Women Framing Hair

Download or read book Women Framing Hair written by Heather Hanna and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-13 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the complex and enigmatic motif of hair in the work of five contemporary women artists, Chrystl Rijkeboer, Alice Maher, Annegret Soltau, Kathy Prendergast and Ellen Gallagher, from the late 1970s to the present. It investigates why hair is such a productive and resonant site of meaning, how it is suggestive of, and responds to, serial strategies, and why it appears to be of particular significance to women who are artists. It explores the implications of hair as an embodied material, its role as a haptic metaphor of the life cycle, and what might be seen as a darker, more liminal side of hair as a site of excess and body waste, and its ability to represent trauma and ‘wounding’. It also discusses some of the divergent histories of hair as a rich marker of identity in cultural discourses of beauty, myth and femininity, and as a symbol of status and power. Informed by a range of theoretical approaches, this book draws on Julia Kristeva’s theorizations of the abject, Hélène Cixous’s notion of écriture feminine, and a Deleuzian consideration of difference.