natural quality and expressive quality and a temporal quality and um the length of the hair
00:47:09.040that almost always goes with mar-a-lago face both of them combine as expressions of temporal
00:47:18.480commitment. How committed am I to this administration, to Trump's hyper loyal? Like he wants everybody to
00:47:26.400be ultimately loyal. How loyal are you? I put it in my face. How loyal are you? I've been growing
00:47:31.980my hair this whole time. Look how long it is. Right. Even though it's fake. Right. It's a sign
00:47:37.040of a long term commitment. Yeah. And even though it's extensions. Right. Even though it's extensions.
00:47:44.100Right. I worked. So I had all this money and I got the really good extension. No matter even if it's not your time, it is expression of a commitment of time and resources. Right. And it's as such as a sign of loyalty to an administration for which that is maybe the most prized value.
00:48:03.180But the other thing that I think is really interesting about this, when I talk about how hair is a sign of nature that allows us, it's not just what our nature is, but it also allows us to express what we would like our nature to be, right?
00:48:20.820When you look at me, you can see, OK, well, her hair is brown, but she thinks blonde is beautiful. So she is showing, but she's a little ambivalent about it, but she shows that she gets that blonde is beautiful. Right. And that's true. Right. Like I'm showing my hair because I can bleach it. It's available to these permanent transformations that makes it a really important site of cultural discipline.
00:48:45.660And it has been uniquely that for, let's say, all of human history until I'm not quite sure the exact date, but till whenever Botox, maybe, let's say.
00:48:56.820Right now, I think it would, you know, it costs me, including Tip, about $500 to go get my hair done.
00:49:13.080I've never done any face stuff like that.
00:49:15.660But what used to hair used to be uniquely available to transformation. And in fact, we were pressured to transform it, but kind of judged like doing plastic surgery, you know, other bodily things. They were really expensive. They were not very well controlled and they were not available to most people.
00:49:37.120But now there's a huge number of cosmetic surgeries that are available and that not only are not judged, but expected, at least in some communities. I mean, that's what I learned from my students. So I think that we're actually at an end of one way that hair has meant.
00:49:57.060I don't think it's unique compared to the rest of the body in the way that it used to be.
00:50:02.160And that doesn't mean that hair is not important in the way that it was.
00:50:05.800It's just not unique in the way it was.
00:50:07.400And in fact, we need to understand how hair worked because now increasing parts of the body work that way.
00:50:12.820This also just allows us to think of like Mar-a-Lago hair as in concert with Mar-a-Lago face.
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00:56:07.400I can't help thinking maybe it was the advertising around shampoos when I was growing up
00:56:12.120and companies selling us the idea that you had to shampoo your hair every day or two.
00:56:16.880Even more mysterious to me, my own mother has hair that's more curly than mine
00:56:21.860and has worn it curly most of my life.
00:56:24.400Why did she never teach me how to take care of my curls?
00:56:27.620And then the second question is from Zoe.
00:56:30.040as a curly haired white jewish woman who was a teenager in the early 2000s when all my peers0.78
00:56:36.420were straightening the shit out of their hair i've always understood curly hair as a deviation from0.83
00:56:41.360the ideal which i now understand is deeply rooted in white supremacy of course but curly hair had a
00:56:47.560moment in their 80s and early 90s and if the tiktok hair tutorial girlies making videos about
00:56:53.900discovering that they have curly hair are any indication it is again or at least was a few
00:56:59.120months ago what explains curly hair coming in and out of acceptability the current iteration feels
00:57:03.980a bit like kardashian inspired white girls talking about what a big bet they have but i'm not sure if
00:57:08.840i'm just being a jerk okay where do we start ah there's so much good stuff here i look the chapter0.54
00:57:17.000you talk a lot about how race scientists actually came up with like hierarchies of the curls right0.86
00:57:25.080So can we can we start there just to talk about a little bit of that?
00:57:27.960Yeah. So, I mean, again, my specific breed of nerd specialty, nerd is my highest praise, is American women's popular media, particularly literature before the Civil War, which is entirely inflected by race.
00:57:46.100And I mean, it's really the moment where we see the rise of the media culture that we live in now as the first moment of mass media.
00:57:55.380And also a moment of really intense preoccupation by science with trying to rationalize, let's say, a belief in racial hierarchy, sometimes by being fully polygenic, by which many, many people thought that actually the black race and the white race were like had no common origin.0.67
00:58:25.200They're just like a completely different quality of people with different mental capacities, different emotional illnesses, different physical realities.
