Body Hair: The Final Frontier of Alternative Beauty Campaigns

• In Event: 420 - Section on Body and Embodiment Paper Session. Embodied Encounters: Beauty, Pap Smears, Citizenship and Bodily Capital

Abstract

This investigation interrogates the absence of women’s body hair from representations of “real” women in alternative beauty campaigns. Informed by Goffman’s theories about “backstage” labor and gendered “fronts” and West and Zimmerman’s concept of “doing gender,” I hypothesize that women’s body hair is more highly stigmatized than women’s body fat because it uniquely threatens the illusion of polarized sex difference. In order to test this hypothesis, I conduct a content analysis of the most recent 500 internet comments below Ben Hopper’s body hair advocacy photograph series “Natural Beauty,” identifying three main rhetorical themes: concern with the definition “natural beauty,” disgust, and gender-policing through heterosexism and homophobia. A close reading of exemplary posts confirms my research hypothesis, further clarifying that women’s body hair is politically oppressed within the body-positive movement because: 1) it is mutable and thus dismissible through “free choice” rhetoric and 2) body hair and body fat are mutually exclusive experimental variables in the otherwise conventional beauty formula employed by alternative beauty campaigns. I conclude with a discussion of my results’ implications for the body-positive movement.

Author

• Helana Darwin, State University of New York-Stony Brook