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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 2002 an FBI agent similarly recommended the forced shaving of detainee Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi “in order to reduce his influence” among other detainees. Al-Sharbi, the agent reported, “was getting too much respect” on the cellblock for his waist-long beard; the beard was soon removed. The investigation further recorded allegations that some guards shaved off half of detainees’ beards “in an effort to embarrass them,” while others imposed shaving as “a punishment for detainee misconduct.”⁴

In the searing debate that erupted around American treatment of detainees at Guantánamo, forced hair removal played an uncommon role. Critics of U.S. detention policies generally ignored the shaving altogether, instead focusing their condemnation on the use of waterboarding (suffocation by water).⁵ In contrast, supporters of U.S. policies seized upon descriptions of beard removal as evidence that conditions at Guantánamo were, as National Review editor Rich Lowry put it, “nothing to be ashamed of.”⁶ Referring to al-Qahtani’s interrogation, radio talk show host Michael Smerconish asked, “Where is the abuse? We shaved the guy’s beard. We played Christina Aguilera music and we pinned 9-11 victim photos to his lapel. That’s abuse?”⁷ A Washington Times editorial, citing the Time magazine report, characterized the treatment of Guantánamo detainees as “unpleasant”:

[I]nterrogators did a number of unpleasant things to al Qahtani to get him to talk. These included shaving his beard, stripping him naked, ordering him to bark like a dog, depriving him of sleep—to the music of Christina Aguilera, no less—and violating his “personal space” with a vulgar female interrogator.⁸

Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, summarized the mood among the Bush administration’s supporters when he concluded that “there have been FBI reports of rough treatment [at Guantánamo], but nothing I would consider torture.”⁹ Although the International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and detainees themselves repeatedly characterized beard removal as a violation of religious belief, personal dignity, and international treaty obligations, opponents and defenders of U.S. detention policy alike generally regarded forced shaving as a minor footnote to the nation’s larger “war on terror.”

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

The United States is hardly exceptional in witnessing the extension of medical authority: the “biomedicalization” of everyday life has been charted across the affluent industrialized world. With time and resources, a more exhaustive comparative study—a global history of sciences of hair—would be ideal.¹⁷ But given the disproportionate influence of U.S. definitions of “necessity” in the early twenty-first century (evident in the ICRC’s report on Guantánamo), sustained reflection on American habits seems a useful place to start.

BUT FIRST, A few notes on terminology may prove helpful. Because this book seeks to emphasize the contingency of ideas often treated as timeless, I take some care to employ the terms of identity and difference used by period writers themselves (e.g., “Indian,” “lunatic,” “man of science”). Relying on what might be called “actors’ categories” carries the obvious hazard of being misinterpreted as condoning the activities under discussion; I hope that readers will not mistake my intent in this way. To take but one example, I follow the U.S. government in using the word “detainee” to refer to the men held against their will at Guantánamo, not to convey support for indefinite detention but to stress the consequences of seemingly minute terminological decisions. “Criminals” would need to be charged with specific crimes; “prisoners” would be endowed with specific rights.¹⁸ Elsewhere, too, I resist the impulse to simply extend idioms backwards or forwards anachronistically: the nineteenth-century “invert” is not synonymous with the twentieth-century category of “homosexual,” nor “man” with “people,” nor “Mongolian” with “Asian.” The introduction of new words, or familiar words invested with new meaning, often signals subtle, consequential changes in thought.

