• Human Material Loop sets out to commercialise textiles made from hair
    https://www.dezeen.com/2023/11/28/human-material-loop-textiles-from-hair

    Dutch company Human Material Loop is using an unusual waste source to make a zero-carbon wool alternative that requires no land or water use: human hair.

    People’s discomfort around the use of human hair is said to fade when they see the fabric

    #tissus #cheveux

    • ça me parait pas mal. récupérer tel ou tel morceau pour ne pas gâcher l’entièreté des corps d’exterminés ou ne pas négliger d’éventuels usages des déchets déjà produits par des vivants, c’est la nuit (et brouillard) et le jour. voilà des matériaux organiques de qualité qui n’auront pas à être produits.

      + Hypoallergenic by nature
      + Cruelty free
      + 100% natural
      + Fully traceable
      + Value from waste

      https://humanmaterialloop.com
      je m’attendais à trouver des tarifs élevés, or ils sollicitent des dons...

      #cheveux #textile

    • Par contre on traduit un peu vite « hair » par « cheveux » alors que ça veut aussi dire « poils ». Et là, quand on pense à certains barbus d’ici et d’ailleurs, ça donne moins envie.

    • la laine c’est pas mal, ça permet aussi de vivre avec des animaux utiles pour plein de choses Les montagnes se sont vidées parce que les tracteurs tombent dans les pentes et le cheval de trait est loin. les ronces reprennent leurs droits et la forêt gagne. Mes cheveux ne feront pas l’isolation de mon toit, alors que les moutons si en plus, merci, d’empêcher les chasseurs de venir dans des forêts qui n’existent pas !
      Des fois je pige pas.
      #brouteuse

    • mais c’est pas ou bien des moutons et des chèvres ou bien des pilosités humaines devenues inutiles, pourquoi pas les deux et moins de plastique ?

      si on prend leur pub au mot, récupérer un tiers des cheveux jetés en Europe, c’est déjà une bonne manière de produire moins (sous réserve que la récup ne nécessite pas beaucoup plus de travail et d’énergie que mettons du #plastique Shein)


      edit regardant à nouveau le chiffre, je crois que c’est inévitablement un produit de niche rare et cher, que ça vaut moins que le #recyclage des tissus déjà gaspillés dans la fringue

    • @arno une très ancienne tradition d’usage du cheveux persiste dans le métier de posticheur, pour les personnes sous chimio ou le spectacle et jusqu’à très récemment pour la calvitie.
      Mon arrière grand père était posticheur et ma mère possède toujours sa poupée d’enfance avec de vrais cheveux (c’était bien souvent le cas avant l’apparition du synthétique).
      J’ai moi-même fabriqué un masque de « bête » pour un spectacle. Pour l’aspect dru, j’avais le choix entre le poil de yack ou le cheveu d’Indonésienne. Pour une question de budget j’ai choisi le premier.

  • Mercure, pesticides, plastifiants : un cocktail toxique dépisté dans les cheveux des sénateurs
    https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2023/06/27/mercure-pesticides-plastifiants-un-cocktail-toxique-depiste-dans-les-cheveux

    La présence des terres rares, plus importante que celle rencontrée chez la population générale, peut être expliquée, selon le laboratoire, par l’utilisation importante et régulière des téléphones, ordinateurs portables et tablettes.

    #pollution

  • Les produits pour lisser les cheveux, notamment par les femmes noires, font courir un risque accru de cancer de l’utérus.

    Use of Straighteners and Other Hair Products and Incident Uterine Cancer | JNCI : Journal of the National Cancer Institute | Oxford Academic
    https://academic.oup.com/jnci/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jnci/djac165/6759686

    L’étude se fonde sur les données de près de 33.500 Américaines, recrutées entre 2003 et 2009 et suivies sur quasiment onze années. Au total, 378 femmes ont développé un cancer de l’utérus.

    Pour les femmes n’ayant jamais utilisé de produit de lissage capillaire, le risque de développer un cancer de l’utérus d’ici leurs 70 ans est de 1,64%, contre 4,05% pour les utilisatrices fréquentes, a détaillé dans un communiqué Alexandra White, auteure principale de l’étude.

    #cancer #perturbateurs_endocriniens #cancérigènes #cheveux_frisés #femmes_noires

    Et comme ce n’est jamais indiqué nulle part, je te rappelle que les #perturbateurs endocriniens investissent les cellules fœtales car ils ont quasiment la même structure moléculaire que les hormones humaines. Et qu’il faut attendre un certains nombre d’années avant qu’elles ne déclenchent des cancers, une fois le foetus devenu adulte, donc longtemps après, (ou pas). C’est la mère « contaminée » qui est le véhicule des hormones perturbées par ces produits de merde à base de #pétrole #plastique #chimie #moderne Aujourd’hui ce sont elles qui se choppent ces cancers, demain ce seront leurs enfants mais tout le monde s’en fout.

    Avec le tag #L'OREAL_criminel puisqu’ils sont les promoteurs internationaux du défrisage des cheveux crépus.

    Hair products may contain hazardous chemicals with endocrine-disrupting and carcinogenic properties. Previous studies have found hair product use to be associated with a higher risk of hormone-sensitive cancers including breast and ovarian cancer; however, to our knowledge, no previous study has investigated the relationship with uterine cancer.
    Methods

    We examined associations between hair product use and incident uterine cancer among 33 947 Sister Study participants aged 35-74 years who had a uterus at enrollment (2003-2009). In baseline questionnaires, participants in this large, racially and ethnically diverse prospective cohort self-reported their use of hair products in the prior 12 months, including hair dyes; straighteners, relaxers, or pressing products; and permanents or body waves. We estimated adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) to quantify associations between hair product use and uterine cancer using Cox proportional hazard models. All statistical tests were 2-sided.
    Results

    Over an average of 10.9 years of follow-up, 378 uterine cancer cases were identified. Ever vs never use of straightening products in the previous 12 months was associated with higher incident uterine cancer rates (HR = 1.80, 95% CI = 1.12 to 2.88). The association was stronger when comparing frequent use (>4 times in the past 12 months) vs never use (HR = 2.55, 95% CI = 1.46 to 4.45; Ptrend = .002). Use of other hair products, including dyes and permanents or body waves, was not associated with incident uterine cancer.
    Conclusion

    These findings are the first epidemiologic evidence of association between use of straightening products and uterine cancer. More research is warranted to replicate our findings in other settings and to identify specific chemicals driving this observed association.

    #utérus #sein

  • Bienvenue chez #Frange_Radicale, #salon_de_coiffure sans prix genrés et sans patron

    Ouvert après le deuxième confinement, l’établissement parisien Frange Radicale propose une alternative aux salons de coiffure traditionnels. Rencontre.

    Depuis l’ouverture du salon en décembre 2020, les fauteuils de Frange Radicale ne désemplissent pas.

    Pas évident pourtant de distinguer l’entrée du salon quand on passe par la rue Carducci, nichée dans le 19e arrondisssement de #Paris, à quelques minutes des Buttes Chaumont. Il faut connaitre l’adresse pour savoir que derrière les bosquets se cache un salon de coiffure. Ou plutôt une « coopérative de coiffure », comme il est écrit en rose au-dessus de la baie vitrée.

    Le salon de coiffure attire les gens du quartier, mais une bonne partie de sa clientèle passe aussi l’entrée parce que Frange Radicale n’est pas un salon tout à fait comme les autres.

    On y coupe les cheveux certes, mais à des tarifs abordables et non genrés, et surtout, on y fait en sorte que vous vous y sentiez bien, même quand vous avez fui les salons des années durant, échaudées par l’ambiance normative parfois pesante qui y règnent.

    Se lancer en pleine pandémie

    Chez Frange Radicale, la déco est épurée, les plantes vertes nombreuses, et les fauteuils vintage stylés. Bref, on s’y sent déjà bien, et pas juste parce qu’on arrive pile au moment où la playlist du salon passe du Aya Nakamura.

    Aux commandes : Léa, Pierre et Anouck, qui ont fait le pari d’ouvrir leur salon en pleine pandémie.

    Ce n’est pas que l’amour du coup de ciseaux qui les a réunis. Tous les trois se sont croisés dans des squats autonomes et à l’école de coiffure, avant de monter Frange Radicale : « On a tous été salariés dans différents salons de coiffure et on s’est rendues compte que ce modèle ne nous convenait pas », explique Anouck.

    « Pour les salariés, il faut toujours travailler plus, plus vite, et on avait envie d’expérimenter un nouveau modèle, de monter notre coopérative, notre entreprise détenue et gérée par nous, les salariés. »

    Un argument qui marche auprès des clientes, à l’instar de Marion, venue pour la première fois après avoir entendu parler du salon par ses collègues : « L’idée de la coopérative m’a plu. C’est un projet politique cool, alors je suis venue pour soutenir. »

    Tout le monde au même prix

    Chez Frange Radicale, on applique la règle des prix non genrés, à l’instar de quelques salons comme Bubble Factory à Paris, Holy Cut à Bordeaux, ou bien Queer Chevelu, qui pratique le prix libre.

    Les tarifs sont fixés en fonction de la coupe et non en fonction du genre du ou de la cliente : 35€ la coupe longue, 25€ la coupe courte, 15€ la coupe tondeuse, et la couleur sur devis.

    Un choix qui répond à la logique la plus élémentaire, même si la majeure partie des salons perpétue aujourd’hui la tradition des coupes « femmes » à des prix largement supérieurs aux coupes « hommes » :

    « Ça veut dire que les femmes qui ont les cheveux courts paient plus cher pour un travail qui est souvent similaire, et les hommes qui ont les cheveux longs, ce qui est quand même la mode en ce moment, paieraient moins cher qu’une femme qui a les cheveux longs ? », s’agace Léa.

