The Importance of Vulnerability
A continuous theme throughout all of my work, vulnerability has become the most important element of my creative practice. To be truly vulnerable in front of complete strangers has felt uncomfortable at times but these conversations are what generates honest and sensitive pieces of art.
I never thought I would be capable of facilitating such conversations. At times it can feel as if I'm blindly sharing the most personal part of my existence and offering it up for debate to anyone but there is no intimacy without vulnerability - with that comes unusual and sometimes intimidating experiences. To truly be vulnerable in art is to put yourself out there for critique, with no expectations of how you may be perceived - this project is the most vulnerable I think I've ever been through my work, with my body hair serving entirely as the inspiration. My thoughts and feelings seem to be on this relentless cycle with nothing ever staying the same but if I can be open about these feelings, it normalises them and creates a space for healthy conversation to happen.
To protest the norms and expectations that surround us and look at our bodies without the ever-present male gaze, is to reclaim a part of our expression that we've been told is unwomanly. Understanding why it is that we choose to remove our body hair and questioning our relationship with it, provides us with our own perspectives. Rather than accepting what it deemed to be palatable for women, we must question what it so unacceptable about female body hair and why the way we're viewed in society changes when we choose to reclaim it. In Louise Tondeur's "A history of pubic hair, or reviewers' responses to Terry Eagleton's After Theory" she states that "Hair is either silly or obscene. But if something is being called silly, it's likely there is political motivation, an attempt at subjection and the removal of power involved in the process. Female body hair is silly, masturbation is silly, women's writing is silly, because to call them anything else would be to allow them to unleash their power"
The foundations of what it means to be a woman are so fragile that something as menial as female body hair, can threaten femininity entirely. In Alice Macdonald's "Hair on the lens: female body hair on the screen" she states that "A woman with hair growing in an area socially deemed male - like the chin, or the upper - will be seen as failing to fit gender expectations and will be regarded as transgressing one of society's cherished classifications. These women are treated with social disapproval since the failure to remove the offending hair - the 'matter out of place' - will be seen as a sign that she wishes to destabalise society itself." A woman with body hair is read as a powerful and disruptive manifestation of sexuality and threatening to patriarchal order. The fragility of society's classification of femininity means that we can construct our own definition of what it means to be a woman.
I am woman with body hair. I should not have to justify that to anyone yet even throughout this project I’ve found sometimes I’m doing exactly that - over explaining and giving out the exact reasons I choose to grow my hair, when actually the only person it concerns is myself. The further I go into this project the more complex my relationship gets and the more shocked I become at how misconceptions about female body hair are embedded into everything. To be publicly open about body hair as a woman opens you up to all kinds of criticism, not all of it being from a place of curiosity. My work in this project has taught me that despite the space I may create to facilitate the necessary conversations, not everyone is as accepting as they claim to be, especially towards topics that are still considered off-limits.
To be vulnerable is to share a part of yourself that hasn’t been available to everyone before. For me “The Battle of My Body Hair” is the most vulnerable I’ve ever been but the project has almost taken on a alternative meaning since it began. Female body hair will always feel like a battle, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be something we are able to celebrate.