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Description
You have no ease of manner. Why? Because you're never sure about your
personal appearance. When a girl feels that she's perfectly groomed and dressed, she can forget that part of her. That's charm. The more parts of yourself you can afford to forget, the more charm you have. --F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," 1959 What makes a woman beautiful? Is it her eyes? Is it her skin? Her hair? Or, is it her sass? It's all that. And we make it all happen here, at the beauty shop. And I'm not just talking about making you look fly. In here we share everything. Nothing's off limits: family, gossip, money, and especially men. Trust me. We got ways of making you talk. So ask yourself. Are you ready to walk through these doors? Are you ready to hear what I hear? --Gina (Queen Latifah), trailer for Beauty Shop, MGM, 2005
As UNISEX SALONS REPLACE beauty parlors, as big box retailers oust department stores, something, arguably, is lost to women. Both beauty parlors and department stores, sites of female social, economic, and cultural participation, serve as key locations of women's gendered practices, their objectification of self, their performance not only of becoming but of being "female." It is easy to see the disciplinary power of such sites, the degree to which they impose limited definitions and practices on women. But women's participation in bodily adornment through hairstyle or dress is complicated, as Bernice's cousin argues in the short story quoted above. In a world in which the female is defined by the body, attention to some aspects of the body and its beautification can serve, paradoxically, as a way to move beyond those demands, to secure personal space in which considerations other than beauty might also emerge. Likewise, female spaces, as Gina declares her salon to be in the recent film, Beauty Shop, provide challenges as well as directives to women who live their lives in the shadow of such disciplinary scripts. These sites also arguably provide a potential "safe space" in a continuum of female-only spaces. In beauty parlors, women not only accommodate to or resist male-defined femininity, they also actively create beauty culture on their own terms.
Although beauty parlors did not originate as female-only places in which to interrogate the rituals and practices of beauty or other oppressive regimes, they arguably have the potential to serve as spaces in which pleasure and resistance coincide with oppression. Beauty shops in Willi Coleman's poetic exploration, "Among the Things That Use to Be," served black women in the pre-Black Power era as places where "lots more got taken care of than hair." In Coleman's telling, beauty shops provided a space for mulling over "our mutual discontent" and "could have been a hell-of-a-place to ferment a revolution." (1) This essay explores the ways in which beauty parlors are represented in contemporary cinema as fulfilling a similar anticipatory role. In films directed at women, these sites of female activity serve to engender positive female identity, challenge rather than simply reinforce negative notions of female beauty, and sometimes promote solidarity across differences of class, race, and age. On screen, beauty parlors serve as female spaces of limitation, but also of potentiality and of promise.
This essay also complicates the on-screen depiction of the beauty shop by inviting in and connecting with the cinematic, the real, and the historical neighborhood beauty parlor. The cinematic beauty parlor provides viewers with what film enables: "the reimagined, reinvented version of the real." (2) The beauty parlor becomes a space in which viewers can imagine for themselves a corner of resistance, a place in which to enact a feminist fantasy of personal growth and sisterly solidarity. Arguably, the progressive nature of these on-screen beauty parlors provides viewers with alternative ways of imagining relationships women have with themselves and others. By ignoring or negating the more complicated nature of beauty culture and of socially constructed differences among women, however, these "safe spaces" on film obscure power relations within gendered beauty culture and practice. Recent ethnographic scholarship on beauty parlor workers, for example, explores the ways in which the shared gender of women in salons is mitigated in significant ways by differences and dynamics of race and class between service providers and their clients. (3) If film viewers "cannot live social reality outside of the cultural forms through which we make sense of it," can they enact the cinematic promises of beauty culture given the complicated nature of social reality? (4)
COMBING MEMORIES: THE BEAUTY SHOP
The history of beauty parlors in the United States is a rich and, in recent years, well-documented one. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, women who worked on other women's hair transformed their own kitchens, bathrooms, and porches into beauty parlors and in so doing "turned domestic workers and farm girls into successful entrepreneurs." (5) Beauty shops grew in number and in prestige after the turn of the twentieth century, so that by the end of World War I hairdressing had become a middle-class, respectable occupation for black and white women across the United States. (6) Although the numbers most certainly would have been greater had the hundreds or thousands of unregistered beauty spots been included, 5,000 beauty shops were registered in 1920; by 1930, the number had reached 40,000. Even through the Great Depression, the beauty business persevered, in part because of women's entrepreneurial skills in introducing products that could be purchased only in salons. A 1948 survey showed a 37.5 percent rate of beauty shop attendance among women; by 1953 reported attendance had climbed to 52 percent. Importantly, as early as the 1930s, women's participation in beauty culture transcended not only race and region but social class as well. The pursuit of beauty through the services of the beauty parlor came to be considered a necessity for women, by women themselves and by the culture at large. Many women secured "standing" appointments and made hairdressing a regularly scheduled activity. During World War II, beauty shops could be found both on military bases and in factories employing large numbers of women. In fact, wartime factories proved more willing to provide beauty services than childcare. And women's patronization of beauty parlors did not and does not lessen with age: enter a nursing home today and you will almost always find a beauty parlor on site. (7)
By 1930, the local beauty parlor had become "the women's equivalent of the men's club: the place women went to be with each other." (8) As a small-town, white, Southern girl, Shirley Abbott accompanied her mother to her weekly appointments. "You go there to get your hair 'fixed' but that isn't the real reason, any more than men congregate at the county courthouse to transact legal business," she recalls. "It was an all-female society--no man would dare enter the place--and here, if nowhere else, women said what they thought about men." (9) In black communities, too, beauty parlors played a significant role in girls' socialization. Some scholars have argued that the beauty discipline, in this case, enacts a process by which black women designate hair as "good" or "bad" depending on its perceived proximity to white hair: black beauty, then, never emanates from blackness but gains currency as it moves away from real or perceived African heritage and identity. (10) The beauty parlor plays a role in demarcating difference and imposing disciplinary practices that enforce racism through beauty standards. bell hooks and others, however, remember the beauty parlor not as a discipline into whiteness but as "an important ritual," an instruction in womanhood. "It is not a sign of our longing to be white. It is not a sign of our quest to be beautiful. We are girls. It is a sign of our desire to be women. It is a gesture that says we are approaching womanhood. It is a rite of passage." (11)
Both black and white beauty parlors have provided a sense of community to women and girls, but in black shops the politics of belonging has often been more explicitly affirming of identity. In the South during the civil rights era, news of organized protests and voter registration drives spread through beauty parlors, as these spaces merged two working-class affiliations: the mutual aid society and social club. (12) Myles Horton, civil rights organizer at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, invited black and white beauticians together to teach them organizing skills. His work attracted little notice, as he put it, because no one felt threatened by hairdressing or hairdressers. He sagely understood these women as influential citizens, as independent, community-minded people. As late as the 1990s, civil rights-era posters and portraits could be found still hanging in black beauty shops. A 1990 documentary film, DiAna's Hair Ego, shows the centrality of a black-owned beauty parlor in South Carolina in the contemporary era. The women who own DiAna's Hair Ego facilitate considerable AIDS awareness and education right out of their shop. (13)
THE BEAUTY PARLOR IN FILM
The films under consideration here are popular romantic comedy and female friendship films, directed primarily at female audiences, in which the beauty parlor features in the plot either peripherally or prominently. They include, in chronological order, Desperately Seeking Susan, Steel Magnolias,... |
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