Portrayal of black women’s hair-beautification practices in six South African news reports: a close textual reading

ABSTRACT

Black beauty is both bodily aesthetics in an Africa struggling with decolonization and a political investment celebrating African physical phenotypes, such as hair variation, as attractive. Hair, a visible and heritable trait in its unstraightened form has been subjected to extreme beautification techniques. Media, advertising, fashion industries, as well as ideologies of image and embodiment, have debated hair-beautification practices. One site for public debates is the newspaper. News reports disseminate debates to readers and are expected to engage with contested ideas about hair beautification. This discourse analysis of six South African newspaper reports about Black African women’s hair-beautification practices identified discourses named Commercialization, Chemical Harm, Empowerment, and Decolonization. The study also investigated these reports’ portrayal of subject positions because hair represents identity. Black African female subjects for whom hair beautification represented being empowered were portrayed in opposition to counterparts who, allied with decolonization trends, do not wish to practise dominant modes of hair beautification. These are circulating discursivities that represent interstices where Black African female identities are debated in a journalism that grapples with the articulation of nuanced positions. In intermediate positions, news reports portray African women as negotiating both ‘natural’ and colonized hair aesthetics amidst globalization and the image-conscious world.

KEYWORDS:

• Black beauty
• decolonization
• discourse analysis
• hair
• hair beautification
• subject positions

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Prevan Moodley

Prevan Moodley, currently senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in South Africa and formally lecturer at Vista University and the University of Pretoria, has research interests in discursive and social constructionist versions of social psychology. His expertise is in critical methods applied to popular culture and media representations of health and sexuality. He pioneered an undergraduate course in evolutionary psychology at UJ. A registered counselling psychologist, he also teaches health psychology and the application of counselling to problems of ‘diversity’ (i.e., race, gender, sexual expression, and sexual orientation).

Samukelisiwe Nosipho Mthembu

Samukelisiwe Nosipho Mthembu obtained a Master of Arts degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She is in independent private practice in Johannesburg. Her academic interests include include the self, identity, and psychopathology—all rooted within postmodern thinking and practice.