    Si tant de salons n’ont pas (encore) franchi le pas, c’est aussi que les coiffeurs et les coiffeuses sont formées à envisager leurs coupes en fonction du genre des clients, comme l’explique Anouck :

    « Ça commence dès l’école de coiffure où on t’apprend qu’une coupe femme, tu ne la fais pas en trente minutes comme une coupe homme, il faut y mettre plus de temps, il faut être plus raffiné au niveau des tempes… Il y a plein d’arguments… qui sont des arguments à la con parce qu’on fait ce qu’on veut avec ses cheveux ! Mais ce sont aussi des arguments qui vont justifier une tarification supérieure pour les femmes. »

    Un coup de ciseau dans la binarité

    En pratiquant des tarifs égalitaires, Frange Radicale s’est rapidement forgé une réputation de salon où tout le monde est bienvenu, où une femme peut demander une coupe ultra courte sans être regardée de travers et où toutes les audaces capillaires sont acceptées.

    S’il n’a pas été pensé comme un salon destiné spécifiquement aux personnes queers, Frange Radicale attire une clientèle qui a longtemps fui les salons classiques où s’exercent les normes binaires et hétéronormatives. « Ici, nos corps et nos coupes ne sont pas étranges », explique Clémence, cliente fidèle à la nuque bien dégagée :

    « Ça diffère tellement des salons où une coiffeuse un jour m’a quand même dit “attention je laisse les pattes sinon c’est des femmes qui vont vous draguer hihi”. Ce à quoi j’ai répondu : « Rasez, merci ! » »

    Politique, le cheveu ? « Les cheveux, ça a toujours été quelque chose de revendicatif, depuis toujours, que ce soient les crêtes des punk, les afros, ou les cheveux longs pour les gars, ou les mulets », assène Léa.

    Pour Anouck, c’est non seulement un marqueur d’identité, mais aussi un signe de reconnaissance : « Moi, j’arrive à savoir si une fille est gouine à sa coupe de cheveux. », plaisante-t-elle.

    « Et il ne faut pas oublier les salons en tant que lieux », insiste Pierre :

    « Les gens s’y croisent, s’y reconnaissent, il y a des journées où trois voisins de la résidence d’en face se croisent ici. Ça crée du lien social. Et on en a vraiment besoin en ce moment… »

    Clichés tenaces et discriminations

    Être coiffeuse, c’est encore aujourd’hui s’exposer à pas mal d’idées reçues rarement bien intentionnées. Anouck et Léa en ont régulièrement fait l’expérience :

    « Quand tu rencontres des gens et que tu leur dis que tu es coiffeuse, on te fait sentir que c’est naze. Et quand tu es une meuf, il y a un côté hyper sexiste, car tout de suite ça veut dire que tu es stupide, que tu es une fille facile, ou que tu es un peu bébête. »

    Anouck se souvient de cette cliente qui lui a lancé : « Et donc, toi t’aimais pas l’école ? » :

    « J’ai trouvé ça bizarre, mais je n’ai pas compris tout de suite. Ce n’est qu’après que j’ai compris qu’elle me disait ça parce que je suis coiffeuse. Bah si, j’étais bonne à l’école… mais ça n’a rien à voir ! »

    Derrière ces réactions, c’est aussi tout un corps de métier où les comportements sexistes et racistes sont encore monnaie courante.

    Tous les trois l’ont vu dès l’école et leurs premiers stages : ce sont des patrons qui demandent aux filles de changer leur prénom à consonance étrangère, des employées à qui on demande de ne pas parler parce qu’on estime qu’elles ne parlent pas assez bien le français, à qui on demande de se lisser les cheveux, ou de porter jupe et talons pour faire plus féminine.

    Tenter l’aventure

    Anouck, Pierre et Léa en avaient assez de l’abattage, des coupes standardisées faites à la chaîne. Avec Frange Radicale, on prend le temps et cela leur permet de réenchanter leur travail, d’évoluer dans des conditions plus respectueuses. « Ça améliore grave la qualité de notre travail, j’ai l’impression que même nos coupes sont beaucoup mieux », assure Anouck.

    « On est trois avec un salon, c’est très ambitieux de vouloir revaloriser tout le métier », reconnaît Pierre. Pas envie d’être des donneurs de leçons, les trois coiffeurs et coiffeuses espèrent au contraire que leur salon donnera envie à d’autres de se lancer. Et ce n’est pas si inaccessible, affirme Léa :

    « On n’a pas fait quelque chose de si exceptionnel. On a grave galéré, mais on est trois, on se partage tout, et c’est pas du tout insurmontable. On a le salon qu’on veut, on fait exactement ce qu’on veut, on a les congés qu’on veut, on se paye comme on veut… c’est tout bénéf’ ! »

    Frange Radicale ne transformera peut-être pas le monde de la coiffure, en tout cas pas tout de suite, mais à son petit niveau, le salon pourrait bien faire naître des envies d’indépendance et d’autonomie à d’autres dans la profession.

    https://www.madmoizelle.com/bienvenue-chez-frange-radicale-salon-de-coiffure-parisien-sans-prix-gen

    #coopérative #tarif #prix #tarif_non-genré #genre #cheveux

    ping @isskein

  • Des coiffeurs•ses en autogestion
    https://utoplib.blogspot.com/2021/11/coiffeur-autogestion-paris.html

    « Frange Radicale (Paris 19e), c’est l’histoire de trois coiffeur·ses qui décident de repenser leur travail en créant un salon de coiffure sans patron·nes, ni prix genrés. La coopérative de coiffure n’en est qu’à ses débuts. Mais elle a le vent en poupe et incarne un exemple d’organisation différente du travail et de l’accueil des client·es. Un modèle pour le monde de la coiffure, mais pas seulement… »

    #radio #podcast #autogestion #coiffure #cheveux

  • Black women’s hair products are killing us. Why isn’t more being done ? | Tayo Bero | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/27/black-women-hair-products-health-hazards-study
    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/82a10213e963216e67729e85b66069b738c27f82/0_358_6720_4032/master/6720.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali

    Certains refusent de regarder en face les choses. Et pourtant. Voici un excellent exemple du « racisme systémique » : au nom d’une idéologie de ce que serait la « beauté », on augmente le risque de cancer des femmes noires, et malgré les connaissances scientifiques, les gouvernements ne font rien pour interdire ces produits « cosmétiques ».

    A new study reveals what some scientists and researchers have suspected for years – that frequent and long-term use of lye-based hair relaxers may have serious health effects, including breast cancer. Published in Oxford University’s Carcinogenesis Journal, the study found that Black women who used these products at least seven times a year for 15 or more years had a roughly 30% increased risk of developing breast cancer compared with more infrequent users.

    The research team also analyzed survey data from Boston University’s Black Women’s Health Study, which followed more than 50,000 African American women for more than 25 years and observed their medical diagnoses and any factors that could influence their health. The results? Of the women followed from 1997 to 2017, 95% reported using lye-based relaxers, and ultimately 2,311 developed breast cancers.

    This additional risk factor is just one part of a wide race gap in breast cancer rates among American women. We already know that Black women have the highest occurrence of breast cancer before reaching the age of 40, are more likely than white women to develop highly aggressive breast cancers, and are more likely to die from it at any age – 40% more likely, to be precise.

    And when it comes to the role of haircare products in that imbalance, none of this is new. In 2019, research published in the International Journal of Cancer found that ​​permanent dye use was associated with a 45% higher breast cancer risk in Black women, compared with a roughly 7% higher risk among white women who used these products.

    It’s important to examine why Black women are so overrepresented in the market for these harmful products to begin with. For centuries Black women in the west have been told that their skin tones and hair textures were inferior, unprofessional and largely undesirable.

    Even today, anti-Black hair discrimination is rampant in many professional settings, particularly in corporate and customer-facing roles – so much so that Black advocacy groups and US legislators have been working to pass new laws that would make hair discrimination illegal. So far, however, only 13 states have passed the “Crown Act.”

    Biased, white-centric beauty standards have led many Black women to embrace hair and skin treatments that pose serious risks to their health, often without their knowledge. And despite the abundance of evidence pointing to these risks, corporations and government regulators aren’t doing nearly enough to protect the Black women who are the main consumers of these products.

    For context, one in 12 beauty and personal care products marketed to Black women in the US were found to contain highly hazardous ingredients such as lye, parabens and formaldehyde-releasing preservatives. Research from the nonprofit Environmental Working Group also found that fewer than 25% of products marketed to Black women scored low in an assessment of their potentially hazardous ingredients, compared with 40% of products marketed to the general public which researchers classified as low-risk.

    This issue cuts across all aspects of the beauty industry. Skin lightening products, another legacy of the cultural idea that dark skin is less desirable, are a thriving industry in the US. Women of color reportedly spent more than $2bn on such products in 2020. Users have reported chemical burns and lifelong scars.

    Warnings about the dangers of these products are minimal, leaving many Black women with insufficient information with which to make decisions on what products they use. To combat this, the EWG created a database listing all known personal care products targeted toward Black people, with information about their ingredients and potential problems. Unfortunately, this kind of effort isn’t happening on any large scale, or being supported by the companies who actually make and market these products – a gap that will no doubt continue to leave Black women at risk.

    In a society that imposes largely Eurocentric standards of beauty, desirability and respectability on all women, Black women in particular are placed under immense pressure to mold themselves to these standards in order to be accepted in social and professional settings. It’s crucial that personal care companies and the government do their part to keep Black female consumers safe and healthy.