00:58:36.260And so if your whole world order and all of your privilege depends on believing that it is okay to keep some people enslaved and some people continually pressed off their land and some people in specific geographic hierarchies, you know, even amongst what we might call whiteness, there are definitely hierarchies within this as well.
00:59:02.820you really are going to put a lot of work into proving that you're right.
00:59:07.880And so people like Samuel Morton developed really intense hierarchies of hair and how
00:59:16.460the follicles worked and how the root of the hair worked and how the pigment worked.
00:59:21.740And you would literally get in trials where people were, court cases where women or people
00:59:28.960were trying to say, no, no, no, this person has enslaved me falsely.
00:59:32.580I am white. As you can see from my skin, I'm white. People are like, I don't know. Is she white?
00:59:38.760And you would get people to come in and testify like she has been very proper. She has only acted1.00
00:59:45.700in a way that only a white woman could act this way. And then you would also get people to come1.00
00:59:51.080in and say, I cut off strands of her hair and I looked at it under a microsoap. And yes, she's0.98
00:59:56.380definitely white. I can tell you because of the follicle of her hair. And the follicle is also1.00
01:00:02.760connected to the question of whether or not it will curl and how it curls. So this is a long way
01:00:11.540around to your question of the question of, is it curly? Is it not curly? How do we know what it is?
01:00:20.440what does it mean if it is, are tied to huge questions of just what kind of autonomy you
01:00:27.320could have, what kind of property you could own, how you could be treated by every institution
01:00:32.860in American culture. So the intensity we feel about curly hair is not bullshit, right? We feel0.95
01:00:42.120intense about it because it is carrying this huge weight. Yeah. And also the way that it becomes
01:00:49.580desirable, but only in specific iterations, right? So can we talk a little bit about that and
01:00:54.740how like Julia Roberts' hair, I mean, again, I just recommend this chapter so strongly,
01:01:01.520becomes the signifier. I'm so glad you said that. I really, really worked on it hard. I really,
01:01:06.780I wrote it forever. I feel like I've never finished writing that chapter. It was so hard.
01:01:11.700And I mean, so much like ideologically happening with not only her star text in that moment,
01:01:18.280but also with like the narrative of Pretty Woman and like how it was how the script was
01:01:25.540dark. It was so dark. And then Disney bought it and was like, let's turn this into like a
01:01:33.140post-feminist fairy tale. And then you connect this to like financialization, all of this
01:01:37.760different stuff. But like, even if you weren't looking at this movie super closely, like people
01:01:42.980if you've watched it you remember she has this blonde bob and then reveals like the true1.00
01:01:48.980beautiful self which is a seemingly wild unkempt absolutely exquisite head of like1.00
01:01:58.820just gorgeous hair yeah and gorgeous red curly hair that like flops around the way that i always
01:02:07.140dream like oh like this is when you have every dream this is exactly what i wanted yeah
01:02:12.500so like what she just scratches it and it looks better like that's what i want too is like0.51
01:02:21.600i'm just so like free wild you know there's that patty labelle song wild women do and they don't
01:02:28.020regret it yes that's what my hair says yeah and yeah but why was like and this i think we get
01:02:35.400this too with like what good quote unquote like well taken care of curly hair can look like now
01:02:41.800and a lot of it has to do with like the pristine quality of the ringlet so can you talk a little
01:02:47.520bit about this yeah okay well so the main thing i have to say is that i have extremely straight hair
01:02:54.080so i am very ignorant about curly hair i'm very ignorant about uh the caretaking of curly hair
01:03:02.240So I have a lot to learn from these questions and from everybody and from my friends.
01:03:07.760I will also say that I have a son with very coarse, thick, curly hair, which does come from my side of the family.
01:03:17.020My brother has that, but I don't have it.
01:03:20.240And my kid who had his hair long and he was constantly trying to make it less frizzy and he would brush it and brush it and brush it.
01:03:28.640And if I tell that story in a room full of people with curly hair, they all start flinching because they're like, no, no, no, that's not right. That's not right. But I didn't know. And at one point, my friend Lauren, who has gorgeous, thick, curly hair, took me aside and was like, Sarah, you're a wonderful mom and you're failing your child.
01:03:49.840and she was like can I help and she sent all of her favorite curly hair products and a comb
01:03:56.340and she's like this is what you do um yeah so I don't know uh but it was definitely hard one
01:04:04.000knowledge for her too I have a couple of friends with curly hair I guess I would say I so I don't
01:04:10.380feel like I have all the answers for this my editor for the book uh also has very curly hair
01:04:16.760And she, this was the chapter that she pushed back against more and more and more because I kept expressing the fantasy of, and then if you have curly hair, everything is great, which I believed.
