The last taboo

This is the first academic book ever written on women and body hair, a subject which has, until now, been seen as too trivial, ridiculous or revolting to write about. Even feminist writers or researchers on the body have found remarkably little to say about body hair, usually not mentioning it at all. If women’s body hair is noted, it is either simply to accept its removal as an inevitable aspect of female beautification, or to argue against hair removal as a return to a ‘natural’ and un-oppressed female body. The only texts to elaborate on body hair are guides on how to remove it, medical texts on ‘hirsutism’, or fetishistic pornography on ‘hairy’ women. ‘The last taboo’ asks how and why any particular issue can become defined as ‘self-evidently’ too silly or too mad to write about.

Using a wide range of thinking from gender theory, queer theory, critical and literary theory, history, art history, anthropology and psychology, the contributors argue that, in fact, body hair plays a central role in constructing masculinity and femininity and sexual and cultural identities. Arguing from the theoretical position that identity and the body are culturally and historically constructed, the chapters each analyse through a specific focus how body hair underpins ideas of the ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ in Western culture. This book will provide academic researchers, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates with a completely fresh perspective on all of the fields mentioned above.

Contents:-

1. The last taboo: women, body hair and feminism -  Karín Lesnik-Oberstein
2. ‘The wives of geniuses I have sat with’: body hair, genius, and modernity - Daniela Caselli
3. A history of pubic hair or reviewers’ responses to Terry Eagleton’s 'After Theory' - Louise Tondeur
4. Hairs on the lens: female body hair on the screen - Alice Macdonald
5. ‘La justice, c’est la femme à barbe !’: the bearded lady, displacement and recuperation in Apollinaire’s ‘Les mamelles de Tirésias’ - Stephen Thomson
6. ‘That wonderful phænomenon’: female body hair and English literary tradition - Carolyn D. Williams
7. 'Fur' or hair: l’effroi et l’attirance of the wild-woman - Jacqueline Lazú
8. Designers’ bodies: women and body hair in contemporary art and advertising - Laura Scuriatti
9. Bikini fur and fur bikinis - Sue Walsh
10. Women with beards in early modern Spain - Sherry Velasco
11. On Frida Kahlo’s moustache: A reading of Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair and its criticism - Neil Cocks