Documento sem título

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janvier/juin 2008-janeiro/junho 2008

Cassie’s Hair[i]

The first year and a half of Cassie’s life her hair was basically not an issue because she didn’t have much. Then, one day she came home from daycare with a dozen tiny braids marking a complex and delicate pattern on her tiny head. I was, first of all, mystified. I had no idea she had enough hair to do anything like this. Where had all that hair come from? How had her teacher gathered it up like that? And how had she gotten her to sit still long enough to do it?

When my friend Annice found out what had happened, she was indignant—for me. “What right did that teacher have to mess with your daughter’s hair?”

I understood why she, as a black woman whose own hair had been braided by her grandmother and aunts, might have had that reaction. Why she, as a person whose ancestors had their parental rights ignored, would be horrified at the idea of another woman appropriating, without permission, such an intimate ritual of mother-child bonding.

But for me, with my very different personal history of mother-daughter hair-care—basically, none—it didn’t feel like an overstepping of parental rights, it felt like my daughter had been welcomed into a community. When I picked her up that day, all the black teachers were gathered around her, oohing and ahing, cupping her face in their hands. “Would you look at this gorgeous baby doll?”

She was, indeed, gorgeous. She also seemed, for the first time, undeniably black. Since infancy, Cassie, whose birthmother is white and birthfather black, had been taken for many different ethnicities. We’d eat in Indian restaurants, and the owners would ask if she was Indian. Asians thought she was Asian. And so on. “Where does she come from?” I’d get asked. People were often surprised when I replied “Texas.” But now, her head criss-crossed with cornrows, it was absolutely clear that Cassie was a black child. And that I had been given a message, with or without intention on the part of her teacher, that as a mother I had two choices: get inside this world, truly inside, or remain a clueless white mom.

That was the last thing I wanted to be. Later, when Cassie was in preschool, I was privy to the black moms’ bemused disdain for the white moms of black and biracial children who didn’t know how to take care of their children’s hair. One white mom, for example, was so intimidated by the very prospect of combing her daughter’s hair that she had to cut it all off when, untended, it clumped into a mass of locked tangles. That woman was the subject of a lot of laughter, her daughter the object of pity. “That poor child.” I never wanted my daughter to be the object of that kind of pity. Or me the object of that kind of scorn.

So I undertook the project of educating myself. I read, I asked, I looked, and I tried. Products that I’d never heard of before—pink lotion, braid spray, do-rags--became staples of my life. New terms: Tender-headed—which Cassie definitely seemed to be. Kitchen—that bit of hair at the back of the neck most prone to kinks and tangles, most resistant to combing through. “If there ever was one part of our African past that resisted assimilation,” writes Henry Louis Gates,

“it was the kitchen. No matter how hot the iron, no matter how powerful the chemical… neither God nor woman nor Sammy Davis Jr. could straighten the kitchen.” (1994:42)

I first read these words from Colored People several years before we adopted Cassie. But now, with Cassie on my lap, the kitchen was no longer a fascinating piece of insider knowledge, but a precious marker of Cassie’s ancestry—and a practical challenge to me, as the mom who had to deal with hers.

For practical instruction, I looked less to books than to Annice. I watched intently as she did Cassie’s hair, marveling at her ability and her patience. Annice, the mother of a boy, claimed to be a terrible hair-stylist; yet still she managed to get those parts straighter and cleaner than I ever could. Over and over she’d do them, until she considered my child fit to go out in public. I found it difficult to be as exacting. My fingers seemed less agile and it felt, at times, as though I was lacking an inherited aptitude. I was amazed at the abundance of lotion Annice (correctly) deemed necessary for Cassie’s hair, and—as someone who had grown up being told that greasy was something you didn’t want your hair to be--had almost a bodily aversion to slathering it on in such quantity. My patience and endurance ran out sooner—these sessions can take hours, depending on one’s dexterity and the complexity of the style--and I often sent Cassie off with braids that were only passable. It didn’t bother me the way it bothered Annice, from whom I learned that my lack of anxiety over my child being seen as less than perfectly coiffed (read: not respectable, not cared for, liable to being seen as a wild “animal”) was a privilege of my race.

But there were privileges, too, conferred on the black mom, as I discovered when they became my privileges, too. As I became used to setting aside at least two hours for doing my daughter’s hair, I became addicted to the pleasure of unbroken physical closeness the ritual afforded. As she grew into a more and more independent and active child, I knew that I could count on at least two hours every week when I’d have her on my lap, her little body leaning against mine, sometimes (as I got better at combing) even falling asleep as she had when she was a baby. At first, I was intimidated by every ouch, at the same time as it seemed like such a lot of work to take the time to do it carefully and gently, working from the ends on up. But I discovered that there is a kind of Zen to it. Once you give yourself over to it, everything else recedes to background, as the closeness of ones child, the taking care, the permission to touch and smell and attend to her, becomes an absolute center, a place of peace and safety.

