Hair, Identity, Beauty, and the Self in Muslim Contexts: Emotional Landscapes and Changing Femininities Beyond the Veil

This project analyses how Muslim women’s hair shapes everyday intimate lifeworlds, processes of social transformation, and new religious identities in contemporary Egypt, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. In so doing, it will turn the global contemporary headscarf debate on its head. By shifting the paradigm from the veil as a marker of inter alia religiosity, HAIR examines how the attitudes and practices of Muslim women towards their hair condition religious norms and social expectations.Hair itself remains a neglected theme, despite being central to issues of identity, beauty and processes of individualisation. Even so, there is much contention concerning how Muslim women wear their hair, think about it, and feel about it. Indeed, hair is at the very root of the headscarf debate. Hair is both a mundane issue and a disputed one for many women. As such, it is a contentious field that spans the negotiation of gender dynamics, beauty ideals, political orientation, and religious norms. What, then, do we learn when we study women’s (in-)abilities to show or (not) show hair? What does the (in-)ability to conceal one’s hair mean in different contexts? HAIR will address these questions by examining the intricate entanglement of the body, emotions and the gendered self within changing social landscapes by combining research approaches rooted in Islamic studies, social anthropology and anthropology of emotions. It will do so through a blended methodology of field research, digital ethnography and literary analyses carried out in Egypt, Lebanon and the UAE. Through this approach, HAIR will produce two doctoral dissertations, two monographs, and three journal articles, culminating in a new synthesis that explains the importance of Muslim women’s head hair. HAIR offers a path-breaking approach to gendered body politics that will open new frontiers in the study of women in Muslim majority and minority societies.