Embodying Grotesque: Body hair’s subversion of classical notions of the feminine body
Published in issue 1 of E/X Journal.
The established Western scientific model, which posits the human body as merely a mechanical entity, has been contested by postmodern and feminist scholars since the early twentieth century. To varying degrees, these scholars argue that bodies do not exist as ‘natural’ or ‘underneath’ culture, but are instead created as cultural, socio-political, and material meaning1. Judith Butler agrees that the ‘fixity of the body, its contours, its movements’ are indeed ‘material’, but this materiality must be rethought as the ‘most productive effect’ of power2. The body is also ‘libidinally invested’; according to Elizabeth Grosz, it is not merely flesh and bone, but has a meaningful, significatory, cultural dimension’3. This implies that the body is not simply a reflection of its surrounding cultural context, but is shaped and constituted by it. Bodies, she writes, themselves a cultural form, marked in their ‘very ‘biological’ configurations with sociosexual inscriptions’4.
This understanding sees the human body as a politically inscribed entity—a site of disciplinary power whose ‘histories and practices of control and containment’ shape and mark its very morphology5. Michel Foucault was one of the first to elaborate on disciplining the body, expanding on the different ways “docile bodies” have been produced throughout history by means of specific symbolic, ritual, and theatrical bodily practices6. Contributing to these obedient bodies are seemingly impulsive yet subliminally imposed ‘technologies of the self,’ which are bodily praxis that ‘permit individuals to effect [...] a certain number of operations’ on their bodies, transforming themselves ‘in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, and perfection’7.
Classical and Early Modern Concepts of the Body
Fifteenth-century Europe witnessed the revival of classical antiquity and a renewed interest in the art, literature, and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome, accompanied by the rediscovery of the classical human forms depicted in Greco-Roman remains and the desire to emulate—even attempt to surpass—their sublimity. The Renaissance was also the era during which François Rabelais lived, publishing his Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel between 1532 and 1564, his work critically responding to the dominant ideals of his time8.
The Renaissance was a period during which mathematical and religious tradition integrated to form a humanist vision of the body as a figure which could express perfection9. Early modern European art and science presented the ideal form much the same as that of the Ancient Greek classical period: an athletic, finely proportioned physique of porcelain smoothness. Although aesthetics certainly formed an element of depilatory practices, hair was also understood as a bodily excretion that must be removed in order to return to the “true” balance of the female body10.
The pursuit of this ideal led to a surge in body hair removal practices across Europe, leading historians to aptly label the Renaissance as the ‘golden age of depilation’11. Dangerous and painful techniques circulated to accomplish this physique, largely targeted towards women. A recipe dating from 1532 instructs users to boil together ‘one pint of arsenic and eighth a part of quicklime,’ smear it on the desired area, and ‘when the skin feels hot,’ wash it quickly so ‘the flesh does not come off’12.
Rabelais’ Grotesque Concept of the Body
In response to, and as a critique of, the classical body and the ontology of early modern Europe which it accompanied, the bodily category of grotesque realism emerged. The grotesque was not only a refusal of modernity’s stylistic effects as a diminishment of human freedom, nor was it merely withdrawal from the ‘cultural tools of the dominant class’. It acted as a counter-production of knowledge, as ‘a site of insurgency’13. The dividing lines between world and the body, and between separate bodies, were depicted in the grotesque genre in direct opposition to the dominant classical concepts of the body. The grotesque body, rather than being individual, impenetrable, and limited, was unconfined, open, and shifting.
In his seminal book, Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin analyses this genre of imagery through the remarkable birth of Gargantua by his mother Gargamelle, which occurs in the first book of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Following an over-indulgence on tripe—the intestines of fattened oxen—during dinner, the pregnant Gargamelle began to ‘groan, lament and cry out’14. Midwives came rushing to her from all directions, ‘feeling and groping her below’, finding ‘loose shreds of skin, of a rather unsavoury odour, which they took to be the child’. But this flesh was not the child she was expecting. It was, on the contrary, ‘her fundament which had escaped with the mollification of her right intestine’ from consuming ‘too many tripe’. The baby Gargantua instead entered Gargamelle’s vein, ascended though her diaphragm to a point above her shoulders, and was born through her left ear. He emerged, not wailing as most babies do, but loudly bawling ‘“Drink, drink, drink!”’15.
