Hair without a head: disembodiment and the uncanny

This essay concerns itself with disembodied hair and will show via the discussion of a range of cultural and historical examples that such hair is, in Freudian terms, uncanny. It makes connections between hair’s place in memorial, ritual and magic, to emphasise its ambiguous and in some cases troubled relationship to the rest of the human body.

The essay explores the relationship between disembodied hair, the ghostly, and specific historical and cultural contexts that make the use of uncanny hair of this kind an enduring motif in the representation of the spectral and the supernatural.

Publisher's Text About the Book:

Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion explores the social importance of hair, wherever it grows, explaining the cultural significance of hair and hairiness, and presenting a new critical engagement with hair and its stories, histories, performances and rituals.

From heads, legs and underarms, to wigs and beards, and everything in between, the presentation, manipulation and daily experience of human hair plays a central and dynamic role within fashion, self-expression and the creation of social identity. The book's diverse range of cross-cultural essays encompasses the study of hair in fashion, film, art, history, literature, performance and consumer culture.

Offering an accessible mix of visual analysis, cultural commentary and critical theory, Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion will appeal to all those interested in the presentation and analysis of cultural identity and the body.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword, Caroline Cox

Author's Biographies

1. Introduction: Thinking About Hair, Geraldine Biddle-Perry And Sarah Cheang

Part One: Histories of Hair On the Head, Face and Body

2. Fashionable Hair In The Eighteenth Century: Theatricality and Display, Louisa Cross,

3. Roots: Hair and Race, Sarah Cheang

4. Revealing and Concealing: Notes and Observations on Eroticism and Female Pubic Hair, Jack Sargeant

5. From Style to Place: The Emergence Of The Hair Salon in the Twentieth Century, Kim Smith

6. The Big Shave: Fashions In Modern Male Facial Hair, Dene October

Part Two: Hair & Identity

7. Hair And Male (Homo) Sexuality: Up Top And Down Below, Shaun Cole

8. Hair, Gender And Looking, Geraldine Biddle-Perry

9. Men's Facial Hair in Islam: A Matter of Interpretation, Faegheh Shirazi

10. Resounding Power Of The Afro Comb, Carol Tulloch

11. Concerning Blondeness: Gender, Ethnicity, Spectacle And Footballers' Waves, Pamela Church-Gibson

12. Hair, devotion and trade in India, Eiluned Edwards

Part Three: Hair in Representation: Film, Art, Fashion, Literature & Performance

13. Hairpieces: Hair, Identity and Memory in the Work of Mona Hatoum, Leila McKellar

14. Hair Without a Head: Disembodiment and The Uncanny, Janice Miller

15. Hair and Fashioned Femininity in Two Nineteenth-Century Novels, Royce Mahawatte.

16. Hair control: The Feminine 'Disciplined Head', Thom Hecht

17. Hair-'Dressing' In Desperate Housewives: Narration, Characterisation, And The Pleasures Of Reading Hair, Rachel Velody

18. Hair Styling In The Fashion Magazine: Nova In The 1970s, Alice Beard

Conclusion

19. Conclusion: Hair and Human Identity, Sarah Cheang and Geraldine Biddle-Perry

End Notes

Index