And then, too, there was the pleasure of community with other black moms, as we’d discuss the varying textures of our daughter’s hair, their relative degrees of tender-headedness, and at what age, if ever, we’d let them straighten their hair. I never approached their level of expertise about any of it. But I knew, too, that they didn’t regard me as clueless, either. On one occasion, I even got a compliment on Cassie’s twists, and was asked how I did them. I proudly showed the mom, neglecting to mention that Annice had taught me how. But then, they had all learned from someone, too.

I learned something more than just how to do my daughter’s hair. I had always imagined myself pretty savvy about “the intersections of race, power, beauty and the body.” I’d written articles critiquing the normalizing tyranny of Anglo-Saxon beauty norms, I had an enormous collection of slides, historical and contemporary, of hair-straightening products and skin-lighteners. I knew all about historical practices like the brown bag test and the comb test, which were used to exclude darker skinned and nappier haired blacks from clubs and churches, and which are still employed, although rarely, in some black sororities today, to limit membership to lighter-skinned women.

I talked, in my classes, about contemporary court cases involving women who had been fired for wearing corn rows to work, and showed slides of Sara Baartman—way before mention of her became politically obligatory in any discussion of race and the body. And so on.

It’s one thing, however, to know about racist aesthetics and its history. It’s another to have a black hairdresser recommend, in full earshot of your five-year-old daughter, that she should have her hair straightened. An issue that I had talked and written about was now something that I was living inside of. And living inside of it, it became far more complicated.

When it happened, Annice and I cast quick angry glances at each other. We were both aware of the fact that Cassie was already getting the same message from movies and television, where straight hair, straighter than I ever thought possible for anyone to attain, now reigns absolutely. Every “transformation” on The Swan and Extreme Makeover includes a mandatory straightening for the black contestants. Late night and early morning infomercials for ceramic wands and miracle straightening lotions feature emotional before and afters of black and white women with tousled and “natural” hairstyles miraculously transformed into sheets of sleek and shine.

What’s most incredible about these commercials is the women’s reactions. They weep and speak of miserable lives redeemed, of dreams of beauty realized, of nothing short of deformity corrected, salvation achieved. Having straight hair has achieved a trans-racial beauty-status almost as important as not being fat.

It pains me when Cassie tells me she hates her curls (as she calls them.) But how could she not when even Latifah—one of her idols—has hair like satin? In the doll world, there’s been an explosion of “ethnic” and “urban” production and marketing, as dolls like the saucy and style-conscious Bratz have started to give Barbie a real run for her money (or rather, ours.) But although some of these dolls have hair done in cornrows and braids, undo those dos and it’s still the same old white girl hair. Two exceptions are the high fashion “urban hipster” Barbie (who has two enormous afro-puffs) and the “Treasures of Africa” Barbie—described in the FAO Schwartz catalogue as “richly drawn from an African model but completely defined by high couture,” and sporting a dramatic Afro.

These dolls are clearly an illustration of the principle that this culture mostly lets “difference” in by exoticizing it. These Barbies, not at all your everyday “American” girls, are the doll equivalent of the fashion world’s inclusion of very dark-skinned models only when they are going for the drama, the “otherness,” of their difference. (The black “American Girl” doll is a run-away slave girl.)

At the same time as this has been going on however, barely anyone—outside academia, that is—considers hair-straightening to be a practice with troubling implications for racial identity and the preservation of historical memory. I look back on “Material Girl,” an essay I wrote over fifteen years ago which took issue with the diminishing of public consciousness of the politics of body practices such as surgical alteration of ethnic features, blue contact lenses, hair-straightening, and so on (1991:106-130), and realize that in the years that have passed since I wrote that essay, such consciousness has almost entirely disappeared. A current advertisement for African Pride hair products summarizes the prevailing attitude: “Some wear it straight. Some were it natural. It all says pride to you.” In other words, whatever.

In “Material Girl” I worried that obliterating such distinctions was also obliterating the memory of racist history and any awareness of continuing racial normalization. Today, however, I begin to wonder whether I am a relic of the sixties or an ivory tower academic who’s grown out of touch with the culture. I am constantly aware nowadays, not just of historical meaning and practices, but also of the contemporary reality of my daughter’s life, within which some of her most powerful role models—Latifah, the Williams sisters, Lisa Leslie, Marion Jones—all have straight hair.

Think of any highly public black female who doesn’t—Whoopi or Toni Morrison, for example--and she’s probably too old for my extremely athletic, aspiring-to-be-cool, six-year-old daughter to identify with. What are the implications of this for the future, I wonder. What extraordinary ethnic traditions may become lost? On the other hand, what would be the consequences of my challenging my daughter’s identification with black women that are wonderful models of strength and creativity for her?

I also have become aware of the fact that my own former critique of hair straightening, being entirely “political” in nature, was in fact quite arrogantly oblivious to all the practical reasons why black people straighten their hair. In my pre-Cassie days, like most clueless white people, I’d ooh and aah over the tousled hair of the children in Baby Gap ads. “How adorable!” I’d think—and I still do. I love Cassie with her hair loose and free, “flower petal billowy soft, full of frizz and fuzz,” as bell hooks puts it in Happy to Be Nappy. (1999:3-4) But I also know that within a matter of days, that delicious tousle will begin to lock, and become hell to comb through. Locks, once formed, can’t be combed out; they have to be cut off (as that mom I talked about before discovered).

