Gross. Dirty. Monstrous. Manly. Authentic. Beautiful. Natural. Powerful.
Body hair, especially on women, provokes, disrupts, and, at times, offends. It is tangled up with culture itself—in art, families, workplaces, relationships, sex, the beauty industry, governments, and capitalism. From Chinese activists challenging the Communist Party, to students in Arizona rejecting their family and workplace ideas about grooming, to high-art feminist photographers boldly featuring hairy women, Fahs deftly explores the volatile and ever-changing landscape of women’s body hair politics. She showcases an underground movement of artists, zine-makers, rebels, and activists who have used women’s visible body hair as a declaration of freedom from patriarchal norms.
Fahs presents body hair not just as a personal grooming choice but as a connection to broader cultural stories about women’s reproductive rights, feminist battlegrounds about autonomy, neoliberal intrusions into beauty regimens, and even global tensions around women’s place in society. Ultimately, Unshaved shows the collision between the mundane and the extraordinary, the everyday and the revolutionary.
Tentang Penulis
Breanne Fahs is associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University. She is author of Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution (Verso, 2020), Firebrand Feminism: The Radical Lives of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kathie Sarachild, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Dana Densmore (University of Washington Press, 2018); Out for Blood: Essays on Menstruation and Resistance (SUNY, 2016); Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Women Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) (Feminist Press, 2014); Performing Sex: The Making and Unmaking of Women’s Erotic Lives (SUNY, 2011), and coeditor of The Moral Panics of Sexuality (Palgrave, 2013).