    Tayo Bero is a freelance journalist

    #Racisme #Beauté #Cancer #Cheveux #Femmes_noires

  • Mouton

    Mouton reprend la trame d’un court métrage d’animation produit aux Arts décoratifs de Paris, et sélectionné dans de nombreux festivals internationaux.
    Quel enfant n’a pas un jour bataillé contre sa propre #chevelure, ou subit les ravages d’un coiffeur sadique ? Avec humour et tendresse, #Zeina_Abirached décrit une #lutte engagée dès sa plus tendre enfance pour domestiquer la bouillonnante masse bouclée qui encadre son visage.
    L’épreuve du shampooing, de la brosse, des ciseaux maladroits du coiffeur… Ruban, turban, chapeau : la petite fille tente toutes les stratégies pour rendre plus discret cet affreux mouton qui a élu domicile sur sa tête !

    https://www.cambourakis.com/tout/jeunesse/mouton

    #livre #cheveux #livre_pour_enfants #préjugés

  • Cheveux : ce sera tendance en 2021, la coupe mulet fait son retour
    https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/921899/article/2021-01-18/cheveux-ce-sera-tendance-en-2021-la-coupe-mulet-fait-son-retour

    En tout cas, le résultat est là. « Le confinement a aidé l’acceptation du mulet » indique Simon Chossier, 26 ans et hair stylist dans l’agence B. Agency à Paris. « Beaucoup de personnes qui avaient déjà une nuque assez longue ne sont pas allées chez le coiffeur, ont laissé pousser d’environ six, huit centimètres, et se sont rendu compte que cette coupe ne les dérangeait pas. Cela a grandement aidé les gens à adopter le mulet, un peu inconsciemment », explique-t-il à BFMTV.

    Ah oui mais là non.

  • La Genevoise #Licia_Chery publie un livre jeunesse contre le racisme

    Après avoir sorti un album en mai dernier, la Genevoise d’origine haïtienne Licia Chery vient de publier son premier ouvrage, « #Tichéri_a_les_cheveux_crépus ». Un #livre jeunesse contre le racisme et les préjugés.

    https://www.rts.ch/info/culture/livres/11085058-la-genevoise-licia-chery-publie-un-livre-jeunesse-contre-le-racisme.htm
    #préjugés #stéréotypes #racisme #xénophobie #racisme_ordinaire #normalité #racisme_structurel #micro-agression

    –---

    Tichéri a les cheveux crépus

    Tichéri est une petite fille de 7 ans. Elle vit à Genève, en Suisse.

    Intelligente, drôle, et curieuse, elle croque la vie à pleines dents !

    Découvre ses aventures au fil de tes lectures !


    https://www.editions-amalthee.com/catalogue-livres-editions-nantes/jeunesse/ticheri-a-les-cheveux-crepus
    #cheveux #livre_pour_enfants

    ping @cede @karine4

  • La tresse - #Laetitia_Colombani - Babelio
    https://www.babelio.com/livres/Colombani-La-tresse/946395

    Trois femmes, trois vies, trois continents. Une même soif de liberté.

    Inde. Smita est une Intouchable. Elle rêve de voir sa fille échapper à sa condition misérable et entrer à l’école.

    Sicile. Giulia travaille dans l’atelier de son père. Lorsqu’il est victime d’un accident, elle découvre que l’entreprise familiale est ruinée.

    Canada. Sarah, avocate réputée, va être promue à la tête de son cabinet quand elle apprend qu’elle est gravement malade.

    Liées sans le savoir par ce qu’elles ont de plus intime et de plus singulier, Smita, Giulia et Sarah refusent le sort qui leur est destiné et décident de se battre. Vibrantes d’humanité, leurs histoires tissent une tresse d’espoir et de solidarité.

    Une copine indienne commente :

    C’est blindé de ’racial tropes’ sur les Indiens ... On évoque les dalits, les inégalités, l’oppression des femmes, le système des castes...
    C’est une réalité en Inde mais l’Inde c’est bien plus que ça !!! Ça me rappelle toutes les conversations énervantes que j’ai eues avec des Français ignorants
    Et en plus,
    L’écrivaine utilise mal certains termes hindou comme darma, karma, nirvana qu:elle ne comprend clairement pas.
    Elle parle d’un sari cousu pour un enfant de six ans par sa mère
    Les enfants de six ans ne portent pas de sari
    Il y a plusieurs types de vêtements Indiens , ils s’appellent pas tous ’sari’ et en plus ce n’est que le haut du sari qui doit être cousu... Parce que sinon c’est que du tissu qu’on doit savoir plier autour de soi
    Puis bindi rouge pour une gamine de six ans, réservée aux femmes mariées
    ’cette petite dalit a la peau brune’ ce style de phrase je déteste. Hahahhh
    Les Indiennes souffrantes, illettrées dans leurs cahutes insalubres
    Battues par leurs maris
    Mangeant du curry
    Elle fait pareil avec l’autre personnage sicilien, elle parle des mamma, nonna, vespa, pâtes

    Je n’ai pas lu le livre mais je remarque que la partie indienne n’a pas l’air franchement narrative : pas entrées dans l’histoire ?

    #littérature #clichés

    • Roseaux — « La Tresse », quand sexisme, racisme et capitalisme s’entremêlent
      #beauté #féminisme_libéral #cheveux

      Sarah n’aurait plus un physique attractif, et l’autrice l’enferme dans un dégoût d’elle-même, sans jamais élaborer une critique politique constructive de ce système qui perpétue la haine du corps des femmes à partir d’un certain âge…

      Aussi, si ce roman se veut relayer les destins de femmes fortes, celles-ci sont pourtant construites et grandies par des hommes.

      Ce roman est soi-disant « mondial » car composé de trois nationalités, issues de trois continents différents. Il donne une vision du monde, et plus particulièrement du monde du travail, capitalistique et ancrée dans le principe du succès financier, de la self made woman à l’américaine.

      « Après tout, elle a bien réussi à dissimuler ses grossesses, elle parviendra bien à cacher son cancer. »

      Les héroïnes de ce roman doivent être des guerrières, avoir la force et la combativité qui sont habituellement des traits de caractères assignés aux hommes. À l’inverse, elles doivent effacer toute qualité souvent pensée comme « féminine » – l’empathie, la bienveillance et l’indulgence – car l’ascension professionnelle est un combat. Ces émotions sont écartées afin de mieux répondre au monde néolibéral. Ce roman est l’histoire de trois individus, ce n’est jamais un combat collectif avec une réflexion sociale aboutie.

      Il y a un véritable problème de comparaison, de proportions. Les parcours des trois femmes et leurs soucis sont évoqués de manière similaire, comme si les mêmes difficultés s’imposaient à une Italienne dont l’entreprise est en difficulté, à une Canadienne dont le cancer est simplement un motif pour la voir sans cheveux (et donc conclure l’intrigue sans aucune once de suspense) et l’Indienne dont le parcours est résolument un calvaire. La quête des cheveux de la Canadienne est placée au même degré que la fuite de l’Indienne qui risque viol, tabassage et mort. La beauté « féminine » passerait par les cheveux et ceux-ci sont extraits ailleurs. Et le livre se conclut sur un anthropocentrisme exacerbé

      En conclusion, hormis quelques pâles critiques du monde patriarcal, ce roman ne fomente pas une pensée féministe aboutie, mais est simplement le reflet d’un sexisme intériorisé, sans remise en question des injonctions à la féminité, des affres du regard masculin et des poids qui pèsent sur les épaules de ces femmes.

  • Everyday racism : exhibition heading to Glasgow

    A NEW photography exhibition aims to shine a light on the every day experiences of racism faced by people of colour in Glasgow and foster conversations on how best to tackle discrimination.

    The exhibition, which opens at the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art (GOMA) this week, features 10 photographs by Karen Gordon, taken in collaboration with her subjects. It examines the common place racism experienced by the project’s participants that often went unnoticed by the white population around them.

    Participants, who all live in Glasgow, told Gordon about experiences of being stopped and searched at airports and taken aside for questioning by plain clothes police officers.
    Others had gone through their twenties being turned away from pubs and nightclubs by bouncers, although this did not happen to their white friends. One actor with Scottish Asian heritage said that being told he “did not have the right look” at castings was such a common experience that it was a “running joke” amongst BAME actors.

    One black man spoke about the “dirty looks” and “handbags clutched” if he was wearing a hoodie, while several others spoke of sensing racist judgments being made based on the colour of their skin. One black women recalled when a music tutor she had just met reached out unprompted to touch her hair.

    Gordon, who has worked as a photographer with Maryhill Integration Network – which supports refugee and migrant communities – for many years said she was inspired to start the project after realising that even though she had been involved in anti-racism work she was still not aware of the daily nature of racism directed at people of colour.

    She said: “As someone who has been trying to tackle racism all my life I realised there was still so much that I was unaware of. What are the insidious things that people don’t talk about? Glasgow can seem quite diverse and welcoming due to that, but when you start to go under the surface its more complicated.

    “The most important thing for me was that the participant was happy with the portrayal, so that was a huge part of the project and I worked very closely with people.

    “A lot of white people say they don’t see colour and that is only because they have never had to see it. It’s such a huge issue. I see the photographs as a way of starting a bigger conversation about this.”

    Nida Akif, a 21-year-old student, who both took part in and worked on the project, said that it had helped her to deepen her own understanding of the structural racism that she had sometimes struggled to name when she was younger.

    “For me what is often frustrating is that you experience something that is not outward racism but it’s more that it is an underlying thing,” she said.

    The photograph featuring Akif depicts an experience she had in an art gallery.

    She and a friend – both of Pakistani heritage and wearing headscarves – were told to stop taking photographs. The white people doing the same around them continued to do so unchecked.

    “It’s something that you can’t report because it’s treated as just being a suspicion,” she said. “When I started to speak to others about this I realised that as someone who is brown, who is Asian and wears a hijab I think about [how I am viewed] every day ... when I’m on the train and someone doesn’t sit next to me, when I go for job interviews.”

    THE increasing racist attitudes in Britain have also affected Akif and her friends, she claimed, with many of them deciding to remove their hijabs and headscarves because they felt it made them too visible.

    She said of the exhibition: “I hope that it will showcase the experiences people are having and will help tackle ignorance.”

