WOMEN AND THEIR HAIR

2001/10/01 by ROSE WEITZ, Rose Weitz · 4 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Diversity and Impact of Dance #Fashion and Cultural Textiles #Gender Roles and Identity Studies

paper · doi:10.1177/089124301015005003

openalex publication_date 2001/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

Abstract

This article explores how women seek power through both resisting and accommodating mainstream norms for female hair and delineates the strengths and limitations of these strategies. The data help to illuminate the complex role the body plays in sustaining and challenging women's subordinate position, how accommodation and resistance lie buried in everyday activities, the limits of resistance based on the body, and why accommodation and resistance are best viewed as coexisting variables rather than as polar opposites. Finally, these data suggest the importance of defining resistance as actions that reject subordination by challenging the ideologies that support subordination.

Citations

• The Foucauldian Body and the Exclusion of Experience
• Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair

Cited by

• Voiceless and invisible? Statelessness in Northern Thailand and the purposefully disorganised exercise of agency
• Algorithmic flexibility and everyday resistance on e-commerce platforms
• The untold stories of resilience, reworking and resistance of ageing non-European migrant women
• The “Black Middle-Class Toolkit” as a Framework for Understanding the Cultural Implications of Recreational Running

Related

• Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair
• I Am My Hair: A Black Woman Educator’s Autoethnography of Oppression and Liberation Through Schooling, Bantu Knots, Box Braids, Locs, and a Press
• The Well-Coiffed Man
• Review of “Natural: Black Beauty and the Politics of Hair”
• Gender Inequality and Gender Differences in Authoritarianism