Hair: Strength/Power

So we’ve seen the extent to which the loss or covering over of hair creates different kinds of shocks, punishments and taboos. Naturally the converse is also true: the ownership of great hair is a living allegory for the ownership of great power.

At the risk of seeming obsessed, lets stay with the iconography of the headscarf. We talked above about the taboo of concealing and revealing hair, and how this taboo is born from a strong desire for the thing which is concealed. So a headscarf, by definition, covers something exciting and desirable – this is in fact its stated purpose. I have written elsewhere about Foucault’s essay “We, Other Victorians”, in which he extends Freud in Totem and Taboo to question the motivation of creating such an obvious discourse (a pointer) to something we are pretending to hide. People conceal sexy things: breasts, ankles, and also long, dark, middle-Eastern locks, because they are so attractive they threaten to unshackle our inhibitions and cause civic unrest. For the security of our own society we cover up these sexual icons: they are withheld and rationed. Yet in covering them up we underline their powerful sexuality by emphasising them through the very fact of their proscription. We treat them as special hidden secrets, in a perverted attempt to rob them of their special sexual force. Furthermore, we explicitly grant the tabooed object the characteristic of being a locus of sexual attraction. In reality, the sexual attraction of a person is to be found in them as a whole; but by isolating and censoring one element – their breasts, or their hair – we are annexing that overall power into one place, which is then prohibited and tabooed. All physical censorship is synecdoche, in which the tabooed body-part stands for the sexuality of the whole person.

So the link to power? Well, having focused sexual power in one place, for example, in a Muslim woman’s hair, who then holds the key to all this power? Who can withhold or grant access to this illicit store of sexual energy? It is the woman herself who wears the headscarf. So in being the keeper of this strong desire, those women who wear headscarves hold under wraps a great deal of sexual power: the suggestive sexual power of the unseen, the withheld, the imagined, the unobtainable. In revealing her hair, that woman unleashes a sexual potency so strong it had needed to be contained. This fact is also seen through its converse: it is well known that wearing revealing clothes often has the opposite effect to the one intended: revealing too much is less sexy than leaving something to the imagination. Hence the tease is sexier than the strip. Anyone who has been given the privilege of seeing the hair of a woman who normally always wears a headscarf will have experienced first-hand the extraordinary power held by the unveiling of acres of wavy, shiny, black hair. In most respects these Islamic woman are by Western standards oppressed, or even brainwashed, but in this limited but important context they hold all the cards. Their enforced modesty (not just in hair, but in manners, abstention, shyness and so on) gives them a great power: the power to withhold and release sexual potential at will.

Moving on to more conventional and well-proven relationships between power and hair, one can look at innumerable mythical stories: Samson, whose trim by Delilah betrayed him and stripped him of his power;

Peter Paul Rubens - Samson and Delilah, National Gallery, London

Medusa, favourite of psychoanalysts, whose ophidian locks themselves turn people to stone;

Caravaggio - Medusa, Ufizzi, Florence

Nisos, protected by a magic lock of purple hair; Pterelaos, whose immortality, dependent on a gift of hair from Poseidon, is reminiscent of the cult of the reliquary (discussed in the next post, on hair, magic and superstition); and Apollo (also called chrysokomon – meaning with golden hair):

God of the golden bow,
     And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
     And of the golden fire,

Keats, Hymn to Apollo, 1815

Naming just a few is sufficient to see that ancient man saw in hair the same iconography as it has today.

In our own more recent and extant culture, a slightly comic example of this relationship is the visual link from big power to big wigs: literally, the Restoration wig, which persist today in the court-room.

The more powerful and senior you are, the bigger your wig, culminating in the huge wigs of high-court judges. In a 1992 consultation it was decided to retain the wig, as “it imbues in laypersons a sense of the solemnity and dignity of the law.” Big, fake hair then is the necessary bastion of authority, a placeholder of dignity, in the British legal system.

Politically, Berlusconi and his hair transplant may look like a typically buffoonish act,

but anyone who has been in ex-Soviet or east European nations during election-time cannot help but be in awe of the sheer hirsuteness of the candidates, their great Nietzschean moustaches signs of wisdom and reliability.

It may be very true that Berlusconi would not have been repeatedly re-elected had he allowed himself to go bald. If so, this could be seen as an embarrassing example of Italian voter ignorance, but also a soaring affirmation of the continuing power of big hair.

In psychoanalytic terms, men compete, in all walks of life, at all times, over the size of their phalluses. Men show off their phalluses in many ways, and many show it off on their heads too. It is both amusing and hard to avoid this equivalence when we look at people like Berlusconi, Peter Stringfellow, Fabio. Hair is a symbol of virility, sexual potency, youth. Their hair is a shiny, well-groomed and shoulder-length phallus.

Stringfellow: well-groomed, shoulder-length phallus

There is also a peculiar inverse of this: the skinhead, who seems to be boasting of his strength, in spite of having shorn himself. The skinhead is so strong in himself that he can rebel against the supremacy of the power of hair, drawing instead from his raw physicality. He shows his power by transcending the location of power in the hair. He, qua his body, is stronger than his hair. Perhaps we can say he has shaved off the phallus which hair represents, revealing that the phallus is his head itself.

