Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig

Figure I.1. Table of contents from a 2007 Red Cross report on the treatment of U.S.-held detainees at Guantánamo Bay, noting the use of “forced shaving.”

      The striking unity of opinion among Bush administration supporters and critics on the insignificance of forced shaving, particularly when juxtaposed with the divergent judgment of the ICRC, raises a number of questions. When exactly does a practice cease to be merely “unpleasant” and become “cruel,” “inhuman” torture? What distinguishes trivial nuisances from serious problems? Who gets to determine the parameters of true suffering, and of real violence? Such questions—matters of knowledge and power, privilege and exclusion, life and death—animate this book, a history of hair removal in the United States from the colonial era to the present.

      At first glance, hair removal may seem an odd subject for such rumination. The treatment of body hair, like incessant celebrity diet updates or major league sporting news, could easily be considered one of those annoying tics of contemporary American culture best ignored. The whole topic of body hair, I have learned, strikes many people as not merely tedious but also uncouth, even downright repulsive. Several previous reviewers of this work suggested that hair removal is simply too repellent to merit scholarly attention.¹⁰

      It is not my intention to try to persuade readers otherwise. Although, as we shall see, hair removal has preoccupied political thinkers in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to Donald Rumsfeld, has shaped practices of science, medicine, commerce, and war, and has elicited breathtaking levels of financial, emotional, and ecological investment, this book does not try to argue that body hair is “in fact” more consequential than previously recognized. To do so—to assert, say, that forced shaving is actually more torturous than waterboarding—would simply flip existing presumptions of value. My aim here is instead to illuminate the historical contingency of such assertions themselves. Delving into the history of personal enhancement, Plucked excavates the surprisingly recent development of seemingly self-evident distinctions between the serious and the unimportant, the necessary and the superfluous.

      Body hair, here referring to any hair growth below the scalp line, renders such distinctions helpfully concrete. Readily and temporarily modifiable, hair serves as a tangible medium for communicating and challenging social boundaries. The modification of hair often establishes multiple boundaries at once: not only separating self from other but also dividing and ranking “categories or classes of individuals.”¹¹ In the United States, those classifications have long served to segregate bodies into distinct sexes, races, and species, and to delimit the numerous rights and privileges based on those distinctions. Assessments and treatments of body hair also have served to define mental instability, disease pathology, criminality, sexual deviance, and political extremism. Some classifications have been codified in diagnostic criteria, bureaucratic regulations, or technical standards; others remain tacit understandings, held fast by emotion and habit. Throughout, the maintenance of such segregations and classifications has required labor, physical and emotional labor—the often grubby, painful chore of separating hide from flesh. By examining that labor more closely, we might better perceive the implicit values suffusing social life.

      OF PARTICULAR CONCERN here are ideas about suffering. In the United States, those consequential moral and legal standards—e.g., does the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo constitute torture?—have long been established through recourse to the “natural” order of things, as discerned by scientific and medical experts. Battles over whose suffering gets to matter have been waged, in large part, over who is authorized to speak about natural facts. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the pronouncements of bodily “deficiency” made by eminent ethnologists and naturalists helped to buttress the political disenfranchisement of the continent’s indigenous peoples. In the nineteenth century, the arguments for the separate, distinct origins of races offered by physicians and anthropologists of the “American School” were summoned to defend the institution of slavery. More recently, the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams deployed at Guantánamo served to establish the parameters of “enhanced” interrogation techniques. Expert assessments of real suffering authorize specific legal procedures, and vice versa.¹²

      Although definitions of suffering have been tied to claims about nature throughout U.S. history, the rising prominence of the sciences, paired with increasing emphasis on individual bodily health, amplified the significance of those scientific and medical classifications. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the human body moved firmly under medicine’s purview.¹³ Particularly for the affluent, more and more domains of everyday life—sexuality, cognition, mood—have been moved into the province of expert assessment and treatment. Today, the boundaries of suffering—psychic and physical—are established and contested through complex, multidirectional engagements with medicine.¹⁴

      Crucial to those boundaries are references to medical “necessity,” a term that has mutated from an obscure insurance designation to the focus of national debate. Although suffering might be understood as a scalar attribute (a complaint might move up or down the ladder of “seriousness”), the concept of medical necessity acts to fence “real” suffering, allocating or withholding social and financial resources in a binary fashion.¹⁵ Medical necessity compels for-or-against decisions. Contested diagnostic categories, such as fibromyalgia or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, drive patient advocates as well as medical providers to seek reproducible tests of “legitimate” disease. New drugs and devices, such as memory-enhancing pharmaceuticals, demand decisions about their appropriate application. State and federal health care reforms force questions about precisely which services ought to be considered “basic” or “essential” (e.g., kidney transplants, in-vitro fertilizations, gender-reassignment surgeries). And, even as distinctions between elective “enhancement” and necessary “therapy” acquire fresh importance, accountability for the determination of these distinctions is obscured, veiled by the spread of integrated private insurance plans with capitated payment systems. As critics rightly point out, insurance companies are rarely called on to justify their exclusions.¹⁶