Body Hair

Removal and Modification

Though some may consider the study of hair to be merely trivial, its position in the marketplace suggests otherwise. For instance, it has been estimated that hair removal in Britain alone is annually worth £280 million. The removal of women's body hair has replaced body hair as a fetishistic discourse that must be reiterated; such a reiteration is good news for those who sell hair removal products. Where body hair has a cultural presence, it is almost always concerned with body modification practices, including its removal or alteration. Indeed, until the recent publication of The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair, edited by Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, contemporary writing on body hair has been almost exclusively about its removal.

Sarah Hildebrandt's detailed account of normative body hair practices among North American women builds on the work of Michel Foucault and suggests that for men as well as women, certain parts of the body become available for public display through the modification of body hair. Therefore, body hair is never so much evident as is its removal. When head hair has a historical presence, as in The History of Hair: The First Five Thousand Years, by Richard Corson, for instance, this history concerns its modification or a crisis produced by a problem associated with it: Hair in general becomes that which is modified or in need of modification.

As a review of the literature demonstrates, much current writing on body hair focuses on hair modification by women, or rather the production of “woman” and “women's bodies” via body hair modification. In such formulations, the modification of hair somehow defines what a woman might be. Research into the production of the male body challenges notions of that body as somehow stable and assumptions of a simplistic heterosexist dyad. A recent experiment by Michael Boroughs, documented in the paper “Male Body Depilation: Prevalence and Associated Features of Body Hair Removal,” further complicates the issue, demonstrating that so-called normative female responses to body hair can also be understood as male behaviors and that depilation itself can be read as that which blurs the boundaries between what is considered male and female. All the same, one can see historically reiterated a trope that seeks to give a presence to certain kinds of male body hair and to make invisible certain kinds of female body hair. Such a trope functions not only to differentiate between men and women but also as a political device.

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