ABSTRACT
Umberto Eco has claimed that ‘humor is always, if not metalinguistic, metasemiotic’,3 as it utilizes signs while encouraging a critical re-evaluation of the signifying system which produces them. This chapter examines how humorous representations of hair and hair-fetishism from the 1860s to the 1890s function as a meta-semiotic commentary, discussing not only women’s hairstyles, but also their iconic representation and signification in various Victorian discourses. Depictions of hair and hair-fetishism in pictorial satire, caricatures, parodies and grotesqueries attain a degree of cultural self-consciousness by making visible the process of signification, countering what Baudrillard names ‘a fetishism of the signifier’, whereby the cultural and cognitive processes of registering, encoding and decoding well-established signs become ‘naturalized’ or transparent.
