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Plucked: A History of Hair Removal Rebecca M. Herzig. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
Plucked: A History of Hair Removal by Rebecca Herzig is a thoughtful and unique microhistory of hair from the eyebrows down. Herzig examines hair removal in the US from Native Americans to today's men and women and how body hair has been medicalized, industrialized, and politicized. Herzig includes notes and citations from medical journals, monographs, and primary sources, as well as a thorough index.
The introduction to Plucked is essential reading as it sets the tone: terminology and the two most frequent theories (evolution and gendered social control) about why hair removal was, and is, so prevalent despite practices often "repetitive, and expensive, at best, and not infrequently messy, painful, disfiguring, and even deadly" (12) are explained. These theories are central in understanding attitudes.
Starting at the roots of hair culture, Herzig begins with the "othered" body of Native Americans, a longtime fascination during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among early naturalists and anthropologists. The visible hairless ness of the native people was seen in opposition to the civilized and was attributed to a lack of masculinity. Despite eventual conclusions...