That’s Why My Hair Is So Big. It’s Full of Discourses.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I got to do the usual excessive eating and shopping, with uncomfortable family conversation happening in the background. While I was trying to enjoy my four days of responsibility-free excess, I couldn’t help but overhear the gossipy conversation happening between my aunts only a few feet away. (They were, of course, speaking in Arabic, thinking that I wouldn’t understand them. They thought wrong.) Of all things to talk shit about, they were talking shit about my “unruly” hair.
Of course, this is nothing new for me. And neither is the completely opposite (and sometimes excessive) reaction that white people tend to have towards my hair. While I don’t blame either side for their attentions to my hair, I can’t help but feel that my own understanding of my hair gets lost in all their comments.
In part, Judith Butler addresses this idea of identity expression being limited by larger external understandings of that identity, or discourses. Butler talks about the discursive understandings of identity in terms of gender (not hair). According to Butler, “‘Sex’ is…not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility” (2).
So for Butler, bodies don’t exist as what they “naturally” are. Rather, bodies exist as they are socially, or discursively, understood. Butler even argues against the natural existence of the body outside of social contexts or discourse, “Subjected to gender, but subjectivated by gender, the ‘I’ neither precedes nor follows the process of this gendering, but emerges only within and as the matrix of gender relations themselves” (7). A body doesn’t come to exist simply by taking up space, but rather comes into existence within discourse, within a social type of language in which that body can become understood or legible.
For this reason, it’s important to note that subjects don’t just get to choose what gender they inhabit on a daily basis. Rather, if subjects do choose their gender identity, their options are discursively limited.
Yet, if our identity expressions only serve to perform according to certain established discourses, then do these expressions actually serve to assert our identities? Aren’t there any other options for understanding one’s own identity? Butler seems to refute the availability or the accessibility of an “outside” to the social discourses that play a significant role in our own understandings of our identities. However, I’d like to open up this possibility of an “outside”. I want to look into this possible theory-space of desires and identities that aren’t legible to us via discourse, and I want to do it by bringing this theory dilemma back to the setting of the varying external comments about my hair.
The discourses that tend to orbit around my hair are of two varieties. One of the usual discourses about my hair is that I wear it as a symbol of non-conformity. This is the discourse that my gossipy aunts, and sometimes other brown people, subscribe to when they look at my hair. They see it as a stance against their assimilationist values. The other of the usual discourses about my hair is that it is a form of exotic entertainment that I am performing for “normal” people to enjoy. This is the discourse that some white people subscribe to when they look at my hair. They see it as a sort of pleasure that I am serving (which, for some, apparently justifies the ability to touch and play with my hair without asking).
If I’m oscillating between these two (racial and gendered) discursive understandings of my hair, then Butler’s performativity claim of limited identity expression is supported. I’m not actually choosing the identity that my hair would help me assert. Rather, I’m shifting between the limited discursive languages/understandings within which my hair is legible. But what if my own understanding of my hair falls outside of the limited discourses offered to me? What if my understanding of my hair is beyond discourse, falling in the “outside of discourse” space that Butler argues against?
What would it even mean for my hair to fall outside of discourse? While I’m sure I could try to explain this to myself with strange philosophical ideas of social existence, I’m instead going to try to stick to something more tangible. The proof that I have that my hair may fall outside of discourse comes from the fact that I can’t seem to find any reasonably priced hair products (shampoo, conditioner, etc.) that function according to the needs that my hair has. Rather, what I tend to find is either cheap hair products for straight, not-so-thick hair (usually with white people on the covers or in the commercials), or expensive hair products for more “exotic” hair (usually with brown or ambiguously ethnic people on the covers and in the commercials). My hair (apparently) isn’t legible to producers of hair product. Instead, I have to purchase (or subscribe to) either one or a combination of the sets of hair products available to me.
Clearly, an understanding of my hair that I feel comfortable subscribing to doesn’t exist within the discourses (or hair products) available to me. My understanding of my hair as just the large mass on the top of my head, and as a source of personal pleasure, isn’t legible to the available discourses (or at least not yet?). This is also the larger problem with viewing anything (gender, sexuality, pleasure, hair, etc.) as only socially existing within available discourses. These things, such as my hair, do have a social existence, but that social existence doesn’t mean that they “are” what their available discourses say they are. Rather, what these things “are” may simply lie beyond what we understand as being pleasurable, or what we understand as being recognizable.