In a very literal sense, knowledge is power, and notoriously to the criminal classes, all you need to know about someone can be found in a single strand of hair. While our complete DNA is to be found in almost every human cell, practically and forensically speaking, it is a person’s hair which most often is used to fix his identity. We could say that while our superficial fingerprints are on out fingertips, our real genetic fingerprint is most commonly accessed through our hair.

Tresses and Taboos 2: Depilation = depletion

Baldness is not necessarily a taboo in itself when it occurs naturally, as in most men, or voluntarily: the monks’ tonsure and the barber’s blade. Enforced baldness, however, remains an enduring social taboo. Let's look at each in turn.

Men go bald naturally, on the whole. In the case of male baldness, most men are ambivalent – they’d prefer to have rich, velvety locks as a sign of youth and fertility, but most will eventually, albeit reluctantly, embrace their glabreity. Big hair for men is like big breasts for women: they’d rather have it, until they’re reassured they don’t need it. For personal peace of mind in both cases, attractiveness must be acknowledged not to exist exclusively in that body part, as the subject often mistakenly believes.

If the French woman’s femininity is to be found in her hair, can masculinity to be found in a man’s hair? Is the femininely-coiffured man (who will be examined in the next post on hair and power) a paradigm of masculinity, or a hijacker of femininity?

It seems hard to agree to either claim. Biologically speaking, it is now known that contrary to the folk-belief that power and virility are found in hair, hair loss in men signals an abundance of testosterone. So masculinity, naturally more elusive then femininity (as it is owned by those who coin the terms ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’: men: perhaps male intellectuals find their masculinity in their tablette de chocolat), seems to fall somewhere between the stools of glabrous and hirsute, being found both in the big-balled baldy, and the eroticism of male vanity.

Baldness in men is hardly a taboo, partly because it is so common, and partly because it happens naturally. Voluntary baldness is also not necessarily seen as taboo. In some cases it is a question of power, as with the skinhead, which will be looked at in the next post. I mentioned female tonsure in the previous post with some examples that do not invoke a national backlash, as does female hair covering. But for fashion things are different: a woman shaving her head for fashion is still newsworthy, if not shocking.

My (female, Japanese) hairdresser shaved all her hair off when she was 24 (more than 10 years ago). She told me her father was furious. Perhaps it is shocking to people that a woman might claim power and full ownership over her own hair. If this is true, perhaps the French state claims some kind of ownership of women’s hair in the same way the state ‘owns’ your passport. If you are male, think how you would feel if your sister/daughter/mother/girlfriend shaved her hair off. Would the shock come from the loss of femininity? If you are female, why might you do it? I shaved my head once, I just looked like a bollock. But with my male-pattern baldness spreading like twilight, its time will come again.

Hair acts simultaneously as a teacosy and a carrycase for our pate. Those who have shaved their head down to the bone must have experienced the disarming sense of exposed nakedness and unprotectedness that it causes. Our most important organ, our most human organ, the brain, is located balanced on top of our bodies, like a coconut waiting to be knocked of its shy. It is cased within just a centimetre of bone, and cushioned in water. Hair is not armour: its thin covering offers no additional protection to the skull. It offers only token defense, it is an impersonation of resistance. Its contribution is psychological: it serves to disguise the vulnerability of our crania. Baldness does not increase the skull’s fragility, it is fragile in any case. Instead baldness is the unmasking of poor design, it is a smokescreen to the trade-off between brain size and birth canal. The skull is exposed to be our Achilles heel.

Involuntarily imposed baldness, on the other hand, retains all the power and strength of the taboos of primitive man. One of the continuing taboos of illness is the loss of hair. This may be from the illness itself, or from a major invasive treatment like chemotherapy. Cancer is by far the biggest killer in the West, and yet the side-effects of its most effective treatment is strong enough to make a pariah of the patient. Would a French intellectual openly demand that a cancer-suffering French woman must wear a wig, because otherwise she lacked femininity, and was therefore un-French, un-Western?

Perhaps the French intellectuals (when they spoke out against the lack of visible hair of the Muslims) were familiar with an example of another shaving taboo: the ritual head-shaving of women imparted by the French resistance on collaborators. Certainly performed as an act of humiliation, the shame can be ascribed to the belief held by both perpetrator and victim that her femininity, and hence her identity, was found in her hair. Perhaps the act would not have been so damning had hair not had the powerful symbolic status it did.

Another well known ritual of shaving is entry into the army. At the end of the process, all the soldiers, until they become familiar with their new selves, look exactly the same: their identity has been shorn, along with their hair, instilling them into their new life as tiny meaningless cogs in a giant allegorical weapon. The army may claim that the shearing of locks is solely hygienic, but of course there is no such simplistic teleology. Ritual marine shaving, making man into monkey, is a purely symbolic act of self-negation. It is the equivalent of entering prison for the first time, handing over all your belongings, clothes, identification, and taking in return standard issue clothing: a person becoming a convict, as the soldiers walk into the barber’s hall civilians, and walk out tools. The removal of hair is the removal of self, an exchange of "I" for "Us". I remember hearing Germaine Greer once say that rapists should have their heads shaved and painted red. As well as ensuring they would look like giant walking cocks, they would also enter the shaven social subset – the non-civilian, the marked-out, the nonperson.