" The whole experience - the ritual of dealing with hair grooming- that´s pleasurable. The sitting in, everyone remembers sitting in between some other woman´s legs, having your hair brushed and braided.The feeling of knees on your cheek" bell hooks

So unless your child is old enough to choose locks, or you have enough time to devote an hour or so every morning to combing out her hair, or you have a personal hairdresser—that’s how the adorable models manage it, of course---“natural” (unless very short) is not a very practical everyday style. You’ve got to “do it” in some way—even if it’s just a pulled back ponytail—or you can straighten it. When that hairdresser advised straightening Cassie’s hair, it was, from her point of view, “to make things easier”—not to make Cassie look “more white.”

The idea that straightening hair is about looking “more white” is an issue about which there is a great range of opinion among black Americans. Ayana Bird and Lori Thorps, authors of Hair Story, emphasize that the quest for straight hair has never just been about “conforming to the prevailing fashions,” but a recognition that “straight hair translated to economic opportunity and social advantage,” both within slavery and after. (2001:17) Maxine Leeds Craig, in Ain’t I A Beauty Queen? views the “social meaning” of hair-straightening as about winning respect and respectability in a hostile environment, by divesting the body of all signifiers of looseness, laziness, and hyper sexuality. (2002:30-37) Poet Linda Hardnett protests the notion that straightening her hair is selling out her blackness, in a poem called “If Hair Makes me Black, I Must Be Purple” (Ebong,ed., 2001:80)

On the other hand, numerous memoirs and poems recall, bitterly, the painful process of having “bad hair” normalized to white standards of beauty, as in Debraha Wilson’s, “Good Hair” (Ebong,ed., 2001:81)

Today, of course, methods of straightening are far gentler, and it’s hardly only black women and girls that are making use of them. Just about every actress or model has straight hair—from Beyonce to the dramatically white (and formerly curly-headed) Nicole Kidman. “It’s a girl’s thing,” as a commercial for hair conditioner makes explicit: “My hair can shake. That’s the number one girl thing.” In line with this prescription, which doesn’t displace racial meanings but powers up the gender differences that inflect those meanings, far fewer black men are straightening their hair nowadays than they did in the days when Malcolm X got his famous conk.

The gender disparity is very clear in the world of Black music video, a world populated by men with creatively individualized corn-rows and braids and virtually indistinguishable female sexpots with sinuous bodies and silken hair, both of which can do the “number one girl thing:” shake. And it’s also reproduced in the world of dolls: the only black doll in the Barbie line that has hair that truly looks and feels “natural” is a male—one of Malibu Ken’s friends.

I often straighten my own hair nowadays—not chemically, but with a ceramic wand. When I was a young girl, Mary Travers and Judy Collins set the white-girl gold standard for the boys in my left-leaning crowd, and I was well aware that I was far from it: I had “big hair” (and even worse, red hair) at a time when it was aesthetically and politically incorrect for anyone except Angela Davis.

I desperately envied my friends who, despite their Jewish genes, had long straight hair, and when I got to college, outside the purview of my mother (who probably wouldn’t have cared anyway), I ironed my own hair in my dorm room. When Farrah Fawcett helped make a more layered, just-out-of-bed look fashionable, I finally had hair that did “naturally” what the culture wanted of it.

But the straight look, apparently, refuses to yield its cool hegemony over modernity. And nowadays, it’s even more difficult for most of us to achieve because it’s both straight and layered, a bow to “the number one girl thing” (hair that swings from side to side) but “queered” by asymmetrical chunks (a la The L-word) or framing the face in descending lengths of absolutely wave-free, curl-free tiers. It’s a style I can only achieve—just marginally, and only temporarily, until muggy weather makes it “go back”—with a lot of product, and my Chi.

I feel younger and prettier when my hair is straightened—and troubled by the message I’m sending my daughter. It’s not just the commercials and media images, of course, but also our own bodies, our own choices that are living, breathing advertisements to our children. I’m also aware of both how different and how alike the “hair piece” is for Cassie and me. Even with my thick hair, it’s so much easier for me to switch back and forth between wild and straight, to treat these options as mere “fashion” choices. I get out of the shower. If I decide I want to go “natural” that day, I just spray a little foam, towel and don’t comb my hair, and voila, it’s fashionably messy (or at least relatively fashionably messy); it’s nonetheless easy to brush out the next day. If I decide to go straight, it’s at worst a half-hour with the ceramic wand. It will never be that way for Cassie; the choice to straighten or lock, go natural or braid, will always involve time, effort, and consequences that can’t be turned around in one shower.

