Material Intimacies and Black Hair Practice: Touch, Texture, Resistance

ABSTRACT

This article explores the socio-materiality of Black hair care practice as an affective surface through which we can understand Black women’s experiences of intimacy and belonging. Texture of hair has often been overlooked in the examination of racialized presentation, even as shade or skin colour has been over-determined. By paying attention to the centrality of touch in negotiating grooming practices in Black hair care, a multi-layered appreciation of the material entanglements in Black intimacies can be explored. Hair is more than part of the body, it is both highly visible, as well as intensely personal and political in terms of the ways it is worn and seen by the observer. Drawing on a sensory ethnography of Afro hair salons in the UK and biographical narrative analysis, this article explores Black women’s relationships with their hair in everyday life, alongside a parallel reading of the classic text “Cassie’s hair” by Susan Bordo. This layering of narratives allows for a new form of listening to emerge, an attunement that forefronts the habitual practices of hair dressing and hair making as ways of “becoming black”. In every twist, braid and weave, these biographies highlight the intimate entanglements by which the ambivalence of black belonging is negotiated. Touch in particular, both nurturing and hostile, represents an important socio-cultural ritual through which collective belonging is experienced: evoking memories of inter-generational and transnational intimacies with black communities in another time and another place. This paper offers a novel way of reimagining the role of affect in understanding collective intimacies and sustaining black identity in diasporic contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Touch
• socio-materiality
• affective intimacies
• racial politics
• hair

Acknowledgements

I would like to extend my deepest thanks to Marjo Kolehmainen, Kinnerat Lahad, Annukka Lahti and Sasha Rosneil for their guidance and superb editorial support. To my participants, thank you sharing your hair stories. I am indebted to Greg Seigworth, Jessica Ringrose, Carolyn Pedwell, Dawn Lyon and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos for inspiring my interest in materialising affect and racialised body assemblages.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Kent [Faculty of Social Sciences Award].

Notes on contributors

Sweta Rajan-Rankin

Sweta Rajan-Rankin is a senior lecturer in sociology and social work at the University of Kent. Her research centres around interlinkages between race, ethnicity, embodiment and everyday life. Her recent research explores the mattering of race through the assemblage of human and more-than human interactions between socio-materiality of objects and racialization practices that inhibit or enable belonging. She is the Director of the Migration Ethnicity Race and Belonging research cluster at Kent, and is a national level co-convenor of the BSA Race Ethnicity Study Group.