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The Last Taboo: women and body hair
This is the first academic book ever written on women and body hair, a subject which has, until now, been seen as too trivial, ridiculous or revolting to write about. Even feminist writers or researchers on the body have found remarkably little to say about body hair, usually not mentioning it at all. If womens body hair is noted, it is either simply to accept its removal as an inevitable aspect of female beautification, or to argue against hair removal as a return to a natural and un-oppressed female body. The only texts to elaborate on body hair are guides on how to remove it, medical texts on hirsutism, or fetishistic pornography on hairy women. The last taboo asks how and why any particular issue can become defined as self-evidently too silly or too mad to write about. Using a wide range of thinking from gender theory, queer theory, critical and literary theory, history, art history, anthropology and psychology, the contributors argue that, in fact, body hair plays a central role in constructing masculinity and femininity and sexual and cultural identities. Arguing from the theoretical position that identity and the body are culturally and historically constructed, the chapters each analyse through a specific focus how body hair underpins ideas of the cultural and natural in Western culture. This book will provide academic researchers, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates with a completely fresh perspective on all of the fields mentioned above.