What Cassie and I share, however, although in the context of different racial histories, is the feeling of being “outside,” peering at an ideal that seems to come effortlessly to those born with the genetic inheritance favored by “fashion.” But no cultural ideal is ever “mere” fashion, as I’ve argued over and over in my work; all styles are laden with historical, cultural, political, and gendered meanings. When I was younger, I saw my hard-to-tame hair as “Jewish” and straight, swinging hair as among the many privileges of being gentile. I may have been wrong about the actual genetics of hair (there are many Jews who come by their straight hair naturally) but I wasn’t wrong about the cultural associations and valuations.

Cassie, too, knows—without historical knowledge, and perhaps in confused and fragmentary form—that straight hair is not “just fashion.” I know she knows this because, despite her occasional wistful expressions of envy of straight hair, she insists on cornrows for herself. Living in a white family, with a WASP dad whose hair is naturally straight and a Jewish mom who uses a Chi, she nonetheless wants to look like L’il Romeo, not Hillary Duff—or Raven Simone. In this, I am convinced that in her inchoate, six-year-old way, Cassie is both resisting gender normalization and insisting on her racial identity.

When my white students read, in Maxine Leeds Craigs’ Ain’t I A Beauty Queen? about the black woman student in the 60’s—the first black woman to be accepted at her college—who was unable to fulfill the swimming requirement because to be in the swim class would mean to have to re-straighten her hair several times a week, they are dumbstruck. The idea that concern about their hair would keep them out of the swimming pool is utterly foreign to them.

White people, even those who theorize with sophistication about “cultural difference” and the perils of ethnocentrism, are often clueless when it comes to the concrete, practical ways in which “race matters.” We know little, for example, about the history of black aesthetics and its meaning within black communities. Poet Nikky Finney, in “To Be Beheld,” her introduction to Bill Gaskins book of photographs, Good and Bad Hair (1997), describes some of those meanings:

We have adorned out heads from the beginning of time. It is ancient and Black to Crimp, coif, and curl in supreme celebration that part of ourselves that lives closest to the sun and other celestial bodies. That most high, most regal part of us has often been what we reach to elaborate on first when we have so much to say about who we are. We adorn this part of ourselves for ourselves mainly, but also for anybody else in the hemisphere needing the visual permission to create some audacious authenticity of style in their own life.

"It is ancient and Black to crimp, coif, and curl in supreme celebration that part of ourselves that lives closest to the sun and other celestial bodies" Nikky Finney"

We have tended to this particular body landscape that, consciously or not, holds the cultural jewels of an African sensibility that many have tried to tear from us. We have held on by way of different lengths of cultural memory we see as duty, as responsibility, as the children of genius and many a royal lot, to remember our contemporary lives back through our grandmother and great grandfather’s bones. Yes, indeed, we remember ourselves through the ritual of doing and getting our hair done.

Through the sweeping, stacking, locking, and soft methodical construction of our hair, we insist on being seen and we insist on proclaiming more of the knowledge of who we are that we never learned about in any school. This is but one way we catch history that boomerangs back to us and keeps our spirits free. Some of us adorn ourselves about the head more elaborately than others. Many of us have always been keen to differentiate our work-a-day hairdos from our festive world hairdos.

Some of us in the tradition of ceremonial embellishing have needed to wait for specific occasions in order to attend to our hair, be it wedding, funeral, or Easter Sunday morning. But the more the world has tried (and succeeded on some levels) to alter the social and physical structure of our neighborhoods where we have not sat in the power seats, the more we bring our free, fancy, elaborate hairstyles to the primary shore of our everyday lives and the widest mosaic of American life, to say without question I will own the way I look….

I believe we have focused on and been obsessed with hair in order to keep our hands and sights on each other. I believe we stay in a groomed state with each other in order to remind ourselves of the language of touch as often as possible, in order to love on each other out loud, as the institutionalized racist world screams for us to turn on each other and keep spewing the hatred that way.

At the very same time this world of barber and beauty shops—with names like Amazon Hair Braiding, Africuts, Khimit Kinks, Brenda’s Braids, The African Hair Gallery, Maxamillion and Ultimate U—gives us physical place and spiritual permission to touch, to care, and to tend to each other, if only for a few pampering hours before we have to steel up our hearts again and head back out into that other world.[ii]

Today, editing this article after five days of watching footage of the ghastly aftermath of hurricane Katrina, I am reminded of the children who, amidst all the horror, had perfect cornrows. It is, as Nikky Finney says, an unbreakable practice of touching, caring, and tending…. even in, especially in, a world that seems to be doing all it can to break you.

African-American hair-styling--the elegant and elaborate patterns of hip-hop, the ingenious twists, artfully interwoven extensions, sculpted and dramatically assembled locks, the myriad and infinitely individualizable combinations of rows and braids--is also about making high art with the body, in defiance of a culture for whom that body has been associated with everything untamed and primitive. “African American barbershops and hair salons, “ an article in the New Yorker says, “are hotbeds of anarchic and confident self-expression.” (Thurman, 2004:144)

So why, I wonder, do we never see this body-work discussed when white academic write about creative “body modification”—as for example, in Victoria Pitt’s otherwise excellent In the Flesh, or Ted Polhemus’s book of text and photos, The Customized Body? (1996) Both these books deal extensively with the many ways—tattoos, piercings, scarification, head-shaving and hair-sculpting--in which individuals and groups make use, as Pitts puts it, of “the body as a space needing to be reclaimed from culture.” (2003:7) Neither makes any mention of African-American hair styling.