01:04:28.580And she's like, Sarah, you have no idea how hard it is to like regulate and all of the work and the time.
01:04:40.420It's like you want the part like that you understand as like the exoticism of curly hair, but you don't want the other components of the identity as well, right?
01:04:50.760So I guess I would say there are two women in the book whose star power, whose hair star power has to do specifically with curls.1.00
01:05:00.920Julia Roberts and the Rachel or Jennifer Aniston.0.96
01:05:06.520And Jennifer Aniston did not have curly hair ever as Rachel. She mostly had very blown out how she mostly didn't have the Rachel as Rachel. Actually, it was fairly short lived, as we all know. But those are two different ethnic relationships to white ethnic relationships to curl and two displays of how to make them valuable and attractive.0.96
01:05:31.000And I really think they work in parallel together.0.58
01:05:34.840So on the one hand, I think it's really important to consider the way that Julia Roberts star power had to do in both life and in that movie by the fact that she is Southern.
01:05:49.160And the character and the actress both come from Georgia.
01:05:51.600She presents herself as a character as being very like her brother steals car.
01:06:01.000That was a big part of her star identity before that, except for Steel Magnolias, where she was rich, but also Southern.1.00
01:06:09.740So there's a way that she, by virtue of her Southern-ness, stands in for—we see whiteness as something that has hierarchies within it in the way that she inhabits her whiteness.0.51
01:06:24.300The movie racializes her in all sorts of ways, which I don't mean it makes her seem another race besides white, but it calls attention to whiteness as a kind of racial identity that the narrative of the movie is about her learning how to perform and romanticizing in a whole series of ways.0.67
01:06:43.960Right. Whiteness, particularly as Cheryl Harris would say, a property of eliteness that is both attractive and scorned in all sorts of media.
01:06:54.300And that's what that movie is about. It's about her learning how to be that version of herself with just enough more self-respect so that the rich white man can come and find her, like be this perfect nexus of being drawn into his back version of himself.0.76
01:07:14.020Have her hair in a perfect updo, like under the hat in the scene where she's wearing the brown and white dress, which is always sticks in my head. So like respectable. But then like in the sheets, her beautiful hair comes out. It's very like virgin whore in some ways. Right. Like this like expression of like a wild sexuality, which is also her hair.
01:07:38.060And as you're pointing out with her star image, like the quote that always sticks with me when so she had Pretty Woman, she had a series of flops after that. And her real like welcome back into like big time stardom, like was her doing the press tour for my best friend's wedding. And she said, yeah, my hair is like big and curly like you like it. Like she's speaking to her fans like, please go see this movie.0.99
01:08:01.940Yep. And I just like I was like, oh, my gosh, someone who is so aware of her power as like her star power, the center of her star power as her hair looking this specific way.
01:08:13.600Right. Yeah. I mean, right after right in the summer, Pretty Woman came out in March of 1990. As I say in the book, it's the same month that Gender Trouble, Judith Butler's book, was released.
01:08:24.420but I know it's it's wild but that summer in the height of Julia Roberts ecstasy she was on the
01:08:33.540cover of Rolling Stone and she had cut her hair off short and she talks about it in the Rolling
01:08:39.420Stone profile and she tells the reporter that she wanted to cut it off it was damaged from a lot of
01:08:46.520dye jobs and people said no you can't do it everybody had to fit and she said it would be
01:08:51.520people acted like i would be cutting off my personality yeah uh but then kiefer sutherland
01:08:57.360said it's totally cool cut it all off her boyfriend at the time oh yeah her fiance
01:09:01.700left it like basically at the eye or at the can't blame her on that one okay but then you contrasted0.96
01:09:08.020this with the way that like rachel green the character of rachel green deals with her curls
01:09:12.880which is is the understanding i don't remember this vividly that she straightens it well she
01:09:18.160definitely straightens it yeah right i mean you know i mean it was it was 1994 so yeah right right
01:09:25.640um i mean she gets the rachel right at the end of the first season but uh she if you look at
01:09:32.060what jennifer aniston's hair was like prior to friends when she was presenting chris mcmillan
01:09:37.900her longtime hairstylist the one who gave her the rachel uh the lifetime achievement award for hair
01:09:43.460i can't remember that but she was presenting the award and she's like before chris my hair was just
01:09:47.740This is what she says, Greek and frizzy. And that he was the one who found all these ways to manage it. And I think that a lot of what Friends is about, I talk in that chapter about that show is kind of a show that's not just about gentrification as a matter of white people in cities pushing out people of other races, although it is certainly that,
01:10:12.580But also about the pressure of those white people to push out all of the markers within them of various ethnic signifiers that are not Anglo.
