ABSTRACT
This chapter extends geographic work on globalization via a feminist commodity chain analysis of the Gulf–East Africa hair and beauty trade. We centre three intellectual interventions of this approach: its postcolonial disruption of narratives of people and places in the Global South living with, affected by and driving globalization; its focus on the connected ideologies of gender, race, class and sexual power that drive, reproduce and reinvent the industry; and its insistence on a global-intimate, relational understanding of scale. Recognizing its deeply spatial nature, we close by calling for feminists to take up geographic analyses of hair and beauty.