Perhaps Polhemus and Pitts view contemporary black hairstyling as belonging to the realm of “fashion” rather than the “body as a space needing to be reclaimed from culture.” If so, they have a lot to learn about the tangled roots, as Ayana Byrd and Lori Thorps call them, of black hair in America. The years of slavery, deprived of indigenous African implements and products for self care. The creative styles that evolved despite those harsh limitations. The racist politics of “good” and “bad” hair. The ongoing contest between “white” norms and reclamation of African styles. If this is all “just fashion,” it is fashion that has developed in the context of ongoing struggle with a dominant culture, as it tries to carve out its own space within that culture.

Whatever the explanation, the fact is that despite their sophistication about cultural dynamics of “othering” and marginalization, both Polhemus and Pitts are in fact guilty of unconsciously reproducing those dynamics. Pitts is quite theoretically penetrating when she criticizes “modern primitives” appropriations of tattoos, flesh hangings, and other tribal markings in order to “queer, blur and “unfix” Western identities. She reminds us that this subculture is composed almost entirely of white Westerners looking to “re-write” our bodies with culturally different, and-as we imagine them--freer identities.

As Pitts point out, the “primitive others” that we copy have no role other than for our white projections and consumption. She writes: “It is the white Westerner whose body appears as a blank canvas ready for self-inventive writing through various forms of consumerism. The bodies of non-Westerners, however, are not blank. Instead, they are already marked as “exotic,” sensual, “primitive” or traditional, and…read under a privileged Western gaze.” (2003:149)

But Pitts herself—and Polhemus, too—seem to me to be guilty of precisely what she accuses the “modern primitives” of. The only difference is that in the landscape of contemporary body modification that they describe, it is American blacks rather than the “non-Western world” whose status as cultural, self-inventive, capable of appropriating their own histories, inventing dramatic and challenging new styles and statements out of them, is given no place[iii].

Would better theory have helped Polhemus and Pitts to see all that Nikky Finny sees in the hair-stylings of African-Americans? I don’t think so. I don’t think that they needed better theory; I think they needed to be taken to a black hair salon. The equivalent of that, with respect to the cultural meaning of body shape, happened to me a couple of years ago. One of my public lectures, that year, was on the globalization of eating disorders, a phenomenon I had been charting for a decade. Among other examples in this talk, I brought up the case of Nigeria, which has recently seen a dramatic change in the incidence of eating problems, attributed by much of the U.S. media to a shift in beauty ideals. The story, as presented in The New York Times and paraphrased in my talk, was this:

“In Central Africa traditional cultures have celebrated voluptuous women. “An African girl must have hips,” says dress designer Frank Osodi, “We have hips. We have bums. We like flesh in Africa.” For years, Nigeria had sent its local version of beautiful to the Miss World Competition, where the contestants did very poorly. Then a savvy entrepreneur went against local ideals and entered Agbani Darego, a light-skinned, hyper-skinny beauty. (He got his inspiration from M-Net, the South African network seen across Africa on satellite television, which broadcasts mostly American movies and television shows.) Agbani Darego won the Miss World Pageant, the first Black African to do so. And now, Nigerian teenagers have begun to fast and exercise, trying to become “lepa”—a popular slang phrase for the thin “it” girls that are all the rage.”

I gave this example at several campuses, where it was received without (verbalized) criticism. Western academics found it unobjectionable, I believe, because it acknowledged cultural “difference” in body ideals. I always got flack, during the eighties and nineties, when I suggested that body image problems were not the exclusive province of white, over-privileged girls. Paranoia over “essentialism” and “universalizing,” at the time, was a constant obstacle to people’s seeing how culturally tenuous different aesthetic traditions are in a world of globally deployed images and an expanding technology of body-alteration. People see the erosion of local aesthetics now—it’s become just too obvious for them not to—although the acknowledgment of “difference” is still more warmly greeted than critiques of normalizing imagery. My point about Nigeria, acknowledging both the different traditions of Black Africa and their erosion by Western aesthetics, didn’t get anyone’s dander up.

Then I gave the talk at a college whose audience included a Nigerian. She pointed out that Nigerian girls were dieting well before Agbani Darego won her crown, and that in her opinion, the trend was less about the allure of Western beauty ideals than about the rejection of traditional identities and the system of male dominance that they were anchored in. It was for men, she explained, that Nigerian women were encouraged to be full-bottomed, for men that they were often sent to fattening farms to be plumped into shape for the wedding night. Now, modern young women were insisting on the right of their bodies to be less voluptuous, less domestically “engineered” for the sexual pleasure and comfort of men.

