Black Hair and Textures of Defensiveness

Full pink lips part to reveal even white teeth. Carefully formed words issue forth:

I’m on my way to work. It’s always a performance. I perform for them and I make them perform for me. Today I’m going to let them touch me. I know they want to. They told me. They told me at work. I’m on my way to work and I’m going to perform for them. I’m gonna let them touch me. I know they’ll like it. I’m on my way to work.¹

We see a tight shot of a woman’s mouth as she says these words. She speaks slowly, sometimes pausing to lick her lips. The screen is filled with lips, teeth, and light brown skin. The screen fades to black and suddenly we are “at work”—signaled by a static shot over a row of cubicles next to a window. A screen saver flickers on an idle computer; we hear ambient office sounds. Men’s voices are mixed in over the din. We hear phrases like: “It was actually, um, fairly uncomfortable,” “It’s not an activity that I would have any experience with. It’s not something that I enjoy doing, that violent sort of physical contact,” “It felt extremely voyeuristic and somewhat awkward to be doing this in the cafeteria,” “I remember it feeling weird only because I never felt her hair before like that and I remember this scent of her hair or this hair spray, hair product that she used actually lasting on my hands for a while, probably the rest of the afternoon,” “Yeah, it was definitely odd, it was crazy, it was memorable, um,” “It felt like I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing, but wanted to do,” “So it was definitely an interesting experience. I’ve never been involved with anything like this and uh had a good time and a lot of fun,” and “it was definitely the first time. It was uh soft, you know a little weird at first, um.”²

The encounter, which occurs offscreen, is erotically charged. It tells the story of white men touching a brown body, yet it is not the conventional narrative that attaches to that scene. Having set herself up in the cafeteria of her workplace, the artist Endia Beal invited her coworkers to touch her hair and she filmed their responses. Beal’s acknowledgment that she is performing black femininity for her coworkers frames the interaction as extraprofessional and underscores the desire underlying these moments of touch. The coworkers’ responses range from discomfort to excitement to curiosity to awkwardness. In their performances of shock-discomfort-desire, the men voice surprise at the novelty of the experience. This novelty, whether it is an unexpected intimacy with a coworker in the cafeteria or a brush with racialized difference, does several things. It locates Beal’s difference in her hair; it underlines the irreducibility of that difference (we hear descriptors like odd, crazy, weird); and it emphasizes the affective work that this difference performs. As Beal’s art experiment illustrates, black hair stands in for thinking about black female subjects in multiple ways. Though the experiment frames these questions differently, at its heart are underlying tensions between black femininity and professionalism, objectification and performance, and the violence and eroticism of difference.

In this essay I would like to work through the affective textures of black hair. Much has already been said about black hair. In Ayanna Bird’s history of black hair, she begins by describing the importance of hair as a marker of social status in different African cultures and weaves a narrative of various technologies and regulations that have led to the complicated hair politics that are at work today.³ Noliwe Rooks draws on history, familial narrative, and advertising to tease out the differing historical relationships between hair and black women’s relationship to the state.⁴ In a similar vein, Ingrid Banks also produces connections between black women’s political agency and their feelings about hair and beauty.^5...