    Concerns have been growing about the way that racist attitudes are being normalised by the racist and Islamophobic comments made by our most high-profile politicians.

    Last August Boris Johnston was widely condemned for saying Muslim women wearing burkas “look like letter boxes”, yet went on to become Prime Minister regardless. Meanwhile the “hostile environment” policies that led to the Windrush scandal have remained a cornerstone of Conservative government strategy.

    https://www.thenational.scot/news/18071789.everyday-racism-exhibition-heading-goma
    #racisme_ordinaire #racisme #xénophobie #Glasgow #photographie #peau #couleur_de_peau #Karen_Gordon

    Le site de la photographe :
    https://karengordonphotography.blog

    Et la présentation de son travail #Everyday_racism :
    https://karengordonphotography.blog/everyday-racism

    ... notamment avec cette photo qui clairement mentionne la question des #cheveux


    #cheveux_crépus

    ... ou celle-ci qui aborde la question de la #classe_sociale et du #travail :

    ping @albertocampiphoto @philippe_de_jonckheere

  • « Avec les traitements, on perd sa féminité »
    https://www.liberation.fr/france/2019/08/27/avec-les-traitements-on-perd-sa-feminite_1747641

    Quand elle se découvre dans le miroir, Isabelle semble aussi surprise que ravie. Ses mains aux ongles vernis placées près de ses lèvres d’un rouge assorti, la coquette quadragénaire s’amuse à jouer les midinettes en prenant la pose. « Tu fais très pin-up dans ta robe à motifs fraises », la complimente Amélie Cosneau, socioesthéticienne. « Il ne me manque que les cheveux », tranche Isabelle, tout sourire.

    #cancer #misogynie #hétérosexisme #male_gaze #cheveux

    • J’entends qu’il y ait des femmes qui ont besoin de ce genre de lieu. Personnellement (et après un cancer du sein) ça me fait fuir comme tout lieu de standardisation et renforce mon besoin de solitude. J’ai pas non plus envie que ma vulnérabilité soit utilisée pour me faire croire qu’appartenir à un groupe qui se repeint le corps comme le veulent les hommes va m’aider à aller mieux.
      J’ai besoin au contraire qu’on arrête de classer les femmes par leur attrait physique pour leur faire croire que leur identité dépend de leur corps. Que dans tous les espaces s’ouvre la bienveillance aux autres et pas seulement dans les espaces qu’on réserve aux handicapé·es en les maquillant en Valides.
      Accepter ses cicatrices, qu’elles soient de l’âme ou du corps, c’est toute la vie que ça devrait se passer et en tous lieux.

      Hier comme aujourd’hui, jem’en fous de ne pas me conformer à ce qui doit plaire aux autres, du moment que je suis en juste accord avec moi même.
      il me semble qu’une société qui entretient par tous moyens de tels tabous sur les corps non conformes (surtout lorsque cela est pavé de bonnes intentions) en tentant toujours de masquer lorsqu’elle ne les ignore pas les effets de la maladie sur le corps nourrit la ribambelle de déceptions et de violences qui en découlent. Devoir en plus résister à des groupes comme celui-là, merci, non, pas besoin.

    • C’est en te lisant @vraiment que j’ai compris le problème avec ce genre de lieu et l’assignation au #male_gaze
      Je me souviens aussi que tu expliquait qu’il n’existait rien pour aider les femmes à supporter les difficultés liées au cancer aussi bien physiques que sociale, psychologiques, économiques, on s’arrange seulement pour que les femmes restent agréables à regarder pour les autres.
      J’ai pensé à toi en postant ici cet article
      Il existe aussi le même type d’ateliers pour les femmes au chaumage.
      Merci pour le partage de ton expérience et de ta réflexion sur ce sujet tabou.

    • Merci @mad_meg j’en suis très honorée :)
      Je considère qu’avoir traversé cette merde m’a permis de capter un espace inconnu. J’espère en relatant mon expérience aider d’autres personnes, notamment à faire fi des conformismes validistes et de l’assignation à l’#autosexisme des femmes.

  • Un livre pour que les petites filles noires apprennent à aimer leurs cheveux - Le Temps
    https://www.letemps.ch/societe/un-livre-petites-filles-noires-apprennent-aimer-leurs-cheveux

    Oui, le #cheveu a toujours été #politique. Les traits qui correspondent à ce qu’on identifie comme étant la #négritude ont été perçus comme des éléments pouvant justifier l’animalisation de la personne noire. Il est ancré dans certaines mentalités que les corps noirs ont une altérité animalière. On peut aussi mentionner la compagnie aérienne Air France, qui avait suspendu un de ses stewards à cause de ses tresses. Par définition, le cheveu a toujours été politique, puisque, en tant que sujet politique, on a essayé d’inférioriser les personnes noires par leur physique et leur couleur de peau, et d’en faire une justification pour les asservir.

    #invisibilisation #racisme #livre

  • The Everyday Consumption of “#Whiteness”: The #Gaikokujin-fū (Foreign-Like) Hair Trend in Japan

    In feminist literature, the beauty and the fashion industries have at times been criticized for being one of the means through which women are objectified.1 Likewise, Critical Race Studies have often pinpointed how the existence of a global beauty industry has the effect of propagating Eurocentric beauty ideals.2 Throughout this article I aim to explore the complicated ways in which beauty and racialized categories intersect in Japan through an analysis of the female-targeted hair trend of the gaikokujin-fū (foreigner-like) hair.

    Essentialism is what prompts us to divide the world into two, “us” versus “them,” negating all that is in between the two categories or even changes within the categories themselves. Although this binary thinking has been subject to criticism by various disciplines, such as Critical Race Studies and Postcolonial Studies, it is still among the dominant ways in which human relations are performed in Japanese society. The essentialistic opposing duality between Foreignness and Japaneseness has been constructed in post-war Japan through widespread discourses known by the name nihonjinron (lit. the theories on the Japanese).3 Even though it could be understood as a powerful reply to American racism towards the Japanese, nihonjinron only confirms stereotypes by reversing their value, from negative to positive. Moreover, these theories have had the effect of emphasizing Japanese racial and cultural purity through the alienation and exoticization of the other, most often represented by the white “Westerner”4 (obeijin, seiyōjin, hakujin).

    The ambivalent exoticism that surrounds the foreigner (gaikokujin) has made it possible for racialised categories and consumerism to intersect in the archipelago. The beauty industry is particularly susceptible to the segmentation between “self” and “other,” and the global white hegemony has a certain influence over it. However, as Miller rightly observes, dominant beauty standards in Japan are equally influenced by local values of “Japaneseness.”5 Torigoe goes even farther: in her essay, she positions whiteness as a power relation and through her analysis she demonstrates how white women are constructed as Others in Japanese media representations, thus creating “a racial ladder that places Japanese people on top.”6 The link between whiteness and widespread beauty practices has been criticized also in studies of the neighbouring country of Korea, with scholars arguing that cosmetic surgeries in the country are successful only if they enhance the body’s natural “Koreanness.”7

    My aim in this paper is to tackle the capitalistic commercialization and fetishization of whiteness in contemporary Japan. As it will become clear throughout the analysis, the Japanese beauty industry is creating a particular image of whiteness that is suitable to the consumers’ needs and desires: this toned-down, less threating way of becoming “foreigner-like” is marketed as an accessory that far from overriding one’s natural features, is instrumental in accentuating and valorizing them. Investigating the peculiar position of this beauty trend, which has been affected by the influence of the two contrasting hegemonic discourses of white supremacy and the purity/superiority of the Japanese race, might be helpful in shedding some light on the increasingly complicated ways the concept of race is being constructed in a setting that has been often considered “other” to the Eurocentric gaze.

    Whiteness and the Global Beauty Industry

    Beauty is an important practice in our daily life, and as such it has been at the center of animated discussions about its social function. Seen as one of the practices through which gender is performed, it has been put into scrutiny by feminist literature. The approach used to analyze beauty has been dualistic. On the one hand, the beauty and fashion industries have been criticized for being among the reasons of women’s subordination, depriving them financially8 and imposing on them male normative standards of beauty.9 On the other, it has been cited as one of the ways in which female consumers could express their individuality in an oppressive world.10

    The increasingly globalized beauty and fashion industries have also been subjects of criticism from the viewpoint of Critical Race Studies. It is not uncommon to hear that these industries are guilty of spreading Eurocentric tastes, thus privileging pale-skinned, thin women with light hair.11 The massive sale of skin-whitening creams in Asia and Africa as well as the creation of new beauty standards that privilege thinness over traditionally preferred plump forms are often cited to defend this argument. At the same time, there have been instances in which this denouncing of Eurocentrism itself has been charged guilty of the same evil. Practices such as plastic surgery in South Korea and Japanese preference for white skin have been often criticized as being born out of the desire to be “Western”: these analyses have been contested as simplistic and ignoring the cultural significance of local standards of beauty in shaping beauty ideals.12

    Answers to these diatribes have not been yet found.13 It is nonetheless clear that beauty practices articulate a series of complex understandings about gender and race, often oscillating between particularisms and universalisms. Throughout this article I would like to contribute to this ongoing discussion analyzing how pre-existing notions of race and gender intersect and are re-shaped in a newly emerging trend aptly called gaikokujin-fū (foreigner-like) hair.

    Us/Others in Japan: The Essentialization of the Foreign
    Japan and the tan’itsu minzoku

    It is not uncommon to hear that Japan is one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in the world. In Japanese, the locution tan’itsu minzoku (single/unique ethnic group, people, nation), was often used as a slogan when comparing the archipelago with significantly multi-ethnic countries such as the USA.14 The notion of Japan as a mono-ethnic country is being starkly criticized in recent years:15 minorities such as the zainichi Koreans and Chinese who have been living in the country since the end of the second world war, the conspicuous populations of foreign immigrants from Asia and Latin America, as well as mixed-race people, who were thought of as a social problem until these last ten years,16 have been making their voices heard. In the following paragraphs, I will trace how the idea of a racially homogeneous Japan was constructed.

