CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Lanita Jacobs-Huey (Anthropology, USC), December 4, 2000.

"Epistemological Deliberations: Constructing and Contesting Knowledge in Women's Cross-Cultural Hair Testimonies."

This paper examines several instances wherein black and white women negotiate ideologies and practices around black hair and hair care. I am centrally concerned with African American women's lay and expert narratives about hair as an index of their personal, professional, and in some cases, political identities (Bonner 1991, Mercer 1994, Rooks 1996). I will argue that their narratives of hair are, in many ways, filtered through their experiences of marginalization as a collective of women who are underrepresented in Eurocentric standards and representations of beauty. These shared experiences socialize them into similar ways of knowing and experiencing their body, particularly their hair. African American women's ways of knowing their body and strategies for using this knowledge also emerge from their lay and professional epistemological communities (Nelson 1993). These communities are overlapping in that African American women draw upon their own experiences of race and gender-based marginalization, both in society and the hair care profession, to construct counter evidence to privileged ideologies and practices around hair and hair care. As their hair narratives are constructed in critical response to white women's commentaries, I describe the critical role of audience in shaping the way African American women collaboratively construct ways of knowing black hair in their cross-cultural dialogues. To the extent that black women legitimize their shared knowledges about black hair, their collaborative narratives can be considered counternarratives to "master" or Eurocentric notions of beauty or, alternatively, what Goldberger (1996) calls privileged epistemologies or socially valued ways of knowing for establishing and evaluating truth claims. Discourse analyses of cross-cultural hair testimony illustrate how women make sense of their race/ethnicity, gender, and lived experience in order to substantiate or undermine particular knowledge claims. Moreover, the very nature of African American and European American women's hair narratives invokes, at a larger level, pertinent themes in feminist theory, including a) the enunciation of difference between women engaged in knowledge production/sharing and b) the dialectics of race, gender, experience, and epistemology. Collectively, these findings suggest the promise of social science research in documenting the micro-processes of knowledge production that are valuable as part of an interdisciplinary and empowering dialogue about feminist epistemology.