Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig
PLUCKED
PLUCKED
A History of Hair Removal
REBECCA M. HERZIG
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
© 2015 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herzig, Rebecca M., 1971-
Plucked : a history of hair removal / Rebecca M. Herzig.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4798-4082-3 (hardback)
1. Hair—Removal—United States—History. 2. Hair—Social aspects—United States—History. 3. Body hair—Social aspects—United States—History. 4. Human body—Social aspects—United States—History. I. Title.
RL92.H49 2015
617.4’779—dc23
2014027535
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Also available as an ebook
For Jill Hopkins Herzig
Contents
Introduction: Necessary Suffering
Savagery and Civility before the Civil War
2. “Chemicals of the Toilette”:
From Homemade Remedies to a New Industrial Order
3. Bearded Women and Dog-Faced Men:
4. “Smooth, White, Velvety Skin”:
X-Ray Salons and Social Mobility
Sex Hormones and Deviant Hair Growth
“Arm-Pit Feminists” and Women’s Liberation
Labor, Pornography, and Brazilian Waxing
Laser Regulation and Elective Medicine
Genetic Enhancement and the End of Hair
Conclusion: We Are All Plucked
INTRODUCTION: NECESSARY SUFFERING
IN THE CLOSING months of 2006, representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) traveled to the internment facility at Guantánamo Bay run by the U.S. Department of Defense. There, the representatives conducted private interviews with fourteen “high value” detainees held in custody by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in accordance with the ICRC’s legal obligation to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions. Their resulting forty-page report on detainee treatment, sent to the acting general counsel of the CIA in February 2007, concluded that the “totality of circumstances” in which the detainees were held “amounted to an arbitrary deprivation of liberty.” Other aspects of the detention program “constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” while “in many cases” the combined treatments to which the detainees were subjected “constituted torture.”1 The report devoted a separate discussion to each of the “main elements” of detainee abuse, including beating and kicking, prolonged shackling, confinement in a box, and deprivation of food.
Listed among these elements of abuse was another category: hair removal—or, as the report’s authors termed it, “forced shaving” (figure I.1). The report explained how the heads and beards of at least two of the fourteen detainees were shaved clean but for a few, irregular patches of hair, deliberately left to create an “undignified,” humiliating appearance.2 Other descriptions of detainee treatment outlined similar practices. A 2005 feature story in Time magazine detailed intelligence officers’ long campaign to extract information from a man named Mohammed al-Qahtani, who had been captured fleeing Tora Bora in December 2001 and sent to Guantánamo. By the fall of 2002, Time reported, al-Qahtani’s “resilience under pressure” led officials at the detention facility to seek approval from Washington for more coercive interrogation strategies. In December of that year, then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld approved more than a dozen alternative methods, including prolonged standing, extended periods of isolation, removal of clothing, and “forced grooming (shaving of facial hair etc.).”3 According to a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, in