    The word minzoku (ethnic group, people, nation) first appeared in the Japanese language in the Taishō Period (1912-1926), as an alternative to the term jinshū (race).17 The concept of race did not exist prior to the Meiji period (1868-1912), when it was introduced by scholars as one of the ideas from the “West” that would have helped Japan become a modernized nation.18 It could be argued that while the opening up of Japan after the sakoku period was not the first time that the Japanese government had to interact with people of different racial features,19 it was the first time that the idea of racial hierarchies were introduced to the country. Japanese scholars recognized themselves to be part of the ōshoku jinshū (“yellow race”), hierarchically subordinate to the “white race.”20 With rising nationalism and the beginning of the colonization project during the Taishō period, the need arose for a concept that could further differentiate the Japanese people from the neighboring Asian countries such as the newly annexed Taiwan and Korea:21 the newly created minzoku fit this purpose well. Scholar Kawai Yuko compared the term to the German concept of Volk, which indicates a group whose identity is defined by shared language and culture. These traits are racialized, as they are defined as being “biological,” a natural component of the member of the ethnic group who acquires them at birth.22 It was the attribution of these intrinsic qualities that allowed the members of the naichi (mainland Japan) to be assigned in a superior position to the gaichi (colonies). Interestingly, the nationalistic discourse of the pre-war and of the war period had the double intent of both establishing Japanese supremacy and legitimizing its role as a “guide” for the colonies grounding it in their racial affinities: unlike the conquerors from Europe, the Japanese were of similar breed.

    These hierarchies were ultimately dissociated from the term minzoku after the end of the Second World War, when it was appropriated by Leftist discourse. Opposing it to ta-minzoku (multiethnic nation or people)23

    that at the time implied divisions and inequalities and was perceived as a characteristic of the Japanese Empire, Left-leaning intellectuals advocated a tan’itsu minzoku nation based on equality. The Leftist discourse emphasized the need of the “Japanese minzoku” to stand up to the American occupation, but the term gradually lost its critical nuance when Japan reached economic prosperity and tan’itsu minzoku came to mean racial homogeneity as a unique characteristic of Japanese society, advocated by the Right.24

    Self-Orientalism

    The term minzoku might have “lost his Volk-ish qualities,”25 but homogeneity in Japan is also perceived to be of a cultural nature. Sociologists Mouer and Sugimoto26 lament that many Japanese people believe to be the carriers of an “unique” and essentialized cultural heritage, that renders them completely alien to foreigners. According to the two scholars, the distinctive qualities that have been usually (self-)ascribed to Japanese people are the following: a weak individuality, the tendency to act in groups, and the tendency to privilege harmony in social situations.27 Essentialized “Japaneseness” is a mixture of these psychological traits with the products of Japanese history and culture. The perception that Japaneseness is ever unchanging and a cultural given of each Japanese individual was further increased by the popularity of the nihonjinron discourse editorial genre, which gained mass-media prominence in the archipelago after the 1970s along with Japan’s economic growth.28 Drawing on Said’s notion of Orientalism,29 Miller states that “in the case of Japan, we have to deal […] with the spectacle of a culture vigorously determined to orientalize itself.”30 According to Roy Miller, Japan has effectively constructed Japaneseness through a process of self-othering, which he refers to as self-Orientalism. The nihonjinron publications were very much influenced by cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s highly influential “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” published in 1946. Benedict’s study of the “Japanese people” is based on the assumption that the USA and Japan are polar opposites where the former stands for modernity and individualism whereas the latter is characterized by tradition and groupism.31

    Japanese anthropologists and psychoanalysts, such as Nakane and Doi32 further contributed to the study of Japaneseness, never once challenging the polar opposition between the “Japanese” and the “Westernerners.”

    It would seem contradictory at first for a large number of people in Japan to have this tendency to think and consume their own culture through stereotypes. However, Iwabuchi draws attention to the fact that Japan’s self-Orientalism is not just a passive acceptance of “Western” values but is in fact used to assert the nation’s cultural superiority. It remains nonetheless profoundly complicit with Euro-American Orientalism insofar that it is an essentializing and reifying process: it erases all internal differences and external similarities.33 This essentialization that Japan is capitalizing on proves fundamental for the “West,” as it is the tool through which it maintains its cultural hegemony.

    Images of the Foreigner

    Images of the foreigner are not equal, and they form an important node in the (self-)Orientalistic relations that Japan entertains with the rest of the world. An essentialized view of both the Euro-American and Asian foreigner functions in different ways as a counterweight to the “we-Japanese” (ware ware Nihonjin) rhethoric.

    In the Japanese language, gaikokujin (foreigner) refers to every person who doesn’t have the same nationality as the country she/he lives in.34 The term gaikokujin does not have racial connotations and can be used to effectively describe anyone that is not a Japanese citizen. However, the racially-charged related term gaijin35 refers especially to the “white” foreigner.36 Written very similarly to gaikokujin, the word gaijin actually has a different origin and the double meaning of “foreigner” and “outsider.” The word carries strong implications of “othering,” and refers to the construction of the Europe and America as other to the young nation-state in the Meiji period, during which knowledge was routinely imported from the “West.”37 Thus, gaijin and the representation of foreigners-as-other came to reflect the dominant hierarchies of nineteenth-century “Western” knowledge.38

    Putting every white-skinned individual in the same category functions as a strategy to create the antithetical “West” that is so important as a marker of difference in self-Orientalism: it serves to create an “Other” that makes it possible to recognize the “Self.”39 At the same time, it perpetuates the perception of whiteness as the dominant position in America and Europe. In her analysis on the use of foreigner models in Japanese advertisements, Creighton notes that representation of gaijin positions them both as a source of innovation and style and as a potential moral threat.40

    This splitting is not uncommon when dealing with representations of the Other. What generates it is the fetishistic component that is always present in the stereotype.41 Bhabha argues that this characteristic allows the Other to be understood in a contradictory way as a source of both pleasure and anxiety for the Non-Other. Stuart Hall draws on Bhabha’s theories to state that the stereotype makes it so that this binary description can be the only way in which is possible to think of the Other–they generate essentialized identities.42 In the Japanese context, the gaijin, fulfilling his role as a racially visible minority,43 is thus inscribed in the double definition of source of disruption and person to admire (akogare no taishō).

    Whiteness in the Japanese Context

    Akogare (admiration, longing, desire) is a word that young women44 in Japan often use when talking about the “white, Western” foreigner. Kelsky explains that the word indicates the longing for something that is impossible to obtain and she maintains that “it is a rather precise gloss […] of the term “desire” in Lacanian usage. […] Desire arises from lack and finds expression in the fetish. The fetish substitutes the thing that is desired but impossible to obtain.”45 Fulfilment of this unattainable desire can be realized through activities such as participation in English conversation classes and engaging in conversation with “Western” people.46 The consumption of “Western” images and representations as well as everyday practices associated with the Euro-American foreigner could also be considered a fetish that substitutes the unattainable object of desire. In this sense, the gaikokujin-fū hairstyle trend might be for the producers one such way of catering to young Japanese women’s akogare for the “Western” world.

    Gaikokujin-fū is inextricably connected to gaijin, “white” foreigners. For instance, the Hair Encyclopedia section of the website Hotpepper Beauty reports two entries with the keyword gaikokujin-fū: gaikokujin-fū karā (foreigner-like color) and gaikokujin-fū asshu (foreigner-like ash). The “color” entry states the following:

    Gaikokujin-fū karā means, as the name suggests, a dye that colors the hair in a tint similar to that of foreigners. The word “foreigner” here mostly stands for people with white skin and blond hair that are usually called “American” and “European.”47

    Similarly, the “ash” entry explains the following:

    The coloring that aims for the kind of blond hair with little red pigments that is often found among Americans is called gaikokujin-fū asshu.

    Asshu means “grey” and its characteristic is to give a slightly dull (dark?) impression. It fits well with many hairstyles ranging from short cuts to long hair, and it can be done in a way to make you look like a “western” hāfu (mixed race individual).

    It is clear from these descriptions that the term gaikokujin-fū is racially charged. What hairdresser discourse is trying to reproduce is a kind of hair color associated with America and Europe’s Caucasian population. They are selling “whiteness.”

    Writing from the viewpoint of multicultural England, Dyer writes that the study of the representation of white people is important because “as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm.”49 White discourse is ubiquitous, and it is precisely this unmarked invisibility that makes it a position of dominance. The representation of people belonging to minority groups is inevitably marked or tied to their race or skin color, but Caucasians are often “just people.” At the base of white privilege there is this characteristic of universality that is implied in whiteness.

    The marked positioning of the white foreigner in Japanese society would seem an exception to this rule. Torigoe, while acknowledging that the Japanese media “saturated [her] with images of young white females as the standard of beauty,”50 analyzes in her article how white beauty actually embodies values such as overt sexual attractiveness that would be considered deviant or over the top by standard societal norms.51 Likewise, Russell points to the scrutiny that the bodies of the white female woman receive on Japanese mass media, dominated by a male gaze. White females become subject to the sexual curiosity of the Japanese male, and being accompanied by one of them often makes him look more sophisticated and competitive in a globalized world.52 As the most easily, less controversially portrayed Other through which Japanese self-identity is created, the white individual is often subject to stereotyping and essentialization. Russell notes this happening in both advertisement and the portrayal of white local celebrities, that assume even “whiter” characteristics in order to better market their persona in the Japanese television environment.