Hearing this was fascinating, illuminating, and a reminder that seeing something from the outside is bound to be partial vision at best. Paradoxically, though, what I hadn’t seen was the similarity (rather than the “difference”) between the young Nigerian dieters and the first generation of (twentieth-century) anorexics in this country. Many of them, like the young Nigerian women, were also in rebellion against a voluptuous, male-oriented, sexualized ideal—that of the post-World-War II generation. Significant numbers of them had been sexually abused, or witnessed their mothers being treated badly. To be a soft sexual plaything, a Marilyn Monroe, was their horror; Kate Moss and others (like Agbani Darego for the young Nigerians) provided an alternative cultural paradigm to aspire to.

In “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Skepticism” (1990:133-156) and other pieces I’ve argued that instead of harassing and shaming each other for “essentialism” and the like, we ought to be putting our energies into practical transformations in our institutional and personal lives, transformations which would concretely (and not merely theoretically) enlarge the sphere of our knowledge of human culture and experience. Put simply, we need to spend less time “theorizing difference” and more time learning from and about the differences and similarities of each other’s lives.

That however, is not so easy, perhaps especially not in academic communities. I was lucky to have a Nigerian scholar respond to my talk[iv]. Unfortunately, academic communities are rarely diverse enough to allow for such interactions. And when they are, we’re often too afraid of being seen as stupid, theoretically unsophisticated, or—worst of all—racist, to ask the questions we need to ask, or show the curiosity we naturally have about the worlds with which we’re unfamiliar.

It’s not surprising that people would hesitate to expose what they don’t know, given the dogmatic, negative, and sometimes hostile position many theorists of “difference” have taken on the possibilities of “dominant groups” understanding the “others.” Ien Ang, for example, argues, “the subjective knowledge of what it means to be at the receiving end of racialized othering—whatever it means to individual people of color—is simply not accessible to white people.” (1997:60)

She goes on to say that what this incommensurability of experience leaves us with, for the purposes of political affiliation, is what Jodi Dean has called “a solidarity of strangers,” a solidarity that is “based on the statement ‘I cannot know what if feels like to be racially abused, but I know that it hurts you.’” She proposes this “solidarity of strangers” as an alternative to the “solid, unified ‘we’” that conventional politics, including feminist politics, used to imagine was possible.

Some of this seems right to me, and some of it doesn’t. I want Ang’s categories to be historicized and contextualized, for one thing, and for the concept of “white people” to be less homogenizing. I want to tell her that as a Jew, I certainly know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of cultural othering, especially in the South, where I’ve lived for the last eleven years in an abiding, if not always acute awareness that Christianity is the only real game in town. My daughter is already learning from the kids in the neighborhood that everyone who counts goes to church and that she’s weird for not doing so. But its also true that, today, in this country, “othering” doesn’t happen to me in the racialized way that it still does, routinely, for black people. The same, however, could not be said for my ancestors, including my mother, whose family escaped from a virulently anti-Semitic Poland before the death camps were instituted.

I’m not black and never will be. But what I am is not so easily “theorized”—and not only because of the hybridity of identity, which for me includes my Jewishness, a working class background, and numerous other specifics which make my “whiteness” particular rather than generic (something that is true for all “white” people)—but also because I am now a member of a multi-racial family which, although non-biological, has altered every molecule of my being.

In connection with this experience, Ang’s seeming denial that there can be inter-racial affiliations and from there, understandings, that go deeper than respectful acknowledgement of each other’s differences both infuriates and saddens me. Surely, there are other possibilities beyond a “solid, unified ‘we’” at one extreme and a “solidarity of strangers” at the other. The former –the “unified we”--is, of course, a myth—and, I would think by now a dead horse among academics. But the latter strikes me as no less abstract, almost willfully obtuse, and utterly oblivious to the concrete realities of mixed race intimacy in this culture.

The epistemological power of loving, so far, hasn’t been dealt with very well by academic theories of “difference.” I do not know how it feels to be black, no, in the sense that I cannot step inside the subjectivity of a black person in this culture. But I could not step inside the subjectivity of my mother, either. I heard stories, of course. I know that when she was a very little girl, she was dragged through the dirt by a pig that clamped onto her hand, smelling the porridge that had been cooling on the windowsill of their cottage and into which my mother had dipped her eager fingers. I could almost picture that scene; my mother’s hand still had the scar. But other, more profound experiences were not even described to me.

My knowledge of history tells me that her family had to have been affected by the pogroms that massacred thousands of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe; but she never said a word. Nor did she tell me anything about her ocean-crossing and arrival in America; I can only imagine what it must have been like to be eight years old, headed for Ellis Island, bewildered and afraid in the hot, crowded, vermin-ridden quarters of steerage. But as incomplete and inadequate as my knowledge of my mother’s life was, it cannot be compared to that of a stranger’s life. We were intimates. I knew her everyday habits, the phobias and physical symptoms that visited her throughout her life, her cooking—an odd mixture of Eastern-European expertise and American convenience--the way she put on her make-up, the way she smoked her cigarettes, the way she told a joke. I knew the things that pleased her. I knew what her body felt like, as I leaned against her as we watched soap operas together.

