“Hair: In Three Styles”

Abstract

In this creative, nonfiction piece, the author embodies a poetic autoethnography that explores the politics of Black hair and skin color in shifting socio-cultural contexts across 40 years. The exploration is not just about hair, but the politics of hair that are rooted in social constructions of beauty, gender, identity, and the relationality of living and loving across time and bodies. Here, the notion of style is explored as the politics of preference and desire; as a technique of doing, of caring for oneself, of being and being seen; as a way of remembering; as evidence of choices having been made.