Unshaved : Resistance and Revolution in Women’s Body Hair Politics

Body hair, especially on women, provokes, disrupts, and, at times, offends. It is tangled up with culture itself—in art, families, workplaces, relationships, sex, the beauty industry, governments, and capitalism. From Chinese activists challenging the Communist Party, to students in Arizona rejecting their family and workplace ideas about grooming, to high-art feminist photographers boldly featuring hairy women, Fahs deftly explores the volatile and ever-changing landscape of women's body hair politics. She showcases an underground movement of artists, zine-makers, rebels, and activists who have used women's visible body hair as a declaration of freedom from patriarchal norms. Fahs presents body hair not just as a personal grooming choice but as a connection to broader cultural stories about women's reproductive rights, feminist battlegrounds about autonomy, neoliberal intrusions into beauty regimens, and even global tensions around women's place in society. Ultimately, Unshaved shows the collision between the mundane and the extraordinary, the everyday and the revolutionary. "Body hair occupies a fascinating place between the seemingly trivial and mundane, and deeply entrenched views about gender, identity, beauty, and social norms. Unshaved: Resistance and Revolution in Women's Body Hair Politics looks at the politics of hair, how it moves from a personal grooming choice to something with wide resonance in the cultural politics of reproductive rights, feminist battlegrounds, and tensions about women's "place" in society. Popularly emerging in the United States in the 1920s and becoming a compulsory practice by the late 1950s, women's body hair removal came to signify gendered expectations surrounding desirability and adult womanhood. For Fahs, body hair removal is the ultimate example of "the personal is political," as the everyday practices of women's lives intersect with stories about entitlement to women's bodies, corporate/capitalist intrusions onto the body, liberal versus radical feminist battles over bodily autonomy, and tensions about who controls bodily choices. Fahs examines resistance to body hair norms and the deeply entrenched feelings people have about body hair, incorporating historical materials and qualitative interviews to question the assumptions we make about "normal" bodies, talk about oppression, social identity, patriarchy, biopolitics, and power. Throughout, Unshaved interrogates the meanings attached to hair, the reproduction of gendered social norms, and the everyday workings of corporeal resistance"-- Provided by publisher

Body hair, especially on women, provokes, disrupts, and, at times, offends. It is tangled up with culture itself—in art, families, workplaces, relationships, sex, the beauty industry, governments, and capitalism. From Chinese activists challenging the Communist Party, to students in Arizona rejecting their family and workplace ideas about grooming, to high-art feminist photographers boldly featuring hairy women, Fahs deftly explores the volatile and ever-changing landscape of women's body hair politics. She showcases an underground movement of artists, zine-makers, rebels, and activists who have used women's visible body hair as a declaration of freedom from patriarchal norms.

Fahs presents body hair not just as a personal grooming choice but as a connection to broader cultural stories about women's reproductive rights, feminist battlegrounds about autonomy, neoliberal intrusions into beauty regimens, and even global tensions around women's place in society. Ultimately, Unshaved shows the collision between the mundane and the extraordinary, the everyday and the revolutionary.