At the intersection of social media, a trend in organic products, and an interest in do-it-yourself culture, the late 2000s opened a space for many Black American women to stop chemically straightening their hair via "relaxers" and begin to wear their hair natural-resulting in an Internet-based cultural phenomenon known as the "natural hair movement." Within this context, conversations around beauty standards, hair politics, and Black women's embodiment have flourished within the public sphere, largely through YouTube, social media, and websites. My project maps these conversations, by exploring contemporary expressions of Black women's natural hair within cultural production. Using textual and content analysis, I investigate various sites of inquiry: natural hair product advertisements and internet representations, as well as the ways hair texture is evoked in recent song lyrics, filmic scenes, and non-fiction prose by Black women. Each of these "hair moments" offers a complex articulation of the ways Black women experience, share, and negotiate the socio-historically fraught terrain that is racialized body politics and "beauty" as a construct. My project is guided by the following research question: How are Black women utilizing the context of the natural hair movement to (re)define, (re)shape, and (de/re)construct meanings of beauty and Black womanhood? Using an embodied Black feminist framework, I argue that at the intersection of both (re)presentations of natural hair and uses of social/new media, we find new possibilities, intimacies, (re)negotiations, and (re)articulations of both Black women's embodiment and the potentiality of "beauty" as a construct. Ultimately, the project uses hair as a way to underscore the agency within Black women's uses and understandings of their bodies, in a cultural landscape that constantly tries to tell them who and what they are.
Read
