Reflections on Shaving My Hair: Docile Bodies and Agency

Me after my last haircut

It was my 16th birthday, the first time I ever had all of my hair razed off. More than relinquishing my head into the hands of a stranger and what seemed like GIGANTIC clippers, I felt as if my femaleness, my femininity, and my beauty I had just abdicated to be erased as easily as pencil markings on paper. Ironically, my performance of femininity and the rituals it demands would become even sharper  and bolder in the years after my “big chop” than it had ever been before.

The build-up to that moment was sluggish with all of its anxiety and uncertainty and back and forth, but the shaving was abrupt. Immediately after the first glide of the clippers against my scalp, I wanted to hide. Nobody had warned me that a ‘buzz cut’ would leave me so exposed! Nobody warned me what it meant for my eyes and my face to be so naked without all of the hair to frame or cloak them. Even more than that, I struggled to feel attractive or to simply feel like a woman afterward. So began my journey with make-up.

Thinking back to that time in my life realizes for me Sandra Lee Bartky’s, “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In this piece she affirms Michel Foucault's theories on the social construction of “docile bodies,” or how it is that we create “bodies that meet social expectations without complaint or resistance” not through force or punishment, but through teaching people to believe and regulate themselves in these ideals (76). Bartky stretches Foucault’s theory even further to talk about “disciplines of femininity” or how it is that the female body becomes feminine. She describes femininity as a formation that is built socially, culturally, and ideologically and that women learn to police their bodies into this particular kind of docile, powerless femininity as if their life depended on it, as if someone might punish them otherwise (77).

For a long time after I cut my hair, I embraced makeup and high heels like a lifeline. I “ornamented” my body with hyper-feminine vibrant clothing and accessories to compensate for my fuzz and to hail myself back into “woman”. I would look in the mirror every chance I got to examine myself and adjust whatever needed adjusting to recover the pretty I felt I had given up. Even the way I carried myself and moved my body changed, becoming softer, cuter, more delicate and ‘girly’. There was no one who explicitly needed to instruct me in what femininity should look like --although family members did take it upon themselves to comment on my deficient femininity on the few occasions I stepped into the outside bare-faced or undecorated **GASP**. More than anyone else, I had instead became my own surveillance, assuming the “male gaze” into myself and policing myself through it.

I have since then chosen to continue cutting my hair, though I have significantly reduced my use of makeup and settled into more of a ‘tomboy’ aesthetic in some ways. Even then, my rejection of ‘girliness’ or my struggle to create a new sense of being female is still constrained by and articulated through opposition to the same societal ideal of femininity I am trying to distance myself from. Is this empowering--this rebellion through the creation of an oppositional identity? In my transition out of hyper-femininity and in my own reflections on feminine ideals, the question that has remained at the center is that of agency. What is agency and what does it look like when it is employed by disciplined, feminine, docile bodies? Both Bartky and Foucault do not afford people agency and instead proffer that we are always being shaped by invisible powers, that one can never really choose to perform formations like femininity freely, or rather that it is precisely through that supposed freedom of choice that we are managed without ever realizing.

While I am in agreement with Bartky and Foucault and am able to see the interplay of their theories in my own lived experience, I am hesitant to completely abandon the idea of agency. I am, however, aware of how elusive and blurry it can be. In our contemporary moment, for example, I see  many women and men who have begun to embrace and celebrate femininity, reclaiming things like makeup for their own pleasure in spite of the ‘male gaze’ and in spite of societal implications. But where is the line between choosing something or doing it for your own pleasure and doing it because you are socialized to like identify with it? Is reclaiming femininity and technologies of femininity agency if you are still working within societal discourses of femininity? Is it agency when you cannot detach yourself from the punishments or rewards that come with performing certain kinds of femininities? How might we go about crafting new modes of being feminine?

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I have no easy answers to any of these very complex questions. The only kind of agency that has made sense for my own life is turning that surveillant and critical eye I learned to enforce on myself onto the discourses of womanhood, making them visible. My agency has been in seeing the ways I am acted upon, or socialized into femininity, and then discerning where my actions and negotiations of womanhood are located in that picture. The way I see it, consciousness and critique are always in contention with docility.






Picture 2: http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/666865/192232721/stock-photo-beautiful-woman-marionette-on-stage-puppet-theater-192232721.jpg
Picture 3: http://cdn.gurl.com/wp-content/gallery/dating-dealbreakers/woman-cutting-puppet-strings.jpg