(Un)body Double: A Rhapsody on Hairless Identity

In the arena of hairlessness, I speak from experience. I am one of the more than two million women living with breast cancer in the United States.² In a period of six days, from July 5 to July 11, 2004, I lost all my hair. It was an extraordinary experience. I had had waist-long hair since the 1960s. My hair had kept my head warm in winter; in the summer it had taken work to stuff it into a swim cap. My comb and brush seemed like old friends who had moved out of town.

The daily aspect of hairlessness, the accretion of many days of being bald, and the psychological work that women must do to live with that baldness have received too little scholarly attention.³ Several of the essays in this volume, beginning with Arthur Frank's, enjoin us to move the story of cancer—its medical, bioethical, and autobiographical strands—beyond clinical and authoritative narrative modes to register the everyday meanings of cancer, to see it from the embodied perspective of the sufferer who studies how to "just [get] through the day."⁴ This rhapsody, so named because of the improvisational character of the uncharted territory in cancer's story of hairlessness, provides one attempt to get at what can happen physically in a few days and how the residue of that change can resonate psychologically for a long time afterwards.

The material conditions of hairlessness are rooted in other forms of loss—some of it material, some of it more abstract. Those who have experienced cancer understand that at some profound level, the self becomes fragmented and cannot be reassembled as it once was.⁵ What happens to the sense of self when the image the body projects during an illness is unfamiliar? How does the visible evidence of physical change, specifically illness-induced hair loss, square with an individual's understanding of an authentic self? If one's image is unrecognizable, one must find one's way back to a notion of the self that can be accepted—a journey that necessitates hard work. We might see this as a chemotherapeutic metaphor in that we are forced to ingest a substance (the unrecognizable image) that our stomachs would rather regurgitate.

Gender and Baldness

I begin with the premise that hairlessness, or alopecia as it is known in medical dictionaries, differs, culturally speaking, from baldness. Ask people in the western world what image comes to mind when baldness is mentioned and they speak of men: Yul Brynner, Telly Savalas, Michael Jordan, and Bruce Willis, men who bank on baldness for sex appeal.⁶ For centuries, what grows on women's heads has connoted sexual vitality and fecundity. A luxurious head of hair is one sign through which female sexuality has been written on the body. As a gendered construct, it might be argued that the absence of hair on the head is male and its presence female. Men lose their hair if they carry the gene for male pattern baldness, which they can inherit from either of their mothers' parents. Baldness happens as men age; their shiny pates argue warmly for the avuncular. When women lose their hair … but women do not lose their hair as a rule.⁷ A woman with short hair does not necessarily excite notice, but a woman without hair puzzles spectators. At a glance, casual observers "other" her, regard her as disfigured. They may equate her baldness with physical disability or criminality; they may even read her as male. When a flight attendant called breast cancer activist Catherine Lord "sir" as she traveled from the West Coast to the East, Lord initially felt that she was being "disappeared." But on further reflection, she decided that she would "rather be [seen as] a bald white guy with bracelets than a sick white woman"; the gender switch presented a more palatable identity than that of the feminized body marked by illness.⁸

Hairlessness may thus function to consign a woman-in-public to an indeterminate gender. If gender were to exist in a more...