    However, it is my opinion that we must be careful to not be exceedingly uncritical of the marginality that Caucasians are subject to in Japanese society. I argue that whiteness is in an ambiguous position in the Japanese context: it would be wrong to say that in the archipelago white people do not benefit from the privileges that have accompanied their racialization up to the present times. The othering processes that whites are subject to is more often than not related to them being brought up and representing a different culture than to their racial difference.54 The word hakujin (lit. white person) is barely used in everyday conversation, whereas it is more common to hear the term kokujin (lit. black person): white people are not reduced to their racial characteristics in the same way as black people might be.55 Whiteness might not be the completely hegemonic in the Japanese context, but the country does not exist in a vacuum, and its standards have been influenced by the globally hegemonic white euro-centric values to some extent.

    To reiterate, white people in the Japanese archipelago experience the contradictory position of being a visible minority subject to reifying “othering” processes while at the same time reaping many of the benefits and privileges that are usually associated with the color of their skin. They are socially and politically located at the margins but are a hegemonic presence in the aesthetic consciousness as an ideal to which aspire to. In the following sections, I will expand on gaikokujin’s ambiguous location by looking at the ways in which whiteness is consumed through the gaikokujin-fū hairstyle trend.

    Producing Whiteness: Selling gaikokujin-fū Hair
    Creating the “New”

    In order to understand the meanings shaping the catchphrase gaikokujin-fū, I have used a mixture of different approaches. My research began by applying the methods of Visual Analysis56 to the latest online promotional material. I have tried to semiotically analyze the pictures on the websites in relation to the copywriting. In addition, I have complemented it with fieldwork, interviewing a total of seven hairdressers and four girls aged from 20 to 2457 in the period between April and June 2017. It was while doing fieldwork that I realized how important social networking is for the establishment of contemporary trends: this is frequently acknowledged also in the press by textually referencing hashtags.58 Instagram is a very important part of Japanese girls’ everyday life, and is used both as a tool for self-expression/self-promotion as well as a compass to navigate the ever-growing ocean of lifestyle trends. Japanese internet spaces had been previously analyzed as relatively closed spaces created and accessed by predominantly Japanese people, and this had implications on how online discourses about races were carried on.59 However, being a predominantly visual medium, Instagram also functions as a site where information can, to a large extent, overcome language barriers.

    The gaikokujin-fū hashtag counts 499,103 posts on Instagram, whereas 381,615 pictures have been tagged gaikokujin-fū karā.60 Most of them are published by professional whose aim is to publicize their work, and it is not uncommon to find pricing and information for booking in the description.

    Scrolling down the results of the Instagram search, it is easy to notice the high number of back and profile shots; what the hairdressers are trying to show through these pictures is their hairdressing skills. By cutting out the face they are putting the hair itself at the center of the viewer’s attention and eliminating any possibility of identification. The aim here is to sell “whiteness” as an object. The trendsetters are capitalizing on a term (gaikokujin-fū) that has already an appealing meaning outside the field of hair coloring, and that is usually associated with the wider desire or longing (akogare) for “Western” people, culture and lifestyle.

    To the non-initiated, the term gaikokujin-fū might indicate anything that is not “Japanese like” such as curly hair, or blonde hair. However, it became clear when speaking to my hairdresser informants that they only used the term referring to the ash-like coloring. Professionals in the field are reclaiming it to define a new, emerging niche of products that only started appearing a couple of years ago.61 In doing so, Japanese hairdressers are creating a new kind of “whiteness” that goes beyond the “Western” cultural conception of white as blonde and blue-eyed, in order to make it more acceptable to Japanese societal standards. In fact, fair hair is considered extremely unnatural.62 The advantage that ash brown hair has over blonde is the relatively darker shade that allows consumers to stand out without being completely out of place.63

    However, gaikokujin-fū hair comes at a cost. All of my informants told me during the interviews that the colors usually associated with this trend involve dyes have a blue or green base, and are very difficult to recreate on most people of the East Asia whose naturally black hair has a red base. The difficulty they experienced in reproducing the Ash (asshu) and Matt colors on Japanese hair constituted a fundamental charm point for hair technicians, and precisely because of this being able to produce a neat ash coloring might be considered synonymous with keeping on pace with the last technology in hair dying. The Wella “Illumina Color”64 series came out in September 2015, while Throw,65 a Japanese-produced series of hair dyes that eliminate the reddish undertones of Japanese black hair, went on sale very recently in June 2016.66 Another Japanese maker, Milbon, released its “Addichty Color”67 series as recently as February 2017. The globally dominant but locally peripheral whiteness has been “appropriated” and domesticated by Japanese hairdressers as a propeller of the latest trends, as a vital tool in creating the “new.”

    To summarize, the technological developments in hair dyes certainly gave a big push to the popularizing of the gaikokujin-fū hairstyle trend. Moreover, in a very chicken-and-egg-like fashion, the technological advancing itself was at the same time motivated by the admiration and desire towards Euro-American countries. However, this desire for “Westerness” does not entail adopting whiteness in its essentialized “purest” form,68 as that would have negative implications in the context of Japanese society. Rather, Japanese trendsetters have operated a selection and chosen the variant of whiteness that would be different enough to allow the creation of the “latest” while minimizing its more threatening aspects.
    Branding the “New”

    In the previous section I mentioned the fact that most of pictures posted on the social network Instagram serve to amplify and diffuse existing values for consumption, and constantly refer to a set of meanings that are generated elsewhere reifying them. Throughout this section I will examine the production of these values through the branding of the aforementioned hair dye brands: Wella’s “Illumina Color,” THROW, and Milbon’s “Addichty Color.”

    Wella’s “Illumina Color” offers an interesting case study as it is produced by an American multinational brand. Comparing the Japanese website with the international one, it is clear that we have before our eyes a prime example of “glocalization.”69 While on the international webpage70 the eye-catch is a picture of a white, blue-eyed blonde woman that sports an intricate braided hairstyle with some purplish accents in the braid, the Japanese71 version features a hāfu-like72 young woman with long, flowing straight dark brown hair. The description of the product also contains the suggestive sentence “even the hard and visible hair typical of the Japanese [can become] of a pale, soft color.” The keywords here are the terms hard (katai) and soft (yawaraka). Hardness is defined as being a characteristic typical of the Japanese hair texture (nihonjin tokuyū) and it is opposed to the desired effect, softness. The sentence implies by contrasting the two terms that softness is not a characteristic of Japanese hair, and the assumption could be taken further to understand that it is a quality typical of the “foreign.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the international webpage contains no such reference and instead vaguely praises the hair dye’s ability to provide a light color. The visuals of the latter are consistent with Dyer’s definition of whiteness.

    Unlike Wella, Milbon and beauty experience are Japanese companies, and their products ORDEVE Addichty and THROW are only geared to the Japanese marketplace. Milbon’s ORDEVE Addichty dye series is the most recent of the two. The product’s promotional webpage is almost entirely composed of pictures: the top half features 14 moving pictures, two for each of the seven colours available. The pictures slide in a way that shows the customer all the four sides of the model’s bust up, and each one of the girls is holding a sign with the name of the product. To the center left, we see a GIF image with the name of the brand in the roman and Japanese alphabet, accompanied by the catchphrase hajimete mitsukaru, atarashii watashirashisa (“I found it for the first time, a new way of being myself”), that slides into another text-filled picture that explains the concepts behind the branding.

    Occidental-like (ōbeijin) voluminous hair with a shine (tsuya) never seen before. This incredible feeling of translucence (tōmeikan) that even shows on your Instagram [pictures], will receive a lot of likes from everybody. Let’s find the charm of a freer myself with Addichty color!

    The red-diminishing dyes are here associated with both physical and ideological characteristics identified as “Western,” like the “feeling of translucence” (tōmeikan)73 and “freedom” (jiyū). The word tōmeikan is a constant of technical descriptions of gaikokujin-fū and it is generally very difficult for the hairdressers to explain what does it mean. My hairdresser informant N. quickly explained to me that having translucent hair means to have a hair color that has a low red component. Informants H. and S., also hair professionals, further explained that translucency is a characteristic typical of hair that seems to be semi-transparent when hit by light. While in the English-speaking world it would certainly be unusual to positively describe somebody’s hair as translucent, tōmeikan is a positive adjective often used as a compliment in other different contexts and it indicates clarity and brightness. In fact, the Japanese Daijisen dictionary lists two definitions for translucent, the second of which reads “clear, without impurities.”74 It is perhaps in relation to this meaning that the melanin-filled black core of the Japanese hair is considered “heavy” (omoi) and strong. Reddish and lighter brown colors are also defined in the same way. What is more, even hair colors at the other end of the spectrum can be “muddy”(nigori no aru): blonde hair is also described as such.75 It is clear that while tōmeikan is a quality of “occidental hair,” it is not a characteristic of all the shades that are usually associated with whiteness.

    In the last sentence, “freedom” is linked to charm (miryoku) and the individual. These three concepts are also very often associated with the foreigner. The freedom of the gaijin is a freedom from social constraints and from the sameness that pervades dominant representations of Japaneseness.76 Individualism is further emphasized by the pronoun “myself,” which in the original Japanese is a possessive pronoun to the word “charm” (miryoku). As a word, miryoku has an openly sexual connotation, and because of this it might be linked to the concept of “foreignness.” As Torigoe found out in her analysis of Japanese advertisements, white women are often represented as a sexualized counterpart to the more innocent Japanese woman.77 Gaikokujin-fū hair offers customers the possibility to become closer to obtaining this sexiness, that distances the self from the monotone standards of society.

    Of the three, THROW is possibly the most interesting to analyze, mostly because of the huge quantity of content they released in order to strengthen the brand image. In addition to the incredibly detailed homepage, they are constantly releasing new media contents related to gaikokujin-fū coloring on their “THROW Journal.”78

    The “story” page of the website serves as an explanation of the brand identity. It is a vertically designed page heavy on images, possibly designed to be optimally visualized in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. The first image that the viewer encounters is that of a girl whose brown hair is flowing in the wind, which results in some strands covering the features of her pale-white face. This makes it hard to understand her nationality and makes it so that all the attention is focused on the light, airy qualities of the hair. As I said before, “lightness” (karusa) is associated to translucency and is one of the characteristics at the center of the marketing of gaikokujin-fū. This picture very clearly renders those sensations in a way that is very pleasant to the eye and indeed invites consumption.

