How to make victory rolls: gender, memory, and the counterarchive in YouTube pinup hair tutorials

Abstract

The article situates the online culture of YouTube pinup girl hair tutorials within popular and scholarly discourses on post-feminism and the gender politics of the archive. It explores the videos’ genre conventions with particular attention to how their formal aspects engage a post-feminist reimagining of the postwar pinup. The videos invoke an internal tension typifying pinup art between the artifice and self-awareness of the pinup’s aesthetic, and the impression that the poser is caught unaware or in a “natural” state. The article argues that the contradiction between constructed and “natural” beauty, and the videos’ affinity for including hair mistakes or beauty mishaps intuit an absent archive: documenting the manual labor and struggles demanded of these looks that both popular representation and memory of that time period elide. The article connects these absent archives of forgotten beauty skills to broader debates in feminism and popular memory about digital-era desires and fears around recuperating counterhistories and counterarchives.