Rebecca M. Herzig.Plucked: A History of Hair Removal.

Abstract

Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, a whimsical undertaking by the author’s admission, supplements the robust historical literature on beauty practices and the beauty industry in the U.S. The book focuses on body hair removal practices as well as attitudes and beliefs about hair as an element of sexuality or beauty, hairy masculinity on the one hand and hairless femininity on the other. Rebecca M. Herzig’s monograph consists of a chronological series of essays that begins with English-American views of “beardless” Indians in the eighteenth century and ends with a discussion of genetic engineering as a possible means of suppressing hair growth. English Americans, she argues, viewed the clean faces of Indian males as evidence of a degenerate failure to grow into full manhood. Herzig plays Indian hair removal practices against the U. S. government’s twenty-first-century effort to humiliate Muslim detainees at Guantánamo Bay detention camp by shaving their beards. In Herzig’s view the two examples book-end an historical arc of gendered cultural practices. The preponderance of the chapters cover hair removal practices among white women in the U.S. With respect to women, Herzig finds a hairless face matched with a porcelain complexion to be a consistent American ideal with increased interest in the removal of armpit, leg, or pubic hair following from the uncovering of women’s bodies as changing fashion dictated. According to the author, popular taste frequently drove many American women and men to engage in hair stripping that inflicted pain and compromised their health.