The loss of hair that is the only determining and sufficient characteristic of loss in all these cases, underlining just how strong a symbol of identity, selfhood and uniqueness it is. Loss of hair symbolises the loss of femininity, ejection from the social norm, the loss of (French) Western-ness, the loss of virility, the loss of social acceptability, the loss of individuality, the loss of health, the loss of sexuality.

Since depilation has such strong connotations of depletion, it is no wonder that hair ownership has such strong associations with power.

Tresses and Taboos 1: Femininity/Sexuality

A few years ago the French government, to keep true to their admirable secularity, banned “ostensible” religious dress in schools, effecting above all the headscarf. Sarkozy recently said that burqas (full body coverings) were “not welcome” in France, depriving women of an identity. The mood of the nation, as measured by my own anecdotal evidence and limited knowledge of the intellectual debate, is that headscarves are un-French, un-developed, un-Western. In hair, in women’s hair, femininity is located, say many French women and some French intellectuals. So to cover her hair is for a woman to negate her femininity. In denying her identity, her identity as an elegant Gaul, in some sense she is challenging the national gender stereotype and so threatening the alleged homogeneity of French women and the first woman, Liberté herself. The concealment of hair is implicitly compared to treason. To cover the hair in France is as taboo as to uncover the hair is in Islam.

Hair is a taboo because like all things that are taboo, it is desirable. The existence of a taboo is only required when there exists a desire that needs to be suppressed. Freud wrote on this topic with unapproachable insight in the essay Totem and Taboo, to which I direct the reader rather than attempt to paraphrase.

Hair is a locus of sexuality, which like all taboos is both sacred and forbidden. It is the taboo of women’s hair in Islamic society which reveals hair’s sexual potency. One doesn’t need to read Freud (so integrated into our worldview are his discoveries) to recognise that modesty must be enforced, in many cultures through hair-concealment, to ward off sexual desires, promiscuity, and the threat to family and the social status quo. While in Islamic countries hair, as the locus of sexual potency, is concealed to subjugate promiscuity, in France a different quality is located in the hair, and its concealment enacts a different taboo – the taboo of unfemininity.

The desire suppressed by one taboo in one culture may not be the same desire the same taboo suppresses in another culture. The two desires being tabooed by covering the hair: that of sexual promiscuity in Islam, and the need for femininity in France, show that the femininity of French women is then placed, through this taboo, alongside sexual promiscuity, as both must be located in the same place. This result would not have pleased the generations of feminists who fought to unshackle the second sex, and is perhaps a sign which reveals the continued chauvinism of the French intellectual aristocracy.

Now we come full circle. Sexuality and/or femininity are being ‘protected’ by making the wearing of a headscarf into an anti-French taboo. A taboo exists because what it taboos is in fact deeply desired – if it wasn’t desired, a taboo would not be required. So the taboo of hair coverage in France reveals a desire to have femininity denied. Does this desire just come from the oppressive husbands of Muslim women, or from the barbaric Koran? No, it comes from the top, from Liberté herself. Why? Precisely because this femininity has been aligned with sexual promiscuity. And what is “femininity” if it is not a convenient label for men’s desires: the sexuality with which men burden women. Finally Liberté wants, deep down, to burn her bra, to neglect her hair, as she once did, to break the tradition of female objectification, to unclasp the link from hair to sex, and in so doing crack open the synecdoche of hair as a physical locus of the notions of femininity.

And it is her terrified husbands and fathers - Sarkozy, the left bank intellectuals, the Law – looking on aghast, who are tabooing this break up, who are ostracising those who coincidentally manifest their fears. The Islamic woman does not aspire to emasculate La France, but she represents this potential defrocking. And why the Muslims? No-one seems to bother the tonsured Orthodox Jewish women, Buddhists, Krishnas, and the various other religious sects who shave their heads, qua being un-feminine, being un-French. Man fires taboos from the watchtowers at those who seek to escape the enforced prison of the manufactured woman, the manufactured France, and leave behind her “femininity”: sexuality, vanity, and judgementalism.

On the symbolism of hair: an introduction

No other part of the body seems to hold such a variety of symbolic power as the hair. It is both part of our body, and therefore part of our individual identity, and yet at the same time it is changeable and detachable: it emerges and falls out, it can be altered according to taste and fashion, it can be covered or revealed, given or revered. Growing quicker than any other part of our body, it is our most visibly living organ and in this sense is a manifestation of living. At the same time, hair is composed entirely of dead cells: it is where cells go to die - it is the body’s living graveyard.

Upcoming are several analyses of the symbolism contained within hair. One or two will examine hair and taboo: hair lost or hair concealed, with reference to the anti-headscarf sentiment in mainstream French society. Another looks through psychoanalytic glasses at both famous and less famous examples of hair as power. Another post will concern hair as an object of superstition and a bearer of magic. I don’t know yet which order they will emerge.