Abstract
At a time when the United States' battleground over control of women's bodies focuses largely on abortion rights, Fahs offers an engaging and compelling case for exploring adolescent and adult women's almost universal, lifelong practices of body hair removal. She convincingly argues that these regimes have no health or hygiene benefits (and indeed may lead to health complications), yet they are commonly embraced by women ourselves. She challenges readers to ask whether such commonly unexamined conformity to a social norm is freely chosen or bound by the costs of failure to conform. Most insightfully, she links body hair norms to broader feminist concerns involving patriarchy, power, and the necessity (and, potentially, the pleasure) of embodied resistance.
The book is divided into three distinct and complementary sections. In Part 1, Fahs draws on her competencies as a skilled researcher, teacher, and writer to guide the reader through the awakening of her students who participated in an optional class assignment to grow their body hair. I was aware of this work through her article in Psychology of Women Quarterly (Fahs, 2014), and I have used it in my own classes as a way to encourage students to think more deeply about the power of too-often invisible and unchallenged gender norms (Yoder, 2016). It is informative to see this journal article fleshed out in more detail.
In the three chapters of Part 2, Fahs exposes a series of themes related to body hair removal that cut across a select set of zines as well as drawings from a single artist. These themes range from the challenging (reminiscing about adolescent shame, normalizing body shame and anxiety, anger at double standards, racial consciousness, and body hair) to the hopeful (positive feelings toward body hair, resistance, and fighting back). She then moves beyond Western culture to explore the role of body hair in China's largely repressed feminist movement and to highlight a daring armpit hair contest.
In Part 3, Fahs analyzes original interviews with 22 diverse, United States, body hair rebels who intentionally grew their body hair over an extended period of time. She begins this analysis with an in-depth look at the emotions women attach to body hair removal and what they reveal about gender and power. She explores the tensions between the social (control over women's bodies) and the personal (the often-unexamined internalization of social norms), making visible pressures from partners (the most influential), family and friends, bosses, and even male strangers. Turning to the political and ideological, Fahs concludes that body hair has a surprising amount of power to elicit conformity at the same time that it can unsettle and unnerve.
As a researcher, I missed having details about how and why the analyzed zines and drawings were selected, and the inclusion of how the ads were framed to recruit the sample in Part 3 would have been informative. One of my own most enduring takeaways from the book comes from learning about the United States’ origins of body hair removal in Gillette's post-WWI push to sell razors and about China's aggressive marketing of a depilatory in 2005. I found it especially eye-opening to have the exploitative, consumerist roots of such a widely unquestioned social norm exposed across two disparate cultures and time periods. All-in-all, Unshaved is an unabashed and unparalleled reading for anyone wanting to think more deeply about body politics.
