ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the multiple meanings of hair in penal and forensic practice, using philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the body as something that is always becoming. The shaving of hair featured in early modern criminal punishment as a means to shame the criminal. Around 1900, hair was considered an indicator of individual identity in the new science of criminalistics, which started to use hair as a means to demarcate the human individual from animals and to underline gender and racial differences. Forensic scientists distinguished between human and animal blood stains, and textbooks of criminalistics also classified hair on the basis of species, race, and gender. After the Second World War, the symbolical meanings of hair, related to gender and sexuality, reappear when the hair of numerous girls and women was shaved by emotional groups of people who accused them of having slept with German soldiers. Hair can thus be regarded as part of embodiment, as incorporating continually shifting cultural meanings. By growing from the body but also by taking different shapes according to social and historical context, it is an example of the body that is becoming.
