Feminist Interrogations of Women's Head Hair

Feminist Interrogations of Women's Head Hair
Author: Sigal Barak-Brandes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2018-06-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429999887

Feminist scholarship has looked extensively at the perception of the body as a flexible construction of cultural and social dictates, but head hair has been often overlooked. Feminist Interrogations of Women's Head Hair brings new focus to this underrepresented topic through its intersections with contemporary socio-cultural contexts. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines investigate private and public meanings associated with female head hair, problematising our assumptions about its role and implications in the 21st Century. Readers are invited to reflect on the use of hair in popular culture, such as children’s television and pop album artwork, as well as in work by women artists. Studies examine the lived experiences of women from a range of backgrounds and histories, including curly-haired women in Israel, African American women, and lesbians in France. Other essays interrogate the connotations of women’s head hair in relation to body image, religion, and aging. Feminist Interrogations of Women's Head Hair brings together cultural discourses and the lived experiences of women, across time and place, to reveal the complex and ever-evolving significance of hair. It is an important contribution to the critical feminist thought in cultural studies, fashion studies, media studies, African American studies, queer theory, gerontology, psychology, and sociology.

Embodiment and Representations of Beauty

Embodiment and Representations of Beauty
Author: Esther Hernández-Medina
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2024-09-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1837979952

Interrogating beauty's very definition, this volume of Advances in Gender Research explores beauty as an avenue to create alternative knowledge as well as a conduit to engage in critical conversations on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, illness, and fitness.

Hair Tells a Story

Hair Tells a Story
Author: Margo Maine
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-12-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1476688613

The body is the canvas upon which women paint their secrets, their hopes and dreams, pain and disappointments. Hair has long played a role in the struggles for power, self-determination and autonomy--serving as a nonverbal language that represents women's lives. However, pain, anxiety, racism, sexism and rigid beauty standards can too often underlie these stories. Modern events like the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed societal barriers that prevent the free and equitable expression of hair. Although countless books and articles address body image, the personal psychology and the meaning of hair have been missing. This work empowers women to understand complex hair-head-heart connections, and pressures. Above all, the text emphasizes that hair is never just hair.

Counseling the Contemporary Woman

Counseling the Contemporary Woman
Author: Suzanne Degges-White
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2020-05-22
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1538123622

This book provides a comprehensive exploration of the challenges women may face as they navigate the multiple roles that they carry. Attention is given to the unique cultural identities that women embody and suggestions are provided to help counselors acknowledge the various aspects of each client’s intersectional identity. In addition to theory, we provide suggestions for practical application of relevant interventions and strategies for helping women achieve their goals. A foundation is provided that explore the multiple layers of development that occur during adolescence, adulthood, midlife, and older adulthood. Women face numerous challenges related to identity development and relationships. These challenges can generate psychological and emotional distress that lead women to seek professional assistance in finding solutions to their issues. With more choices than in generations past, women can face unexpected and unanticipated challenges and barriers to their individual and relational development. This book is organized around contemporary developmental and relational rites of passage women experience in adulthood. Traditional rites of passage include birth, menarche, marriage, and death. These events still hold significance but women’s lives today follow expanded and complex trajectories. Numerous transitions, such as attending college, navigating employment opportunities and the relational challenges that women face in various areas of life, are presented and addressed in this book from a clinician’s perspective providing practitioners with insight and practical knowledge. In this book, we cover choices related to such topics as career, relationships, parenthood, and support networks. We also explore the struggles that women face including abuse, depression, anxiety, feelings of low self-worth, loss, and addictions. Best practices in counseling women are highlighted and utilized in case study examples. The relationships created by women impact their lives and this book helps the reader to gain insight into how women can take ownership for their relationships and choices.

A Vindication of the Redhead

A Vindication of the Redhead
Author: Brenda Ayres
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2021-12-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030835154

A Vindication of the Redhead investigates red hair in literature, art, television, and film throughout Eastern and Western cultures. This study examines red hair as a signifier, perpetuated through stereotypes, myths, legends, and literary and visual representations. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier provide a history of attitudes held by hegemonic populations toward red-haired individuals, groups, and genders from antiquity to the present. Ayres and Maier explore such diverse topics as Judeo-Christian narratives of red hair, redheads in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, red hair and gender identity, famous literary redheads such as Anne of Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking, contemporary and Neo-Victorian representations of redheads from the Black Widow to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and more. This book illuminates the symbolic significance and related ideologies of red hair constructed in mythic, religious, literary, and visual cultural discourse.

