Option 1, Mon. 4/23
Both Marjorie Garber and Suzanne Kessler help us question, as does the movie, You Don't Know Dick, how cultural ideas about the well-formed or natural body, especially about genitals; all three pieces re-direct our conventional notions about gender, family, love, sexuality and reproduction in our society. All three pieces challenge binary systems of gender in America and disrupt notions of mutually exclusive sexual dimorphism in the human body. Please pose some questions for discussion, with discussion to go with the question, to connect both articles to each other and to the concerns, dreams, experiences, and lives of the men in this film. Alternatively, use your questions and discussion to bring out differences between the two articles and the movie.
Option 2, Wed. 4/25
Both these pieces, by Olivia Vlahos and Marina Warner, survey broad expanses of folk expression concerning hair.
Vlahos ranges over many cultural practices concerning hair length, style, treatment, belief, and speculates about how hair figures in many ways of producing social meaning, shaping individual roles and identities, marking status change, and the like. She questions how and why hair, of all body parts, attains the powers it does as a complex symbol, in so many cultural contexts, and why and how it does so in so many differing ways. Her essay is not scholarly, feminist, critical, or academic, but a kind of wonderland of varied, if not exoticized (not always) practices. Consider what the value of her tour of hair customs, beliefs, and symbols has for the course, and where her cultural values result in ethnocentrism and where she does work toward a multicultural understanding and, even, sometimes celebration of respected differences.
Warner looks at a smaller range of materials concerning hair -- she focuses on hair motifs in Western narratives, either in folklore or in literature based on, or influencing folklore. Nonetheless, her chapter also seems like an aerial survey of hair motifs in folklore and literature, with a little theory and critical thinking that can be expanded through our discussion. In one chapter, she is particularly concerned with the connections between woman's identity and sexuality and their hairiness, and their association with animals and the wild. In the other chapter, she explores the connections between blondeness and women.
Please write a position paper in which you focus on one set of expressions embodying hair beliefs and practices, which is explored by Vlahos and Warner, respectively. Use the position paper to help the class pursue more deeply connections that Vlahos and Warner point to or partially develop, either connecting both articles, or pursuing different issues in each.
Option 3, Fri. 4/27
These two articles, by Noliwe Rooks and Carol Delaney, have one major feature in common: they take the discussions of hair out of the broad survey mode and into the close study of a single society or community. Rooks examines values about and treatments of African-American hair, especially that of African-American women, in the twentieth century; Delaney looks at the meanings of hair treatments in twentieth century Turkish society. Both place their studies in historical perspective, but use very different kinds of evidence and address very different problems concerning hair. Both writers, however, show the centrality of hair treatment in forming social identity and to ideas of nationalism, self-esteem, gender, and sexuality. For this paper, please discuss how each article highlights very different cultural problems that are expressed through how hair is treated. Also consider the authors' very different methods of studying the cultural significance in one culture of hair style, growth, control, texture, color in terms of age, gender, class, status, sexuality, race, historical change.