01:10:27.060I could talk like there's so many other examples.
01:10:29.300Like I'm thinking of Anne Hathaway at the beginning of Princess Diaries and the way her hair looks there.
01:10:35.380Yeah. I mean, in that chapter, I also talk about Jennifer Beals.
01:10:39.320So, I mean, and I use flash dance on purpose.
01:10:41.940I think that's a really important. The original version of this chapter was really going to be just about Jennifer Beals and Julia Roberts as these two like sex workers, various sex workers who get swept up in these things.1.00
01:10:56.280And that way, I mean, there's so many similarities between those movies and the ways that they are both drawing on what I, as a 19th centuryist, would think about this racial passing tropes and an ideal of delicacy that racially indeterminate women, they are vulnerable because of the way they are racially marked.0.99
01:11:20.280But they still have these desirable white qualities. So they're really in this switch place that I mean, I think is an incredibly hard burden to bear for women who inhabit that position for all the reasons that we're talking about.
01:11:40.700And it's not something that I have to navigate. So I guess I want to mark it as really powerful and very persistent. Right up, you know, like we were in the moment when Flashdance was coming out. That was also the moment when there was this huge upsurge in Civil War retellings like North and South, The Blue and the Gray.
01:12:00.920Right. All of which had these tragic mulatto figures that they stage as stuff like their grandmother was a prostitute, but they passed as white. Right. Like that story we have. I would like to say we have moved past it. We are still living it very intensely. And it takes real pressure for women and not me. So I want to be kind of humble about that.0.93
01:12:20.460I want to take a total right turn. And I know this episode is long, but we still have like 17 other questions. We're only going to get to one more, but it felt very important to get to this. So this question comes from Marie, whose pronouns are they them?
01:12:35.680For the white lady hair episode, although technically I don't identify as a lady, I have a queer haircut, short and asymmetrical. Plus, I have curly purple hair, so that helps it flag as queer and not Karen. But sometimes I have an existential crisis about why is my queer haircut so similar to the Kate Gosling classic? How does asymmetrical short hair read so differently based on context?
01:13:02.140This just felt so important to like not only talk about queer haircuts, but also the rejection, the like anti-caredness, like trying to figure out, does my hair look too much like this haircut that signifies a certain type of white ladyhood that I want to reject?0.62
01:13:20.860Yes. Well, the good thing about that is that when you're seeing a counterculture and you can see the hair within it as a kind of costume that marks you as a part of that culture, it helps us remember that things that we think as normal are also costumes.
01:15:29.600Yeah. That's the least punk possible thing. But the hair makes it seem like swaggery, powerful. Tricky. So I guess I would say to Marie that you don't need to feel bad. It's not your fault. I love purple hair. And the reason why you feel that proximity is because you have a rebellious power that the right wants. And fuck them.
01:15:56.080Yeah, this is the best way to end this episode. You have a rebellious power that the right wants is so fucking good. I cannot tell you what a pleasure this has been. I strongly encourage everyone listening. Please pick up the book. I love like that each chapter it's, you know, it's obviously it's essays, but you think of it like a short story collection.1.00
01:16:20.620Like, you can just read, like, one essay and then put it aside and then come back for more.
01:16:42.640Where can people find you on the Internet if they want to hear more from you?
01:16:45.640Yes, my name is Sarah Mesley and my handle is at sunset and echo on Instagram, mostly nominally on blue sky. That's where I am. Also, I have a place to find you. Instagram is the place to find me. Yes. Yes. And I will say that I am rebooting a digital magazine called avidly that I've edited for a long time. And I would welcome other people to pitch things to me that they would like to write about hair for the hairstyles vertical.
01:17:12.480Amazing. Yes. We'll put all of your contact info for that in the show notes and also links
01:17:18.840to everything that we talked about. So thank you again for joining me. It's been a pleasure.
01:17:28.900Thanks for listening to the Culture Study Podcast. Today, Pates of Square has got a bonus
01:17:32.660conversation between Melody and me about everything that we love about Dolly Parton.
01:17:37.220We just got the news about her death and we wanted to just talk a little bit about it. So
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