2025/05/06 by Taura Taylor · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Gender Roles and Identity Studies #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1093/sf/soaf052
openalex publication_date 2025/05/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson explores the socio-political implications of Black women’s natural hair across historical eras, continents, institutions, and life courses. Readers familiar and unfamiliar with the recent arc in chemical-free hairstyling and hair care among Black girls and women are introduced to a comprehensive study that draws out the origins of the natural hair movement. Ethnographic findings concomitantly analyzed with social media content, medicalization data, and global beauty market trends are central to the investigation. As such, Johnson aptly engages sociological theories on race, gender, sexuality, and environmentalism to situate Black Atlantic diasporic grooming practices and worldviews among body politic literatures. Approaching Black women’s hair choices as embodied racial projects, Johnson’s exploration joins a cadre of interdisciplinary research steadily becoming its own canon. She pays homage to seminal works such as Banks’ Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness (2000), Byrd and Tharp’s Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America (2014), Craig’s Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race (2002), and Rooks’ Hair Raisings: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (1996). Her predecessors and contemporaries will find her study echoing and elevating the reliability of their findings on colorism and texturism, political resistance and policy implications of hair, hair salon spaces as Black institutional sites for cultural exchange and economic advancement, and Black women’s increasing attention to their wellness and the self-esteem of their children. She broadens the canon with nods toward activism in the realms of Black ecofeminism and digital/virtual mobilization. Additionally, she keenly magnifies the role of the Black body in opposition to European settler colonialism and queer and transgender nihilism. Natural offers a kaleidoscope of analysis that will appeal to scholars, practitioners, and interlocutors resolute on curating the politics of Black hair.