"Rights of Passage — One Hairy, Brown, Queer Woman's Journey to Claiming Her Feminist Ideals"
Originally Published in Issue #205 of The Malahat Review Print Edition
I shaved my legs until I was twenty-four. My hair is jet black after shaving. I know that each pore has three hair follicles and all three little troopers rise up in the fertile fields of my calves and thighs, respectfully saluting me and each other as they peak out from their fox holes. I have never had a consistent hair maintenance program. Most of my cousins, though, have long since had hair removal regimens in place and adhered to them.
No exceptions.
No deviations.
I was always inconsistent and I had hair everywhere, apparent hair, since at least the age of eight. And one lovely, lonely eyebrow.
Kids my age would point and taunt me. I would dread showing my hairy shins in gym class and my belly and back hair were a shame I wore well into my twenties.
I knew my mom, my aunts, my older cousins, and their friends in the Iranian community all got waxed and had their faces threaded--a technique where you twist thin thread, looping it around thumb and forefinger, and run the twists back and forth over lines of hair, that way pulling them out from the root.
My mom promised me that before my elementary school graduation party she would pluck my eyebrow, and I felt I would arrive to the reception born again. When the day finally arrived we had been running late, true to form. My mom seemed to have forgotten about what, to me, felt like the pinnacle moment of my life to date. The moment I transitioned from monkey to marriage material. I was twelve. I was almost too embarrassed to remind my mom--had she really forgotten? The moment she gestured to me to get my coat, I understood she had no plans of reaching for the tweezers. So I sort of squealed, But you promised to pluck my eyebrows! Her rebuttal, We’re late. There isn’t time. My eyes began to fill with tears of shame and disappointment. But you promised, I murmured to her, my tears tremoring my lower eyelids. Don’t cry, you’ll ruin your makeup! Came her command. I clenched my jaw and focused on controlling any tears before they crested and snaked my blushing cheeks. Ok, sit. she said. I leapt onto her bed as a feeling of certainty settled in my belly, and I placed both my hands candidly on my thighs.
She went back into her small, ensuite bathroom and reached for the tweezers before walking over to me on the bed, my feet dangling. Look up.
Within seconds I experienced a kind of pain that has since become familiar, but in that moment it was the worst pain I had ever encountered. She clamped the tweezers onto the innocent, unsuspecting little hairs between my darker, more defined brows, and she yanked them up and away from my face before she blew them from the metal tip of the tweezers into the air between us. The pain dispersed through my nervous system, sending shocks to my feet strapped in silver platform sandals. I shuddered. It must have taken all of ten seconds but for me it was a lifetime, after which I had clearly been reborn.
I remember going to the mirror afterwards and seeing what must have been an irritated patch of ridiculous red between my eyebrows. With one finger I felt that where once there had been hair, it was now smooth. I was overjoyed. My makeup had run down both cheeks. I wiped it quickly and ran out of the bathroom to get my silver shawl--to match my silver halter top, silver pencil skirt, and silver shoes. When we arrived at the party I was beaming through my alternating navy blue and silver braces and was convinced that everyone could tell there was something different about me. The parents would ask, Your makeup is beautiful! Who did it? And I would respond, turning my head one way and then the other, Thanks! My mom did it. What they really saw was a scrawny kid with bushy eyebrows, pale skin from growing up under a mostly-cloudy Pacific Northwest sky, a gleaming red patch in the middle of her face, and smeared makeup. But I had two eyebrows! I had been waiting for that glorious day since the third grade.
**
I finally have my go-to spot in my neighbourhood. I walk a short distance from my house to a woman named Rita, who knows how to work on women with thick, rooted hair. When I left her little room in the back of a salon, a surprising elation came over me as I walked home. There was a joy that came with establishing that connection so close to where I lived, a feeling of ease that someone who understood my hair was available to support me when I needed her.
My relationship with my body hair is complicated. An experience like the one I had with Rita is twenty-six years in the making. I wanted to cry from happiness and relief when she handed me the mirror and I saw the shape of my eyebrows and the clearness of my face, little specks of blood dotting my chin from the unrelentingly strong hairs she’d had to diplomatically tweeze out a few minutes prior. I get plenty of compliments on my eyebrows these days and the words don’t leave much of an impression on me. I can’t help but see in these folks the juvenile and oblivious faces of the kids that wreaked havoc on my self-esteem in school.
