ABSTRACT
For many Black women, hair is an extension of their bodies – tied to salient, affective understandings of their embodied experiences. In the histories and politics of Black women’s relationship to their hair, we find revealed intimacies, (re)negotiations, (re)articulations, and radical possibilities of Black women’s embodiment and the potentiality of “beauty” as a construct. In this chapter, I review relevant literature about Black women’s relationship to beauty. I historicize Black women’s hair practices and politics, as well as their dynamic, shifting, and heterogenous relationships to beauty culture. I chart the expansion of the recent contemporary natural hair movement, in which a critical mass of Black women has chosen to forego chemically relaxing their hair in favor of “natural” hairstyles. Finally, I offer some future directions for the study of Black women’s relationship to hair and beauty culture, including transnational global analysis, the burgeoning field of Black girlhood studies, and Black queer and trans relationships to beauty. My analysis of Black women, hair, and beauty culture uses hair as a vehicle for revealing the agency and interiority within Black women’s uses of their bodies, within a cultural landscape that constantly tries to tell them who and what they are.
