Unshaved
Description
Gross. Dirty. Monstrous. Manly. Authentic. Beautiful. Natural. Powerful.
Body hair, especially on women, provokes, disrupts, and, at times, offends. It is tangled up with culture itself?in art, families, workplaces, relationships, sex, the beauty industry, governments, and capitalism. From Chinese activists challenging the Communist Party, to students in Arizona rejecting their family and workplace ideas about grooming, to high-art feminist photographers boldly featuring hairy women, Fahs deftly explores the volatile and ever-changing landscape of women's body hair politics. She showcases an underground movement of artists, zine-makers, rebels, and activists who have used women's visible body hair as a declaration of freedom from patriarchal norms.
Fahs presents body hair not just as a personal grooming choice but as a connection to broader cultural stories about women's reproductive rights, feminist battlegrounds about autonomy, neoliberal intrusions into beauty regimens, and even global tensions around women's place in society. Ultimately, Unshaved shows the collision between the mundane and the extraordinary, the everyday and the revolutionary.
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Breanne Fahs is professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University. She is the editor of Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution and author of Firebrand Feminism; Out for Blood: Essays on Menstruation and Resistance; Women, Sex, and Madness: Notes from the Edge; and several other works.
Content
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction: Revolting Bodies or Bodies in Revolt?
- Part 1: Revolting Bodies
- 1. Hairy Subjects: Imagining versus Experiencing Body Hair Rebellions
- 2. Body Hair Battlegrounds: The Dangers and Promises of Nonnormativity
- Part 2: Art and Activism
- 3. Hairy, Not So Scary: Body Hair Zines and Drawings as Activism
- 4. Expanding the Body Hair Imaginary: Photography as Social Intervention
- 5. China's Armpit Hair Contest: Body Hair Resistance as Global Contagion
- Part 3: Body Hair Rebels
- 6. Growing a Thicker Skin: The Emotional Politics of Body Hair
- 7. "The Only Opinion That Matters Is My Own": The Social Regulation of Women's Body Hair
- 8. "In the Revolution, We Will All Be Hairy": Redrawing the Politics of Body Hair
- Epilogue: They Are Going to Be Mad at Us
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- X
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