    Under the picture we find a very short narration that complements it. In bigger characters, the words dare de mo nai, watashi ni naru, that roughly translates as “I’ll become a myself, that is nobody else.” Here again we find an emphasis on individuality and difference. Scrolling down, we find the following paragraph written in a smaller font:

    I leave my body to the blowing wind.

    My hair is enveloped in light, and is filled by the pleasant air.

    What I needed was this [facial] expression.

    I got rid of what I did not need, and refreshingly freed my mind.

    Gracefully, freely.

    I should just enjoy myself more.79

    Unlike the tagline in the Addichty webpage, THROW’s brand identity is here described in ideological terms only. Once again, “freedom” is the central theme, and is associated with a sensation of freshness (kaze, “the wind”; also, the onomatopoeia sutto, here rendered as “refreshingly”). The image of release is further emphasized by the fact that “I” of this text is in close contact with nature: her skin feels the wind, she is shrouded in light and breathes pure air. But what is the subject being released from? The fourth and the last line would suggest that she is being trapped by social constraints, something akin to the Freudian super-ego, that somehow renders her unable to enjoy herself for what she really is. My literal translation of the sixth line makes it hard to understand the hedonistic implications of its meaning: what the original Japanese implies is not simply that she should “have fun,” but she should be finding pleasure in what she is and not what she is expected to be. It is perhaps strange to the eyes of the Euro-American observer accustomed to the discourse of white supremacy that the consumption of whiteness comes with an invitation to spontaneity. The whiteness being sold here is certainly perceived in a radically different way from the Eurocentric “West,” where it is associated with self-constraint.80 It is being marketed to the Japanese public in a way that reminds the portrayal of minorities in the white-dominated world,81 and that makes it particularly appealing to the archipelago’s consumers.

    Listening to the producers’ interviews, it becomes clear for them that the red pigments of the hair, as a symbol of this self-Orientalistically represented “Japaneseness” are represented as a further constraint. Producer Kimura Naoto speaks of a “liberation from redness for the women who hate it”;82 fellow member of the production team Horiuchi brings up the ever-present desire in Japanese women to “become like foreigners,”83 but neither of the two explains the connection between the deletion of red pigments from the hair and the possibility of becoming foreigner-like. It is perhaps this lack of an explicit connection in an explanation from an expert that makes it perceived as an “obvious truth.” In fact, nobody seems to refer to the fact that red undertones are common overseas as well, not to mention the existence of redheads in predominantly Caucasian regions. By hiding these facts, the red pigments are constructed as something that is peculiarly Japanese and juxtaposed to the exclusively foreign blue pigments, further contributing to the essentializing of the gaikokujin that propels self-Orientalism.

    Consuming Whiteness: Gaikokujin-fū and Everyday Life

    To understand the ways that gaikokujin-fū was being interpreted and consumed I conducted fieldwork for two months (April-June 2017) in Tokyo. Engaging in participant observation proved to be relatively easy, since superficial conversation about beauty trends is one of the most common ways that young women around my age use to socialize. Most of my peers were very quick to react every time I lightly introduced the subject. However, due to the perceived “lightness” of the topic, not many people showed to be willing to talk prolongedly about it. This prompted me to supplement the fieldwork with semi-structured interviews I conducted with four people aged 20-22.

    The general reaction to the gaikokujin-fū buzzword was one of recognition–the existence of the trend was acknowledged both by people who were actually familiar with it as well as by others who were not really interested but had seen the phrase and recognized a more general idea behind it. As the reader might expect after having gone through the previous chapter, consumers of gaikokujin-fū hair all brought up the difficulties they had in obtaining the desired results. When I first contacted K., a 23-year-old university student in Tokyo, she told me to wait till the following week for the interview since she had an appointment to dye her hair of an ash-like color. Seven days later, I was surprised to see that her hair had not changed much. Turns out that her virgin hair was a very difficult base to work with: having never bleached it, it proved to be very resistant to blue-green dyes. Dying the hair of an ash-like color would have been impossible as the naturally red pigments of the hair would have completely nullified the effect.

    Whiteness as Empowerment, Whiteness as Difference

    K. was nonetheless very accommodating and answered my questions very enthusiastically. To her, the word gaikokujin had indeed a very positive meaning, and she specifically associated it to difference. My informant used a very harsh word when talking about her fellow Japanese: to her, Japanese style equals mass-production. Her image of Japan was perfectly congruent with those described by Mouer and Sugimoto in their critique of Nihonjinron. “Ordinary” Japanese girls were, in her opinion, the cutesy and quiet girls with straight black hair and bangs covering their foreheads. Why did she feel attracted to gaikokujin-fū in the first place? K. felt that the “traditional” Japanese image was constraining, and she had both very physical and empirical reasons (she does not like face with bangs) as well as a specific ideological background. It is worth nothing here that K. has had since her childhood a very strong akogare towards “Western countries”: she has studied English since she was a small child and is now studying Italian, which led her to spend a year abroad in the University of Venice. Moreover, she attended a very liberal protestant high school in Tokyo, where students were allowed to dye their hair and had no obligation to wear the school uniform. She herself stated that the liberal environment she was brought up in had a huge influence on her view of the world and thus she did not feel the need to “conform.” K. speaks from a privileged position that allowed her to glimpse a “different” world, in which she is promised freedom. In a similar fashion to the representations I analysed in the previous chapter, “Western” foreign becomes a symbol of liberation from the societal constraints of a traditionalistic society.

    The liberating qualities of the akogare towards the essentialized “Western” foreign have been brought up in previous research as a space for young women to astray themselves from the hierarchies of everyday life. The link between freedom and diversity was indeed particularly strong in K., who feels somehow “oppressed” by certain aspects of society. However, this is far from being a universal mode of consumption: in fact, the other three girls never even mentioned anything ideological. To S., a 22-year-old girl I met while studying in Tokyo two years ago, dying her hair of an ash-like hue was an act genuinely finalized to the enhancement of her beauty: she thought the color made her face look brighter. While she too stated during the interview that foreigners are viewed as cool and fashionable, she did not allude to a desire to “become” one nor she mentioned any ideological values associated with them that she emphasized with. In her everyday practice, whiteness is consumed as a tool regardless of its hegemonic signified. Informants A. and H. talked about the trend in a similar way. H. initially dyed her hair because she liked how cute ash hair looked on her favourite model, and had little more to say other than that. Her friend A., who recently graduated from a fashion school, confessed that in her environment standing out was more the rule than a subversive act. Her ash phase was brief and followed by even more explosive hues such as blue and pink. S., A., and H., were very much less conscious of their ways of consumption, but, as French theorist Michel de Certeau argues,84 it is precisely the aimlessness of their wandering that make their practices subvert the hegemony established by the global white supremacy. Having gaikokujin-fū hair is one of the strategies that Japanese women have at their disposition to attain beauty, and while it is trendy, it is far from being superior to different styles. Whiteness becomes an accessory that enhances the natural beauty of the self, and it is not employed to override one’s original racial features but rather to enrich them through the display of individuality. Under this light, it is possible to see the consumption of foreign-like hair as an unconscious tentative of overcoming the racialized barriers that might generate uncanny feelings in the eyes of the “white” spectator.

    Subdued Subversion and the Ambiguities of Consumption

    There are however at least two factors that complicate the consumption of gaikokujin-fū hair, making it a multifaceted and complex process. Firstly, during my interview with K. we discussed the differences between this and other fashion trends that tend to refuse the stereotypical sameness of the constructed Japanese image. K. suggested the existence of an even more individualistic trend–Harajuku–style fashion. The Harajuku district of Tokyo is famous world-wide for hosting a wide range of colourful subcultures,85 which my interviewee described with terms such as dokusouteki (creative) and yancha (mischievous). Harajuku fashion is individuality taken to such a level in which it becomes even more openly contestant of society. S. described these subcultures as referencing the image of “an invented fantasy world, completely out of touch with reality.” The gaikokujin-fū hair colour is indeed a way to break out of the “factory mould,” but it is a relatively tame way of doing it as it is the consumption of a domesticized otherness. As I also pointed out during the analysis of the production processes, the aesthetics of the trend are largely shaped in relation to societal norms and purposely do not excessively break out of them. Especially in its darker tones, foreign-like ash hair is visually closer (albeit chemically harder to obtain) than platinum blonde, and it is precisely in these shades that the hue is being consumed by girls like K. and S.

    Furthermore, one could say that Gaikokujin-fū hues can at times be experimentations instrumental to the formation of one’s identity. H. and S. both explained that they tried out ash dyes as a phase, only then to move on to something that they thought better reflected their own selves. In both cases, that meant going back to their natural black color and to darker tones. H., in particular, after spending her three years of freedom in university experimenting with various hues, finally concluded in her fourth and final year that natural black hair was “what suits Japanese people best.”. After trying out the “Other” and recognizing it as such, her identification acted as what Stuart Hall might have called a suture between her as an acting subject and the discursive practices of “Japaneseness.”86 As “foreignness,” and whiteness as one of its variants, cannot be easily conceived outside the dominant self-Orientalistic discourses, even gaikokujin-fū is inevitably bound to the essentialized “Japaneseness” of the Nihonjinron. This is only worsened by the fact that foreign-like hair colors are a product in the beauty market: they need to be marketed to the consumers, and this necessitates simplification. Essentialization and the reinforcement of self-Orientalism are the high prices that one must pay for the consumption of the other, and constitute a big limitation of its subversive power.