To the degree that we have or develop or strive for this kind of intimacy with others, whether or not they are biologically related to us, the phrase “solidarity of strangers” rings cold and utterly inadequate. Cassie is black and I am white; but she is far from a stranger to me—indeed, she is the most beloved person in my life--and my relationship with her has created contexts that I didn’t have before for relations of beloved intimacy with other black people, and indeed, with “blackness” itself in this culture. There is a line in Nikky Finney’s piece: “The heart of loving myself always had to do with loving my Blackness.” It’s impossible for me to know exactly how I would have responded to this line before Cassie. I suspect, however, that it might have seemed dull and perhaps clichéd when compared to the arresting and poetic imagery of the rest of her piece. I do know that now, as a mother who wants more than anything for her daughter to grow up loving herself, I cannot read it without a wild surge of joy and hope.

The first time Cassie had her hair put in cornrows—something she had been requesting for quite a while—I took her to the local beauty school. It hurt terribly and she could only bear it by pressing my head tightly against her the whole time. I’m sure we were a sight—my middle-aged butt sticking up in the air, interfering with beauty-school traffic, as Cassie pulled my head down to her chest.

But the pain was worth it to her because she could emerge looking the way she wanted to: in a word, cool. After it was done, she swaggered down the street, so proud of herself that sunbeams seem to be bouncing off her smile. Everyday, as I watch her put together her own version of hip-hop styling, her own blend of tough and tender, I am reminded of Nikky Finney’s words, “that no matter what, the circle will never be broken, that every generation will twist and turn the old ways into their own ways, and the next ones of us will step closer to the edge and nudge their locks higher toward the sun, but together we will never fall off or away from each other.” (Gaskins, 1997)

Book Cover from it´s all good hair: the guide to styling and grooming black children´s hair, by Michele N-K Collison reprinted by permission of HaperCollins Publishers

Cassie’s cornrows, it is true, have interfered with the intimacy of our weekly routine, since I haven’t learned to do them yet, but she has become miraculously less “tender-headed” now that I take her to Shamara’s home rather than the beauty school. The arrangement is better for all of us. The beauty school, at which Shamara was a student, didn’t pay her one cent for her beautiful work. Yet she often stayed overtime to finish Cassie’s hair.

She rarely got the chance to do braids, she said, with so many black clients straightening their hair, and she loved doing them. As for Cassie, at the beauty school there was nothing to distract her. Now, as she sits on the floor, playing the Spiderman play station game with Shamara’s son Antonio, she doesn’t complain at all. I’m happy, too; Tajdzha, Shamara’s daughter, has taken a liking to me, and sits on my lap, bringing back Cassie’s delicious baby days to me. Cassie isn’t a baby anymore; now, I’m going to have to develop much more elaborate skill to satisfy her tastes in hair.

So far, I haven’t even tried. I’m afraid to—afraid of frustration, of failing. Watching Shamara, I can see how much dexterity it takes. Feeling inadequate and very white, I comfort myself with an article that we’re reading in a class of mine; called “The Art of the Ponytail,” it’s written by a young “third wave” feminist who’s given up both straightening and styling in favor of simply pulling her hair back in a ponytail. While conceding, “The time and attention some [African-Americans] devote to their hair is a form of pride, a product of their creativity,” Addida McDowell nonetheless insists on the right of her ponytail to signify her own “casual nature.”

“Given the wide range of black people throughout the world, “ she writes, “we need to expand the boundaries of acceptance. Blackness is not (and should not be) defined totally by a hairstyle. I believe there is room for all our expressions,” including the rejection of “the black beauty pageant.” (1998:130,132)

McDowell’s piece, along with contemporary singer/songwriter India.Aries’ insistence, in her popular song, that “I Am Not My Hair,” reminds me not just that you don’t have to be white to find black hair-styling challenging, but also, that there are generational as well as racial and class meanings in our aesthetic styles, in what we choose and refuse to do with our bodies. Cassie, an extraordinarily active and sports-minded child who prefers the ease of boy-clothes to girlie fashions, may ultimately reject both cornrows and straight hair in favor of a very short style that requires little tending at all. The “differences” that emerge between Cassie and me—as well as the shared meanings and experiences--are unpredictable, and will only be discovered through our life together.

The other night, Annice offered to help me take Cassie’s cornrows out. I usually do this a week or so before she has them re-styled, and do her hair myself--or Annice will do it—in the interim. It’s a long process, I was grateful for the help, and we’ve always had fun sharing my daughter’s care together. Now, as many times before, we sit on the couch on either side of her, Sponge Bob on the television, and begin unbraiding. Halfway through I realize that I’m feeling oddly competitive.

When Cassie yelps, I want it to be Annice’s touch she’s flinching at. I want to get more of Cassie’s head done faster and with fewer tangles left than Annice. I reject a suggestion of Annice’s, to put Cassie’s hair temporarily in a single braid, asserting my superior knowledge of what it will be like to deal with in the morning. I want to “win” in what has suddenly become a contest in my mind. I’m feeling a bit embarrassed by my proprietary feelings and actions, but Annice takes it all good-humoredly. Perhaps—or so I fancy—she’s even pleased. At the beginning, I had been so tentative, so respectful of my daughter as a separate individual whom by the most extraordinary grace of the universe had been placed in my arms that I barely felt I had any “rights” at all. I know Annice has taken pleasure in watching me, since then, truly become Cassie’s mom.

