This project is an excerpt from an ongoing ethnographically based exploration of Black women hair care professionals in the Los Angeles area and the domesticity of public service. The work extrapolates and applies the narrated experiences of the Black woman hair care professional (BWHCP) into the interlocking spheres of race, culture, performance, and the social marketing of identity in both the formal and informal economy. The project is an experimental ethnography working at the intersections of critical and interpretive methodologies that foreground the author/ethnographer's critical and poetic reflections on the process of interpreting ethnographic data and the experience of engaging the cultural familiar. The project further argues that in the practices and cultural performances of these women — the local is political and the political is global.
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