ABSTRACT
This chapter lays the theoretical foundations of my study, which is informed by Freudian paradigms, fetish theories which were initiated by nineteenth-century researchers and developed by modern ones, Mary Douglas’s anthropological model of the body politic and its vulnerable margins, and Roland Barthes’s structuralist and semiotic analysis. These theoretical frameworks explore and consider a range of models which explain why woman’s hair is a major site of self-definition on personal, gender and socio-political levels, and how its symbolic value and cultural resonance create, maintain or challenge specific forms of authority, particularly in societies where a certain erosion of traditional gender roles takes place. A brief historical survey of cultural and religious attitudes to women’s hair in the JudeoChristian tradition and in Western societies would shed light on Victorian hair rules and their representational values in the process.
