This chapter shifts attention from providers to consumers of human hair in the Global North. It investigates the hair practices of Finnish, primarily middle-class women within the context of an affluent Nordic welfare state. I first look at how the hair-prosthesis and the women’s self merge and hair extensions are taken as one’s own. Next, I investigate the intertwining of hair with gendered identities and the influence of patriarchal norms on women and their hair. I show how these can be utilised to one’s own advantage as well as resisted. However, patriarchal hair norms are crosscut by class and race. White middle-class contexts foster the value of ordinariness, which organises women’s consumption of hair. Ordinariness establishes a normal, natural and modest look that does not stand out as deviant. At the same time, women strive to achieve the healthy and happy appearance of neoliberal normality. A well-groomed subtle appearance in which hair plays a major part turns into a form of welfare. The last section concerns the taking of hair from global others. I argue that this process leads to the creation of a moral global identity, the background of which lies in structural guilt induced by global inequality.

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Consuming Hair in Finland

  • Riitta Högbacka

摘要

This chapter shifts attention from providers to consumers of human hair in the Global North. It investigates the hair practices of Finnish, primarily middle-class women within the context of an affluent Nordic welfare state. I first look at how the hair-prosthesis and the women’s self merge and hair extensions are taken as one’s own. Next, I investigate the intertwining of hair with gendered identities and the influence of patriarchal norms on women and their hair. I show how these can be utilised to one’s own advantage as well as resisted. However, patriarchal hair norms are crosscut by class and race. White middle-class contexts foster the value of ordinariness, which organises women’s consumption of hair. Ordinariness establishes a normal, natural and modest look that does not stand out as deviant. At the same time, women strive to achieve the healthy and happy appearance of neoliberal normality. A well-groomed subtle appearance in which hair plays a major part turns into a form of welfare. The last section concerns the taking of hair from global others. I argue that this process leads to the creation of a moral global identity, the background of which lies in structural guilt induced by global inequality.