Plucked. Rebecca M. Herzig
pressures as determining the behavior of other women, most do not accept adherence to social norms as determinative of their own practices. Women asked to explain their own hair removal habits instead point to increased sexual pleasure, attractiveness, and other goals of “self-enhancement.” Interviews with men establish similar phenomena.53 Put simply, Americans tend to describe other people as dupes of social pressure, while narrating their (our) own actions as self-directed and free.
The durability of the “social control” narrative compels us to confront power-laden questions about freedom, subjectivity, and truth. Is the person who chooses to spend twenty-five hundred dollars on laser hair removal demonstrating personal liberty or a dangerous “false consciousness”? What defines false (or “true”) consciousness of such choices? Who gets to say? These sorts of questions pervade contemporary discussions of breast implants, hair straightening, rhinoplasty, and other types of aesthetic “enhancement.” And, as we will learn, these sorts of questions reach from the founding of the nation to the present: from eighteenth-century naturalists’ arguments over whether Native men did or did not purposefully pluck their beards to more recent conflict over whether total pubic waxing constitutes personal “enslavement,” American debates over body modification have entailed consternation over just how autonomous and willful apparent choices truly are.
In the end, such questions bear an important resemblance to debates over whether forced grooming at Guantánamo is “nothing to be ashamed of” or a cruel and degrading “deprivation of liberty.” Common to both sets of questions is an effort to determine whether a given activity meets or exceeds some presumed standard of “freedom” or “suffering”—ignoring how those standards are set, and by whom.54 While not indifferent to the enduring enigma of individual will, I take a different tack in this book. Rather than evaluating the choice to remove hair, I seek to show how and for whom body hair became a problem in the first place. Tracing the history of choice in this way, we see how some experiences of suffering, and not others, come to matter.
[ 1 ]
THE HAIRLESS INDIAN
Savagery and Civility before the Civil War
AMERICANS TEND TO remember Thomas Jefferson for many things, but his thoughts about hair removal are not generally among them. Nevertheless, Jefferson expressed a studied opinion on the matter in his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). He turned to hair in a long passage enumerating the distinctions he detected between “the Indians” and “whites”:
It has been said that the Indians have less hair than the whites, except on the head. But this is a fact of which fair proof can scarcely be had. With them it is disgraceful to be hairy on the body. They say it likens them to hogs. They therefore pluck the hair as fast as it appears. But the traders who marry their women, and prevail on them to discontinue this practice, say, that nature is the same with them as with the whites.1
Were Indian bodies naturally hairy like those of settlers from Europe, only appearing otherwise due to some strange habit? Or were Indian bodies irrevocably different from those of whites? Jefferson was far from the only eighteenth-century observer preoccupied with this enigma, or with the absence of “fair proof” of an answer.2 From the 1770s through the 1850s, the enigma of Native depilatory practices preoccupied European and Euro-American missionaries, traders, soldiers, and naturalists. Scores of commentators pondered whether the continent’s indigenous peoples had less hair by “nature” or whether they methodically shaved, plucked, and singed themselves bare (figure 1.1).
Rarely distinguishing between the diverse indigenous peoples of the Americas in this regard (instead lumping geographically and linguistically dissimilar groups together as “Indians”), white writers both famous and now forgotten sought to explain the smooth faces and limbs that they viewed as typical of the original “Americans.”3 Cornelis de Pauw, for instance, saw the complete absence of beard as one of the distinctive physiological characteristics of Indian bodies.4 In contrast, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark concluded that Chopunnish men “extract their beards” like “other savage nations of America,” while Chopunnish women further “uniformly extract the hair below [the face].”5 In 1814, the renowned German explorer Alexander von Humboldt conceded that even the most “celebrated naturalists” had failed to resolve whether the Americans “have naturally no beard and no hair on the rest of their bodies, or whether they pluck them carefully out.”6
These were hardly idle musings. For European and North American observers, such questions of natural order entailed consequential questions of political order: whether Indians might be converted to European ways of life, or whether some fundamental, unalterable difference rendered assimilation impossible. The French naturalist Comte de Buffon’s famous Histoire naturelle held to the latter position, asserting that “the peculiar environment of the New World” had “stunted” the peoples he called aborigines, making it unlikely that they could ever be “admitted to membership in the new republic.”7 As the Pennsylvania-born naturalist and traveler William Bartram posed the problem in 1791, at issue in Indian hairlessness was whether Indians might be persuaded to “adopt the European modes of civil society,” or whether they were inherently “incapable of civilization” on whites’ terms.8 Body hair encapsulated these debates. More than one writer claimed rights of dominance over Indian lands because, as Montesquieu explained, Native men possessed “scanty beards.”9 In this context, Jefferson himself well understood the stakes of his discussion: Native peoples’ inherent rights to self-determination.10
Figure 1.1. George Catlin’s 1832 portrait of Náh-se-ús-kuk, eldest son of Black Hawk. Catlin, like other white travelers and naturalists of the period, was preoccupied with the smooth skin of Native peoples. (Reproduced with permission of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.)
With Andrew Jackson’s election to the U.S. presidency in 1828, the question of Indian governance moved to the forefront of federal policy. Jackson’s proposal to forcibly “remove” remaining southeastern Indians west of the Mississippi provoked fierce opposition. Nonetheless, thousands of U.S. troops were sent to Georgia, resulting in the immediate beatings, rapes, and murders of countless Cherokees, and the eventual deaths of thousands more on the Trail of Tears. By 1837, most members of the five southeastern nations had been relocated through what historian Daniel Heath Justice has characterized as a “ruthless and brutal terrorism campaign.”11 With the expansionist policies ushered in with the election of James Polk in 1844, Native peoples living in California, the Southwest, and the Northwest were subjected to similar federal jurisdiction.12
Whether or not white writers explicitly addressed these political developments, their perspectives on Indian body hair—the crux of debates over the nature of Indian racial character—necessarily engaged larger, ongoing disputes over the sovereignty of Native governments, the sanctity of treaties, and the appropriate use of federal force. The historical import of those disputes cannot be overstated. “If slavery is the monumental tragedy of African American experience,” Tiya Miles writes, “then removal plays the same role in American Indian experience.”13 White assertions of Indian beardlessness contributed to a body of racial thought that helped to buttress those policies and practices of physical removal.14 As the Pequot intellectual William Apess summarized in 1831, “the unfortunate aborigines of this country” have been “doubly wronged by the white man”: “first, driven from their native soil by the sword of the invader, and then darkly slandered by the pen of the historian. The former has treated him like beasts of the fores[t]; the latter has written volumes to justify him in his outrages.”15
Taken together, the volumes written about Indian body hair in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—none, so far as I have been able to locate, written by Native authors themselves—reveal the asymmetrical production of consequential standards and categories of difference. Like other “racial” differences,