I TAKE A similar approach to what might be called the “basic science” of hair and hair growth (figure I.2). Today, the terms of that science are often presented as straightforward and uncontroversial. Mammalian hair is said to grow from follicles in the dermis (the layer of skin between the epidermis and subcutaneous tissues) into a long shaft that extends above the skin surface. The root of each hair ends in an enlargement, called the bulb, that fits like a cap over the dermal papilla. Hair fibers are further made up of three layers (medulla, cortex, and cuticle). The cortex, shaped by the follicle, helps determine the shape of the fiber and resulting texture: round fibers result in relatively straight hair, oval fibers result in relatively curly or wavy hair. Follicles also contain special stem cells, unique to the skin, that regulate the cycle of hair growth.¹⁹ These claims, like other assertions about nature, are not arbitrary; they must respond to the material world or they will fade away. But, like all facts, they are bound to specific conditions of production—conditions that, upon closer inspection, often reveal more complexity and discord than are presented in most textbooks.²⁰ Take the very term “mammalian,” for instance. As historian Londa Schiebinger has argued, Enlightenment taxonomists wrestled with multiple classificatory schema before landing on the category of Mammalia; Linnaeus chose to focus on the breast (mammae) rather than equally valid terms, such as Pilosa or Lactentia, in response to broader cultural and political struggles.²¹ Subsequent chapters address other key scientific and medical taxonomies, including classifications of hair structure (such as distinctions between hair and feathers), type (such as Negroid or Caucasoid), and growth pattern (male or female).²² Throughout, I refrain from placing derisive quotation marks around those words or concepts no longer seen as “scientific.”

Figure I.2. Diagram of a hair follicle, from the 1918 U.S. edition of Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body.

Several previous readers of this work have taken issue with this agnostic approach, asking instead for straightforward declarations of what an outdated disease category “really means,” or who members of some now-defunct racial category might “actually have been” according to twenty-first-century parlance. Such requests seem to miss the point. The chief virtue of body hair as an object of historical study is that it wreaks havoc on established partitions, rendering their scaffolding unusually transparent. This book seeks to describe that scaffolding.

Many of the book’s sources were produced by highly educated Anglophone writers of European descent. Many of the claims made in those sources advance specific racial, national, economic, sexual, and religious interests at the expense of others. This is not to suggest that there are no other perspectives on these matters, no alternatives to dominant attitudes and practices; again, given time and resources, a more exhaustive exploration of subcultural, subaltern, and oppositional attitudes and practices would be ideal. Here, I focus on privilege, its distortions and silences. Considered in this way, history becomes a tool of cultural critique: a way to emphasize the conflict, uncertainty, and possibility present in realms too often taken for granted.²³

IN THE CONTEMPORARY United States, few practices are as taken for granted as the deliberate removal of body hair. (This study does not address the involuntary loss of hair associated with toxic exposures, alopecia, trichotillomania, cancer treatments, or male pattern baldness.)²⁴ Recent studies indicate that more than 99 percent of American women voluntarily remove hair, and more than 85 percent do so regularly, even daily. The usual targets, for the moment, are legs, underarms, eyebrows, upper lips, and bikini lines. Those habits, furthermore, appear to transcend ethnic, racial, and regional boundaries.²⁵ Over the course of a lifetime, one 2008 survey indicated, American women who shave (a relatively inexpensive way to remove hair) will spend, on average, more than ten thousand dollars and nearly two entire months of their lives simply managing unwanted hair. The woman who waxes once or twice a month will spend more than twenty-three thousand dollars over the course of her lifetime.²⁶ Most American men, too, now routinely remove facial hair, and increasing numbers modify hair elsewhere on their bodies. Research indicates that as of 2005, more than 60 percent of American men were regularly reducing or removing hair from areas of the body below the neck.²⁷ Although generally ignored by social scientists surveying hair removal trends, transsexual, transgender, and genderqueer people also express concern with hair management, and employ varying techniques of hair removal.²⁸

The ubiquity of personal hair removal in the United States is particularly striking given its relative novelty.²⁹ To be clear: forcible hair removal is not new. The use of hair removal to control or degrade, as with the beard removals at Guantánamo, has been imposed on inmates, soldiers, students, and other captives for centuries. Despite the recent treatment of U.S. detainees, American courts have tended to frown on the forced removal of hair by agents of the state.³⁰ In an influential 1879 decision, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen J. Field held that the San Francisco officials who cut off the long queues of Chinese men confined in county jails were in violation of both the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection and its prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.³¹ Nonstate actors also have removed hair as a way to maintain and reproduce specific relations of domination. Particularly telling in this regard were the slave traders who shaved and oiled the faces of enslaved men being prepared for sale. Because vigorous men drew higher prices, traders sometimes shaved away signs of grey beards or the first stages of pubertal growth in order to make the men appear younger. An eighteenth-century engraving of a slave market depicts an Englishman licking the face of an enslaved man to check for telltale traces of stubble before purchase (figure I.3).³²

