Negotiating gender in the hair salon

As a short-haired woman, I have come to see hair cuts as a ceaseless negotiation.  They probably wouldn't be if I found a stylist and stuck with it, but as I am incredibly cheap (more to come on this front in a future post), I'd rather just pop into a Hair Cuttery or Fantastic Sam's or my mall's Unisex Hair Salon (that's its real name!) for a $18 trim.  As these locales are revolving doors for sylists, every trim is with a new face.  There is much to be said for having a perfect stranger cut your hair every six weeks - they always make small changes or have slightly divergent techniques.  Some prefer using razors, some prefer scissor-over-comb, some like thinning shears and others clearly don't own a pair.  If you aren't too attached to having your hair just one way, it can be nice to have it a little different every time.

But having to explain what it is I want in a cut every time I visit does have its obvious downsides.  I have regaled you all, dear readers, with a post mentioning my short hair as a gender challenge before.  As I identify as a woman and generally go through the world read and treated as a woman, sometimes I forget that short hair on a woman can still pose a challenge to gendered expectations.  I am made the most aware of this challenge when I get my hair cut and for a few days afterwards, when it's shortest.  It could be that I feel more exposed, or it could be that people really are looking at me differently - it's hard to say, as my sense of sudden baldness may tinge my perspective.

The most overt comments on what my short hair means for my gender presentation (which, in all respects, is almost completely gender conforming) have come from the stylists themselves.  Seeing as how I meet a new one every month or so, I have a steady stream of opportunities to negotiate what I want versus what they are comfortable giving me.

Last fall I paid a visit to my Unisex Hair Salon and I was assigned to a middle-aged Asian woman.  I was about to ask for my usual ("I'll take a three in the back, cut out around the ears, keep it a little longer on the sides and the front, and thin it out if you can too, please!"), but before I even sat down she put her hand on my shoulder and said, "You look like a boy!"  Gotta love her for coming right out with it.  "You are a woman, but you look like a boy.  I can help you look more like a woman."

"But I like it this way..."  I mustered feebly.  It's difficult to stand up to woman for whom tact is not really an issue.

"But you look like a boy!"

"I know but that's okay.  I prefer it short."

She stared at me dubiously, and then proceeded to trim my hair a tiiiiiiny bit.  Then she whipped out the thinning shears and thinned it a tiiiiiiiny bit.  "Okay!" she announced.

"Um...can you cut a little more?"

She thinned it a tiiiiiiny bit more.  "Okay!"  she said again, and this time moved to take my cape off.  Clearly she had cut as much as she was going to cut.

For months I went to the Unisex Hair Salon in fear of being saddled with her again (there is no non-racist way to say, "I'd like a haircut, please...but, uh, give me anyone but the Asian lady").  Last April I was assigned to her chair once more.  I braced myself for a pointless thinning, and I made up my mind to demand that she cut more if she tried to pull the cape off me again, but she actually cut my hair very thoroughly.  It may have something to do with the fact that the woman both before and after me were middle-aged white women with that short, middle-aged white women hair, so I fit right in.  She must have cut enough heads of hair like my own mother's to feel like it didn't matter much when she cut mine.

Last weekend, when I was in D.C., I dropped by the Dupont Circle Hair Cuttery, which has always been a dependable place to get my do cropped.  Historically, they haven't been so afraid of cutting too close.  It may be that it is in a trendy metropolitan area, or it could be because, as my partner tells me, all the gay boys get their hair cut there, so the stylists are accustomed to such things.  Who knows.

But last week (with another Asian stylist, strangely enough), gender came up again in an overt way.  She asked me whether I wanted the neckline trimmed straight across with the buzzer, or if I'd rather she blend it in.  I told her she could do whatever she preferred - I don't see the neckline, so as long as I can tell it's not a mullet, I'm none the wiser to the specifics.

She stood quietly for a moment, running her fingers through the freshly trimmed locks at the crown of my head.  "Well, straight across is...is more like a man.  That's a man's cut.  Blended is for a woman.  So I will blend it."

And then she spend maybe six or seven minutes meticulously manicuring a "blended" hairline, digging different buzzers into my neck to achieve the appropriate womanly effect.  My main thought while she was doing this: "dang, if I were a man I'd so have been out of here five minutes ago!"

It's interesting to me that hair can be so definitively gendered, to the point where a neckline is denoted as masculine or feminine.  It's sort of like the Butch Bakery, that cupcake place opened by a dude who wanted to make cupcakes "for men."  (Although with a name like Butch Bakery, he's not just going to be getting men looking for cupcakes.)  They are CUPCAKES.  Literally pieces of baked sugar and flour and butter with some icing on top.  They don't have a gender!  And neither do neckline techniques, or hair itself.  Hair is as dead and chromosome-less as cupcakes.  But as gender is a defining social organizing principal, we seem to only be able to understand inanimate things by imbuing them with gendered meaning.  Very often these meanings seem to keep us safely within our assigned boxes, even if we have tried to take a step out of them.  If women have short hair, they should at least have a feminine neckline; if men eat cupcakes, they better be whiskey flavored and covered in camo.

We are ridiculous.  All of the energy and creativity and human brilliance squandered on such meaningless details as how to make our choices more like a woman's or more like a man's, so that we don't really have to change much of anything at all!

Now I really need a cupcake.