    Conclusion

    I have attempted to analyse the ways in which whiteness is produced and consumed in Japan, a country with significant economic and cultural power that does not have a significant Caucasian population. I have chosen as the topic a feature of the human body that is usually considered peripherical to the construction of racialized categories, and I have attempted to demonstrate how it becomes central in the production of an occidentalistic image of “whiteness” in the Japanese Archipelago.

    What this trend helps us to understand is the complexities and multiplicities of whiteness. By shedding some light on the way that hairdressers in Japan construct and sell the gaikokujin-fū trend we become aware of the fact that an aspect such as hair color that we do not usually pay much attention to in relation to this racialized category can be central when the same is consumed in a different setting. It is significant that what is being marketed here it is a slightly different paradigm from the Eurocentric or conventional idea of “white” people, that sees at its center blonde-haired, fair-skinned people with blue or green eyes: whiteness is mitigated and familiarized in order to make it more desirable to wider audiences. Its localized production and its consumption as a disposable accessory might be taken as challenging to the global dominance of Caucasian aesthetic.

    Acting in the (locally) ambiguous field of racial representations,87 hairdressers in Japan are creating their own whiteness, one that is starkly defined by what is socially acceptable and what is rejected.88 It thus becomes apparent the fact that racialized categories are nothing but discourses, constantly morphing in relation to time and space. The existence of a different whiteness created by and for the use of people who are not considered as belonging to this racialized category creates conflict with the discourse of a global, hegemonic whiteness by demonstrating its artificiality and construction.

    However, the use of the word gaikokujin inevitably generates ambivalent meanings. The trend becomes linked to the discourse of “foreignness” and the desires associated with it. Eventually, it ends up reproducing the essentialist and reifying stereotypes that are creating through the occidentalistic (and self-Orientalistic) practices of nihonjinron. The trend potentially reinforces the “us/them” barriers that are at the basis of essentialistic thought by juxtaposing the desired “foreign hair” as a polar opposite of the more conservative and traditional “Japanese hair.”

    To reiterate, gaikokujin-fū might be subversive on the global scale, but it is nonetheless an expression of the oppressive mainstream on the local level, as it restates notions of difference and exclusivity that form the basis for social exclusion of phenotypically alien foreigners. Unfortunately, the practices of marketing necessitate simplifications, and makes it is hard to achieve what I believe would be the most subversive action: the elimination of these reifying barriers. It is imperative that we start to think about ways to talk about race and culture in a non-essentializing manner while maintaining an anti-white-centric stance.

    Although the problem of essentialization cannot be resolved by looking at representation only, by looking at how the product is effectively consumed in everyday life we might find that these semi-conscious practices already offer some hints on how to overcome the barriers that reification builds around us. It is indeed true that consumers answer to the “call” of the marketers, and that they identify themselves to some extent with the images of racialized whiteness created by the beauty industry. However, what the interviews revealed is that often times the link between image and product is broken in the immediacy of consumption. By using whiteness as an accessory, some of the consumers open up a space in which they contest the seriousness and rigidity of racialized categories–a space that allows hybridity to exist.


    http://zapruderworld.org/journal/archive/volume-4/the-everyday-consumption-of-whiteness-the-gaikokujin-fu-foreign-like-
    #corps #beauté #femmes #géographie_culturelle #japon #cheveux #identité #altérité #orientalisme #blancheur #hakujin #blancs #représentation

  • RDC : « Porter ses cheveux naturels c’est être une artiste, une dingue ou une droguée » – JeuneAfrique.com
    http://www.jeuneafrique.com/559702/societe/rdc-porter-ses-cheveux-naturels-cest-etre-une-artiste-une-dingue-ou-un

    « nappy », une femme heureuse avec ses cheveux naturels – le terme est né de la contraction des deux mots anglais « natural » et « happy »

    http://www.jeuneafrique.com/139479/societe/mode-cr-pues-et-alors

    Les 5 commandements de la nappy

    1 Le big chop tu pratiqueras. Parce qu’un cheveu défrisé pousse mal et que mieux vaut tout couper pour « passer au naturel »

    2 D’hydratation tu rêveras. Parce que, contrairement aux tresses et aux rajouts, des cheveux naturels se chouchoutent à grand renfort de shampoings et de masques

    3 Inventive tu seras. Parce que la texture du cheveu crépu lui permet d’être natté, « vanillé » (tresse à deux branches), et s’accommode même des dreadlocks

    4 D’accessoires tu t’équiperas. Parce que peignes afros et pinces sont indispensables pour donner du volume

    5 Patiente tu te montreras. Parce que l’on ne devient pas un membre des Jackson Five en quelques mois. Le cheveu afro pousse en moyenne de 0,7 cm par mois, contre 2 cm pour le cheveu asiatique

    #cheveu #nappy #afro @beautefatale

  • La libertà passa dai capelli

    Colombia tra pace e guerriglia, ma Colombia anche tra passato e futuro, tra tradizione e creatività. Il tutto, da 10 anni, a Bogotà.

    Un gruppo di donne ha fatto del taglio dei capelli uno strumento di cambiamento sociale, in un contesto di guerra. Lo ha fatto nel centro storico di #Bogotà e l’esprienza dura ormai da dieci anni.

    Formatasi nel campo della pubblicità, #Melissa_Paerez ha cominciato a tagliare i capelli agli amici quasi per gioco, durante un soggiorno linguistico a Londra. E col tempo quel gioco è diventato la sua passione e il suo mestiere. Di ritorno a Bogotà, nel 2008 ha così aperto un salone nel centro storico, la Candelaria, dove per principio le parrucchiere sono artiste e non devono avere alcuna formazione specifica.

    Forbici alla mano, senza specchi né modelli, le giovani donne della «Peluqueria» trasformano le teste dei clienti in piccole opere d’arte, con l’obiettivo di spingerli ad uscire dalla logica paralizzante della guerra. In Colombia, la cultura è d’altronde sempre stata un’arma di resistenza per una parte della popolazione e oggi Bogotà è considerata tra le città più creative dell’America latina.

    Ad oltre un anno dalla firma degli accordi di pace, la Colombia non ha però ancora voltato la pagina del conflitto. Se le FARC hanno effettivamente deposto le armi, i negoziati con l’altra principale guerriglia - l’ELN (Esercito di liberazione nazionale) - sono in fase di stallo, e diversi gruppi eredi del paramilitarismo continuano a seminare sangue e terrore. Nei soli mesi di gennaio e febbraio sono stati assassinati oltre 40 difensori dei diritti umani. Un livello di violenza che ricorda gli anni bui del conflitto, con l’aggravante che oggi poco o nulla si sa sugli autori di questi crimini e sulle loro motivazioni.

    L’accordo di pace con le FARC è inoltre appeso a un filo. Da un lato perché il governo non ha ancora implementato alcuni dei punti centrali dell’intesa, come la riforma agraria che permetterebbe alle vittime di recuperare le proprie terre o le misure di reinserimento sociale previste per gli ex guerriglieri. Dall’altro perché, dopo le legislative dell’11 marzo, il 27 maggio si terranno le elezioni presidenziali e se a vincere sarà la destra vicina all’ex presidente Alvaro Uribe, l’accordo potrebbe essere rivisto al ribasso, con il rischio che parte delle FARC decida di riprendere le armi.

    https://www.rsi.ch/news/oltre-la-news/La-libert%C3%A0-passa-dai-capelli-10236176.html
    #cheveux #Colombie #femmes #liberté

    Un reportage audio de @stesummi

  • Crépue | Les pieds sur terre
    https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-pieds-sur-terre/crepue

    Ah ben non, nous on coiffe pas les cheveux crépus !
    En France, de nos jours, pour de nombreuses femmes noires, assumer ses cheveux crépus est un long cheminement. Entre acceptation de soi, racisme larvé et malgré la pression des canons et normes esthétiques blancs, certaines font le choix de laisser leurs cheveux naturels.

    #noire #cheveux #racisme #crépue #frisée #défrisage #lissage #audio #radio #France_Culture

  • Vu ce soir au cinéma...

    #Ouvrir_la_voix

    Ouvrir La Voix, est donc un film documentaire, mais pour moi, ce sont aussi plus de deux années de ma vie dédiées à la réaproppriation de la narration par les femmes noires. Une fois les 45 pré-entretiens menés et les 24 participantes confirmées, j’ai commencé par organiser des soupers à la maison pour qu’elles se rencontrent et apprennent à se connaitre avant de se découvrir dans une narration commune à l’écran

    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1172129246/ouvrir-la-voix?lang=fr
    https://ouvrirlavoixlefilm.fr/onepage.html

    #Afro-descendants #racisme #homosexualité #homophobie #xénophobie #femmes #Afro #Afropéennes #film #documentaire #luttes #résister #femmes_noires #noirs #intersectionnalité #identité #témoignage #école #éducation #travail #discriminations #communautarisme #LGBT #Amandine_Gay #préjugés #corps #sexualité #cheveux #beauté #origine

  • Lire Americanah de Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie m’hydrate le cheveu – Sana Guessous
    https://sanaguessous.com/2017/04/18/lire-americanah-de-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-mhydrate-le-cheveu

    « Défriser ses cheveux c’est comme être en prison. Tu es en cage. Tes cheveux font la loi, s’entend dire Ifemelu. Tu te bats toujours pour qu’ils fassent ce qu’ils ne sont pas censés faire. »

    Quand elle coupe tout ou presque, quand elle voit poindre sur son crâne deux centimètres de cheveux vivants, crépus, elle panique, se trouve hideuse. Se cloître chez elle pendant trois jours, jusqu’à la découverte des sites Nappy hair.

    « Elles échangeaient des recettes. Elles s’étaient fabriqué un monde virtuel où leurs cheveux bouclés, tirebouchonnés, frisés, crépus, laineux étaient la norme. Et Ifemelu plongea dans ce monde avec une gratitude éperdue. »

    #cheveux #beauté #racisme