Although overtly coercive hair removal has a long history in the United States, the more widespread practices of voluntary hair removal evident today are remarkably recent. So, too, is the dominant culture’s general aversion to visible hair.³³ From the first decades of contact and colonization through the first half of the nineteenth century, disdain for body hair struck most European and Euro-American observers as decidedly peculiar: one of the enigmatic characteristics of the continent’s indigenous peoples. In sharp contrast with the discourse surrounding bearded detainees at Guantánamo, the beardless “Indians” were described as exceptionally, even bizarrely, eager to pluck and shave. Only in the late nineteenth century did non-Native Americans, primarily white women, begin to express persistent concern about their own body hair, and not until the 1920s did large numbers begin routinely removing hair below the neck. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the revolution was nearly complete: where eighteenth-century naturalists and explorers considered hair-free skin to be the strange obsession of indigenous peoples, Cold War–era commentators blithely described visible body hair on women as evidence of a filthy, “foreign” lack of hygiene.³⁴ The normalization of smooth skin in dominant U.S. culture is not even a century old.

Figure I.3. An eighteenth-century engraving of a slave market, depicting a potential buyer licking an enslaved man’s chin to determine whether he had been shaved. (From Le Commerce de l’Amerique par Marseille [1764]. Reproduced courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.)

What accounts for this increasing antipathy toward body hair? Previous historical investigation sheds little light on the matter. Even the voluminous scholarship devoted to various beauty practices in the United States—cosmetics, breast enlargements, plastic surgery, hairstyling—largely overlooks hair removal.³⁵ How, then, might we understand the prevalence of practices that are repetitive and expensive, at best, and not infrequently messy, painful, disfiguring, and even deadly?

SEARCHING THROUGH EXISTING scholarly and popular literatures for answers, one discovers that two broad causal stories about hairlessness turn up with special frequency: the first might be referred to as the “evolutionary” explanation, the second as the “gendered social control” explanation.³⁶ The sheer repetition of these two accounts is revealing. Let us therefore pause here at the outset to look at them directly.

Perhaps the most common explanation for contemporary hair removal practices, inaugurated by Desmond Morris’s 1967 best-seller The Naked Ape, attributes the allure of hairlessness to deep, animal instinct. “Madison Avenue clearly exploits universal preferences,” summarizes one recent socio-biological account, “but it does not create them.”³⁷ Advocates of evolutionary explanations for routine hair removal often propose that the unusual hairlessness of humans—one of very few mammals to lack fur—allowed them to remain relatively free of fleas, ticks, lice, and other external parasites, along with the diseases they carry. The process of natural selection initiated by hairless hominids’ greater resistance to disease was in turn augmented and reinforced by sexual selection, as potential mates responded to the unconscious messages of health and fitness conveyed through hairless skin. Contemporary homo sapiens allegedly maintain that ancient pattern by waxing, plucking, shaving, and so on. Another version of the theory proposes that because early bipedal hominids were under pressure to carry their infants (since bipedal infants could no longer grasp with their feet, like other primates), infant survival depended on the maternal desire to carry—a desire made stronger, so the theory goes, by the pleasure of (hairless) skin-to-skin contact. Here again, sexual selection is thought to have augmented the process of natural selection, as adults sought hairless sexual partners in order to recreate the pleasurable skin-to-skin contact of the mother-infant relationship.³⁸ Echoing these evolutionary lines of thought in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy, investigators Mark Pagel and Sir Walter Bodmer suggest that the “common use of depilatory agents testifies to the continuing attractions of hairlessness, especially in human females.”³⁹