***
Eyebrow threading is something that brings together Iranian women, brings them to their bodies, and brings me into a place of fierceness and experimentation. It’s a ritual that I feel connected to because of the journey I have been on to deepen my understanding of myself, my look, and my culture. I have paid in funky eyebrows, too thin, too patchy, tried to touch them up myself--that was a mistake. I feel affinity for the faces of my community. The women whose eyebrows are quizzical, those who paint sharp lines into intimidating arches, or those who sculpt their brows straight across the bone and stare you down from the bridge of their nose like a wolf. There is an old and comforting element to this aesthetic endeavour, a common topic of conversation, a valued skill.
In my freshman year of university I was told not shaving your armpits was political, a pretty constant right of passage for young lesbians and other queer, off-centre, gender bending folk. My white feminist friends during this period of my life looked at me, eyes on fire, and declared their love of their armpit hair. I couldn't explain it then, why this irked me. Now I can see that it made me want to hide even more--if I let my hair grow out it would not look like theirs. It would look thick and black. I know now that not all hair was created equal. There is, and has been for years now, the feminist-light movement around hair. When an oppressive system tells us that a “beautiful woman” must not possess unsightly hair--the radical conclusion is to grow out said hair. And this idea was radical for a long time, and was an effective tool for rendering visible other incarnations of femininity amidst a heteronormative society. At one point though, the armpit hair and general body hair growth strategy became the style of a feminist and a key identifier.
The “I grow armpit hair therefore I am feminist” movement is packaged and propagated by white feminists. While it is true that there is a monstrous and intimidating legacy setting white, European, and extremely niche beauty standards for women to adhere to, that does not justify the internal oppression extracted by white feminists outlining how best to protest these systems. This erases the opportunity for feminism to afford women, trans, non-binary folk, and people of colour the access they require for different elements to intersect in their lives. For these elements--body image, race, gender expression, mental health, to name a few--to be dealt with and explored in a healthy way for each individual.
These systems of oppressions are, on so many levels, systems built to erase our identities. To exist wholly and outwardly as oneself is to protest and will, intentionally or not, cause dissent among the powers in place. To strive for wholeness is a journey of undoing, of reshaping, of rephrasal, and rehearsal. Should that self include armpit hair, or any other manifestation of self-expression, the spirit of an oppressed person will not survive without the freedom to choose a distinct and intersecting path.
As someone who paid in pain and endured the taunts of my hairless, wonderless childhood peers for my big, thick eyebrows--born eyebrow--I am over the radicalization of hair in a way that doesn’t expose the full extent of these larger systems of oppression. I am over hearing women asking other women, Why do you shave? Wax? Remove your body hair at all? Really asking, How could you succumb to the patriarchal standards of beauty imposed on us women by submitting yourself to these archaic routines, why not just go natural? Why not liberate yourself? Notably, there isn’t any room in this narrative for gender fluidity or performance of self. The asker is further disregarding any specific cultural practices around hair and hair removal. Not that there should be any need to justify a woman’s chosen grooming rituals, but in many cultures they are a context in which women have traditionally found solace, made space to laugh at patriarchy, healed and renewed while getting groomed. Women with strong literal and metaphorical bonds to their hair are warriors who endure pain and thrive in the face of oppression.
Facial hair on a woman is the frontier. No facial hair on a woman is the frontier. Belly and back hair. No belly and back hair. Shaved hair. Dyed hair. Hair sewed in. Hair lasered off. Growing the hair was the easy part, can we agree on that? Please don’t, with your 100% non-threatening invisi-hair, look at any other person who chooses to deal with her hair any other way and imply that shit isn’t feminist.
In the body hair on a woman’s body revolution we are shaming your flag bearers and frontline fighters. If your hair isn’t threaded together with a racially skewed system that puts you in a less-than category, check that privilege. Hair removal and its cultural significance as a social justice movement is appropriated by cis white women as a fight against sexism. There is no space in that movement for all bodies, all genders, all racialized persons who experience prejudice on multiple levels in blatant and subtle ways. White women who grow their hair out are fighting the white woman feminist fight, not the woman’s fight. The word Woman does not belong to white women, it encompasses all women with all kinds of hair and cultural ties to that hair.
My hair is political whether or not it is present for the conversation. My hair is tied to more than oppressive beauty standards and white feminist theorizing, it is rooted in my life as a queer woman of colour, a diasporic settler in North America. Sometimes, I let my hair cover my calves again. It thrives in the months I feel like I want to read Farsi, because I never learned how to growing up. It reads like a dream.
I am aware now, of course, of all of the reasons my context as a kid made me feel ashamed of my natural hair, both on my head and all over the rest of me. But I refuse to allow my contemporary feminists to assume the same oppressive entitlement in creating norms or shaping society. I refuse to allow them to think they have any say in how I choose to deal with my own hair.
Originally Published in Issue #205 of The Malahat Review Print Edition