Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Feminist Theory
Copyright 2006
SAGE Publications
(London,
Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
vol. 7(2): 159177.
14647001
DOI: 10.1177/1464700106064414
http://fty.sagepub.com
FT
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Black women who wore Afros used beauty practices (regular hair cuts,
raising the texture of the hair with Afro picks, employing products to add
lustre to the hairs surface) to conform to an emerging but hotly contested
beauty norm. The norms of beauty that circulated on the Howard
University campus in 1960 were not generalized norms enforced by a
generalized male gaze. Instead they were norms linked to class and racial
projects. The transformation of the meaning of black female unstraightened
hair was shaped by a broader black re-conceptualization of American black
identity as an ethnic identity with cultural connections to Africa. It was
also shaped by an emerging national and generational criticism of artifice
and a concurrent valorization of practices that were considered natural.
The comparatively privileged women at Howard University had more
leeway to experiment with unconventional styles than the majority of
black women. As college students, their social standing was relatively
secure. By wearing an unstraightened style, ONeal complied with new
beauty norms by resisting others. The meaning of her beauty work was
simultaneously an attempt to be beautiful according to the very local
Through body work, she engaged in the collective racial project of the
politics of representation. Her Afro made her beautiful under a specifically
African-American rather than generalized male gaze. The Afro was a sign
through which African-American women who shared similar political
orientations could recognize each other. One woman who wore an Afro in
the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s recalled an exhilarating feeling
of community among black women:
There was a part of it that felt so magical and so true and honest . . . There was
community in the beauty standard. It wasnt like it was one person who was
doing this. It was a whole community of people who were embracing these
standards. You could look around a room and see fifteen, twenty other women
with an Afro.7
Though the Afro produced feelings of unity, it could still function to rank
women. During the late 1960s, within black communities, women with
larger Afros frequently were seen as more beautiful than women with
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Notes
I thank Jessica Fields and the editors of this special issue for their helpful
comments on earlier versions of this article.
1. Naomi Wolfs 1992 The Beauty Myth brought feminist critiques of the place
of beauty in womens lives to a wider audience.
2. Cahill (2003: 43) similarly critiques the individualist orientation of much
of feminist theory on beauty. However in her work, the collectivity studied
is a single nuclear family. She does not extend the argument to consider
larger social bases of solidarity.
3. For an early 20th century example of the erotic objectification of black
men, see Hazel Carbys (1998: 4583) analysis of the use of Paul Robesons
body as a modernist symbol of ideal black masculinity.
4. In a study of contemporary US immigrants from the Dominican Republic,
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