When is hair “just hair” and when is it not “just hair”? Documenting the politics of African American women's hair, this book explores everyday interaction in beauty parlors, Internet discussions, comedy clubs, and other contexts to illuminate how and why hair matters in African American women's day-to-day experiences. It draws inspiration from early scholarship on both black and white women's language use while laying out a wholly new direction of inquiry grounded in multi-sited ethnography, discourse analysis, and the investigation of embodied social practice. Recognizing that, next to langu ... More

When is hair “just hair” and when is it not “just hair”? Documenting the politics of African American women's hair, this book explores everyday interaction in beauty parlors, Internet discussions, comedy clubs, and other contexts to illuminate how and why hair matters in African American women's day-to-day experiences. It draws inspiration from early scholarship on both black and white women's language use while laying out a wholly new direction of inquiry grounded in multi-sited ethnography, discourse analysis, and the investigation of embodied social practice. Recognizing that, next to language itself, hair is the most complex signifier that African American women and girls use to display their identities, the book examines how hair and hair care take on situated social meanings among African American women in varied linguistic interactions—whether with one another, with African American men, or with European American women. Its use of a multifaceted approach comprehensively documents exactly how and why hair comes to matter so much in African American women's construction of their identities, and how language both mediates and produces these social meanings. The book demonstrates the symbolic and social significance of hair among African Americans in constructing race, gender, and other dimensions of identity.