Practical Theology and Majority World Epistemologies

Practical Theology and Majority World Epistemologies
Author: Alfred Brunsdon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2024-11-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1040182887

This book offers insights into the thinking of majority world practical theologians and introduces the reader to faith realities previously unknown in a quest to create a more inclusive and welcoming practical theological network. Practical theologians are situated in all corners of the globe attempting to make sense of their lived experiences and of those around them from a faith perspective. Historically, practical theology tended to be constructed from academics situated in the West and indirectly marginalized those in and from the majority world. Against this backdrop, this book is a deliberate attempt to empower practical theological voices from the further corners of the global village, based upon the conviction that sharing epistemologies creates an opportunity not only to learn about others and the contexts in which they live, but from them, enhancing the meaning making of practical theology in the present. Cognisant that epistemology as a formal discipline does not always centre lived experience, practical theology has historically prioritised the importance of wisdom, worldview, and a way of life for individual and collective knowing. The diverse issues addressed in this work offers insights into the thinking of mainly Asian and African practical theologians and introduces readers to the faith realities previously unknown to create a more inclusive and welcoming practical theological network. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Practical Theology.

Leisure and Cultural Change in Israeli Society

Leisure and Cultural Change in Israeli Society
Author: Tali Hayosh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2020-02-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000044483

Providing an inclusive, yet multi- layered perspective on leisure cultures in dynamic hegemonic, subcultural, and countercultural communities, this volume investigates the disciplinary and interdisciplinary aspects of leisure studies in the age of mass migration, nationalism, cultural wars, and conflicted societies in Israel. Israeli society has struggled with complicated geopolitical, intercultural, economic, and security conditions since the establishment of the State of Israel. Consequently, the emergent leisure cultures in Israel are vibrant, diversified, exuberant, and multifaceted, oscillating between Western and Middle Eastern tendencies. The chapters in this edited volume reflect dramatic influences of globalization on Israeli traditions, on one hand, and emergent local practices that reflect a communal quest of originality and authenticity, on the other hand. This book opens up a critical perspective on the tension between contested leisure cultures that are interconnected with spatial and temporal changes and interchanges. Examining leisure as a part of social, interethnic, physical, gendered, and sexual changes, the volume is a key text for scholars and students interested in leisure culture, Israeli society, education, cultural and media studies, and the Middle East.

Me, My Hair, and I

Me, My Hair, and I
Author: Elizabeth Benedict
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1616205431

“[A] splendid collection . . . By turns wry, tender, pointed, and laugh-out-loud funny.” —Publishers Weekly “Untangles the many truths about hair, and the lives we lead underneath it.” —Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bébé Ask a woman about her hair, and she just might tell you the story of her life. Ask a whole bunch of women about their hair, and you could get a history of the world. Surprising, insightful, frequently funny, and always forthright, the essays in Me, My Hair, and I are reflections and revelations about every aspect of women’s lives from family, race, religion, and motherhood to culture, health, politics, and sexuality. They take place in African American kitchens, at Hindu Bengali weddings, and inside Hasidic Jewish homes. The conversation is intimate and global at once. Layered into these reminiscences are tributes to influences throughout history: Jackie Kennedy, Lena Horne, Farrah Fawcett, the Grateful Dead, and Botticelli’s Venus. The long and the short of it is that our hair is our glory—and our nemesis, our history, our self-esteem, our joy, our mortality. Every woman knows that many things in life matter more than hair, but few bring as much pleasure as a really great hairdo.

Navigating the Messy Middle

Navigating the Messy Middle
Author: Ann Douglas
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2022-10-01
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1771623446

Roughly 68 million North American women currently grapple with the challenges of midlife, faced with a culture that tells them their “best-before date” has long passed. In Navigating the Messy Middle, Ann Douglas pushes back against this toxic narrative, providing a fierce and unapologetic book for and about midlife women. In this deeply validating and encouraging book, Douglas interviews well over one hundred women of different backgrounds and identities, sharing their diverse conversations about the complex and intertwined issues that women must grapple with at midlife: from family responsibilities to career pivots, health concerns to building community. Readers will find a book that offers practical, evidence-based strategies for thriving at midlife, coupled with compelling first-person stories. Offering purpose and meaning in a life stage that can otherwise feel out of control, Douglas pushes back against the message that women at midlife are no longer relevant and needed, highlighting the far-reaching economic, political and social impacts of these messages and providing a refreshing counter-narrative that maps out a path forward for women at midlife. Both a midlife love letter and a lament, Navigating the Messy Middle both celebrates the beauty and rages at the many injustices of this life stage and provides readers with the tools to chart their own course.

The Last Taboo

The Last Taboo
Author: Karín Lesnik-Oberstein
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2006
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 9780719075001

'The Last Taboo' argues that body hair plays a central role in constructing masculinity and femininity and sexual and cultural identities. It asks how and why any particular issue can become defined as 'self-evidently' too silly or too mad to write about.