The next evening, I finish braiding Cassie’s hair myself. She and I have just taken a shower, and had each other in stitches trading songs as we soaped up our hair. “Stop singing that sixties stuff!” she screams when I offer, in my turn, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Teach Your Children Well.” When it’s her turn, she tries to gross me out with made-up songs featuring extremities being cut off, butts, and farts. After we’ve slathered tons of lotion on our bodies (something we both need, dry skin being a tendency blacks and fair-skinned redheads share) and she’s put on her Sponge-Bob bathrobe, we sit down to do the hair.

“Come on, it’s not that bad. It hurts you much more when Shamara puts the corn rows in and you never complain to her.”

ow her lower lip is out, far out, and she’s glowering at me. No one glowers like Cassie. But I’m not perturbed. It’s my job and joy to keep my “hands and sights” on her, and I’ve been doing this for a long time by now. I know when I’ve hit a snag and I know when she’s just tired of sitting there. I know that I actually rarely hurt her, and that she’s just had a very long day and her body is longing to be set free to jump on the couch, play with the dog. I know that even if it hurts a little, it’s got to get done. And I know, too, that whoever does her hair, I am the one whose touch she knows best, whose body she can fall asleep against.

Ang, Ien. 1997. Comment on Felski’s ‘The doxa of difference’:the uses of incommensurability. Signs, Autumn 1997, 57-64.

Bordo, Susan. 1990. Feminism, postmodernism, and gender-skepticism. In Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 133-156.

____________1991. Material girl: the effacements of postmodern culture. In Laurence Goldstein, ed., The Female Body: Figures, Styles, Speculations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 106-130.

Byrd, Ayana and Thorps, Lori. 2001. Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America. New York: St. Martin’s.

Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain’t I A Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Finney, Nicky. 1997. To be beheld. In Bill Gaskins, Good and Bad Hair: Photographs. Newark: Rutgers University Press.

Mcdowell, Akkida. 1998. The art of the ponytail. In Ophelia Edut, ed. Body Outlaws. Berkeley: Seal Press, 124-132

Pitts, Victoria. 2003. In The Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Polhemus, Ted and Randall, Housk. 1996. The Customized Body. London: Serpent’s Tale

[i] A version of this paper, entitled “The Trouble With ‘Difference’,” was originally presented as a slide-illustrated talk in April, 2005 at Grinnell College; I thank the students and faculty who responded so warmly to it at that time. “Cassie’s Hair” was then the title of a short version that I was developing; when, without knowing about the short piece, Sandra Bartky said to me, “I wish you’d just call this piece ‘Cassie’s Hair’,” I realized that’s what it was destined to be. My special gratitude to Janet Eldred, Kathi Kern, Binnie Klein, Ellen Rosenman, Paul Taylor and Althea Webb for extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of the written version, to Nell Painter, for our email conversations about race and beauty and for suggesting the (perfect) title for the last section of the paper, and to “Annice”—for everything.

To appear in Material Feminisms, Susan Hekman and Stacy Alaimo, eds., Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2007. Do not quote, cite, copy or circulate without author’s permission: Bordo@uky.edu

[iii] In this context, it’s striking that in Polhemus’s chapter on hair, the only photos of Blacks are of two cute twins with short “locks”, and an older man with died blonde hair. It’s as though for Polhemus and Pitts, white people own postmodern practices of bodily self-definition. Black bodily styles can only be imagined either as the stuff out of which white people do that fashioning—as when we copy ancient African practices—or as what we think of as contemporary “primitive” forms—like locks--or as revealing aspirations to be like us (e.g. the old man who goes blonde.)

[iv] I have tried without success to find out the name of the person whose comments on Nigeria were so illuminating. I hope that the publication of this paper will allow her to identify herself, so I can adequately acknowledge my gratitude to her in future publications and talks.

Susan Bordo is Professor of English and Women's Studies and holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of four books and editor of two anthologies, and one of the most widely read and cited interdisciplinary scholars writing today. Her articles have appeared in collections in anthropology, history, sociology, consumer studies, art history, media studies, women's studies, masculinity studies, English, and philosophy, and are frequently re-printed in anthologies devoted to teaching writing. Her best-known work, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, has influenced the study of the body in many disciplines, both nationally and internationally. Named a Notable Book of 1993 by the New York Times and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it has been described as "brilliant" (Katha Pollitt), "a masterpiece", (Susan Griffin), and "a classic of gender studies" (The New York Times). Bordo's current projects are body image and race and a book-length study of girlhood. Her passion as a writer is to bring the complexities of cultural criticism to a broad, general audience. She is the author of Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the
Body; The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private, and other
influential books and articles. She is working on The Anne Boleyn Diet: An
Unconventional Guide to Beauty, Pleasure, How to Die Well, and What Not To
Look For In A Mate

labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas
janvier/juin 2008-janeiro/junho 2008