Partially-shaved hairstyles are pretty cool right now, especially in queer scenes. Secret Asian Man in one webcomic retorts to a hairdresser who says Asian hair is so easy to style, “Did you just call my hair submissive and obedient?” It actually says a lot about racially specific stereotypes. For East Asian women, “natural” hair is usually understood as long, black, straight and flowing – pretty and politically powerless. įor African-Americans, natural hair has been associated with Black Pride and Black Power. I marked myself accordingly.īut whatever we mean for our style choices to signify politically, none of it means that we’ll necessarily be read that way by “illiterate” audiences. For the next four years, my bright green locks were an “excuse” for some whites (male and female) to continue to eroticize my difference without indulging the “obvious” orientalist signifiers. In some circles a shorn skull is a sure sign of dyke-ness. I will be scary, I will be other than the stereotype of the model minority, the passive Asian female.” I said to myself, “Now I will be what they least expected. I thought to embrace my difference, to expound upon it, to expand its breadth. I wanted to be an aggressive spectacle, a bodily denial of the “passive” stereotype, the anti-lotus blossom, because when I was young it was always just a simple matter of “fighting” stereotypes by becoming its opposite. Having “unnatural” hair was supposed to be an oppositional aesthetic tactic, a “fuck you” to the White Man, not an attempt to be the White Woman.
I cut off all my hair and damaged it with all kinds of fucked-up chemicals because I was sick of the orientalist gaze being directed at/on me. Every time I think about my hair I turn to Mimi Thi Nguyen’s essay, “Hair Trauma”. I was the one who requested that Mimi repost this essay because apparently I need to read it at least every six months – the frequency of my own hair crises.
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