Women's Hair Norms

This project is inspired by a turning point of my life. Last September, I moved to Canada for studying MFA program. I greeted this new life experience through changing my hairstyle before the day I took a flight to Calgary —— I had my long hair cut in barbers so that I can have a new image for next stage of life. I suppose it is interesting to embody the invisible life experience change in a visible body appearance change, because, personally, I treated my long hair as an accumulation of the past. Cutting hair (or changing hairstyle) is a meaningful behavior which means the change from one status to another in some sense. However, this act is controversial among my parents and friends, because most of them supposed that I should have a feminine …show more content…
Moreover, if there are any norms/expectations for women’s hair management, how will women be affected by these norms/expectations? In addition, I have a hypothesis that women’s hair may reflect an ambiguous relationship between accommodation and resistance. The reason is that social and cultural conventions define the norms for feminine hairstyles and most women choose to accommodate these norms consciously or unconsciously; on the other hand, in our daily life we are not difficult to find that some women choose to have a non-feminine hairstyle for showing their personalities. And I suppose that this choice could be regarded as an action that women are using their hair to resist social conventions. Thus, we can notice that accommodation and resistant are intertwining in terms of women’s hair management, but I believe that this condition also exerts their experiences in social networks, work place, family life and so …show more content…
Meanwhile hair is used as a metaphor to illustrate the conflict between woman’s desire of struggle and their depressive torment which is caused by constraint. Accommodation helps women to be easily accepted by the society but it also means that they are willing to limit their personalities for “adopting the ideologies that support subordination” (Weitz, 2001, 670). However, women’s self-awareness drives them to pursue being who they are and resist those ideologies. Therefore, the primary objectives of this project is to raise concern for women. As Rose Weitz argues that “Women are neither ‘docile body’ nor free agents”, and their accommodation and resistance are combined, which is related to society structure and cultural expectations