The popularity of evolutionary explanations for behaviors such as the “common use of depilatory agents” points to the rising cultural authority of the sciences noted above. They also raise as many questions as they answer (as Christian creationists are quick to point out).⁴⁰ If the common use of hair removers signals the instinctual appeal of hairlessness, why would hair removal be conducted so much more diligently and obsessively in some times and places than in others? Are contemporary Americans somehow more driven by evolutionary imperative than their eighteenth-century counterparts? More than twenty-first-century Germans or Italians? If the loss of body hair provided early humans with better health and longevity, why would pubic and armpit hair remain?⁴¹ And what’s so inherently distasteful about hairy skin–to–hairy skin contact? Isn’t soft, touchable fur a large part of the appeal of some domesticated animals (why they are lovingly referred to as “pets”)? As one paleoanthropologist, Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, concludes, “There are all kinds of notions as to the advantage of hair loss, but they are all just-so stories.”⁴²

Evolution did play a role in shaping American hair removal practices—but not because those practices reflect “Early Man’s” aversion to fleas and lice.⁴³ Rather, the growth of evolutionary thought, particularly the influence of Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871), transformed framings of body hair, especially women’s body hair. Rooted in traditions of comparative racial anatomy, evolutionary thought solidified hair’s associations with “primitive” ancestry and an atavistic return to earlier, “less developed” forms. Late-nineteenth-century medical and scientific experts extended these perceptions of degeneracy, linking hairiness to sexual inversion, disease pathology, lunacy, and criminal violence. Popular culture, too, advanced hair’s atavistic connotations. The display of a young, unusually hairy Laotian girl known as Krao as a “missing link,” a vestigial embodiment of civilized “man’s” primitive roots, exemplified this trend (figure I.4).⁴⁴ In short, readiness to attribute hair removal to the innate allure of evolutionary “fitness” is itself a consequence of cultural change.⁴⁵

A second common explanation for Americans’ intensifying pursuit of hairless skin focuses not on primordial instinct but on vested social interests: specifically, efforts to constrain women’s lives. In this narrative, hair removal appears as a mechanism of “gendered social control,” one exerted in proportion to women’s rising economic and political power.⁴⁶ This explanation, also born of a particular historical milieu, owes much of its popularity to analyses provided by feminist social scientists. Social psychologists, in particular, have found that women who resist shaving their legs are evaluated by others as “dirty” or “gross,” and that hairy women are rated as less “sexually attractive, intelligent, sociable, happy, and positive” than visibly hairless women.⁴⁷ None of this scholarship ascribes such evaluations to an orchestrated plot against women (other than the stakes that “multi-million dollar companies associated with hair removal” have in promoting the message that “hair is dirty”). Yet several studies propose that “the hairlessness norm” imposes distinct new psychological constraints on women and girls, even as other longstanding legal and social restrictions are eased.⁴⁸ The overall effect of the norm, social scientists suggest, is to produce feelings of inadequacy and vulnerability, the sense that women’s bodies are problematic “the way they naturally are.”⁴⁹ Practices of hair removal, in turn, are said to produce “pre-pubescent-like,” “highly sexualized” bodies, which ultimately “may contribute to the increasing objectification of young girls.”⁵⁰

Figure I.4. An 1887 handbill presenting Krao, a young girl from Laos exhibited across the United States and Europe as a “perfect specimen of the step between man and monkey.” (Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.)

The claim that adult hair removal is tied to the sexualization of young women is not unfounded: some of the first fully depilated female models displayed in mass-market pornography, such as a 1975 edition of Hustler, were explicitly labeled “Adolescent Fantasy.”⁵¹ It is also fair to say that the labor of maintaining hairless skin, like many other practices of body modification in twenty-first-century America, falls disproportionately to people with feminine gender identities. Naomi Wolf famously referred to the work of beautification as a “third shift” expected of women (or, we might clarify, those who seek to be identified as women), wedged alongside the first shift of paid work and the second shift of unpaid household and caring work for the family.⁵²

Yet the “gendered social control” narrative also suggests a rather startling level of conformity on the part of the women being analyzed, who appear to trudge off to their repetitive, demeaning “third shifts” without protest. Not surprisingly, many women balk at this depiction. Indeed, perhaps the most intriguing finding in the social-scientific literature on body hair is that while U.S. women readily recognize the normative pressures on them to remove their hair, and report those 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.