The Big Shave: Fashions In Modern Male Facial Hair

The everyday repetition of the shaving ritual makes it an important site for the cultural production of masculinity. Examining the rhetoric deployed to promote men’s shaving products makes visible different modes of masculinity, such as traditional and modern, as well as the discourses surrounding face hair, hygiene and imagined perils to the social and material body. Such an approach has implications for ‘performativity’, Butler’s (1990) theory that gender is something we do, rather than something we are [...] since it places the emphasis on the negotiation of gendered identity, therefore allowing for more nuanced accounts of power and individual agency. For example, the exploitation of a diverse range of masculinities by advertisers gives male consumers the opportunity to dwell on contradictions in performance. All the same, men’s consumer negotiations occur within a highly regulated social and symbolic framework predisposed to particular manifestations of masculinity. Indeed the cultural regulation of facial hair may be seen as an attempt to rein in the persistent materiality, or ‘nature’, of the socially-significant body.