Contrary to the early modern canon in which the body is ‘self-sufficient’ and concerns its ‘individual, closed sphere’ alone16, the grotesque body is portrayed here as being connected to the rest of the world and in a constant exchange with it. Through the devouring of the dismembered animal body, the falling out of human intestines, and the farcical birth of baby Gargantua, the border between the body and the world is transgressed, and the classical concept of the individual body is overcome. In other words, Gargamelle, her child, and the oxen tripe that she gorges herself on merge and interweave in one grotesque image, as the limits between ‘man and beast, between the consuming and consumed’ become ambiguous17. This intimate and carnal intertwining represents a truly grotesque image in which the body is a hybrid of human, animal, landscape, and cosmos. Rabelais thus creates an atmospheric image of a vast, heterogenous, ‘superindividual’ bodily life that is antithetical to the era’s dominant classical concept of the body18.
Throughout Rabelais’ literary works, this erasure of the body’s defined borders and its consequent synthesis with the world, with animals, and with objects is further expressed through acts of defecation, sweating, sneezing, copulation, and dismemberment. In all such episodes told by Rabelais, the shocking, grandiose, and victorious bodily element of the grotesque—its abundance, hilarity, and joy—opposed the ‘serious medieval world of fear and oppression’ with its ‘intimidating and intimidated ideology’19; according to Bakhtin, ‘no dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness’ could coexist with Rabelaisian images20.
The amusing facet of the grotesque body is one which remains prominent today. The general contemporary understanding of the term “grotesque” is something comically distorted and hideous—a fantastically monstrous being that invokes repulsion or discomfort. But, as Bakhtin reminds us, it is inadmissible to attempt to reduce grotesque imagery to these narrow aesthetic stereotypes that ‘dominate the modern systems of thought’21. It is necessary to read Rabelais and his grotesque images against the background of the thousand-year folk tradition, of which his work comprises. At its core, the grotesque is cosmic, embodying ‘the entire material bodily world in all its elements’22. It is hybrid and undefinable, ‘both and neither, a mingling and a unity’, lying at the margin between metaphor and myth23. Recognising the richness, depth, and complexity of the grotesque movement allows it to be faithfully reappropriated, and thus instigate a development in modern perceptions of the body.
While the classical body is moderated and self-actualised, striving for perfection, order, and homogeneity, the grotesque body defies definition; it has no finite incarnation, no ultimate, ideal form24. It remains ever unframeable and unfinished, outgrowing itself and transgressing its own limits in ways that are absurd and excessive. Even when the limits of the body are not entirely transgressed, opened, or fluid, they are still emphasised and interfered with. Rabelais frequently hyperbolises the ‘shoots and branches’ of the body, seeking to prolong and extend it beyond its confines, and link it to the outer world25, in turn disrupting the smooth, closed surface of the classical body. This usually occurs with the head, the ear, the nose, the breasts, the genital organs, the potbelly—all that which protrudes and sprouts. With this hyperbolizing comes the transformation of these human elements into animal ones, as snouts and beaks replace noses. Beyond the element of satirical humour that it offers, this hybridity and combination of human and animal traits is ‘one of the most ancient grotesque forms’ which defies the boundary between human and animal26.
The Classical Body in Contemporary Culture
Despite centuries having passed, the ‘entirely finished’ and ‘strictly limited’ classical bodily canon has persisted throughout its ‘historic variations and different genres’27. Contemporary bodily practices remain devised according to its ancient principles and unfeasible standards, arguably to even more of an extent than in early modern times. Empirical research confirms that while feminine eyebrows, trimmed pubic hair, and clean head hair are regarded as signs of ‘health, power, youth, vitality, and attractiveness’, unregulated forms of body hair are considered superfluous. Since the early modern period, they have remained endowed with dirt, danger, ugliness, sexuality, and animality—although what is considered as dirty or repulsive is a matter of convention and habit, and not inherent meaning28.
Leg hair, armpit hair, pubic hair, and other unwanted forms of hair are thus removed by means of shaving, plucking, depilatory creams, bleaches, waxing, sugaring, electrolysis, laser treatment, even medication. Since the introduction of the first razor for women in 1915, Gillette’s Milady Décolletée, an immense and fast-evolving industry has been devoted solely to assisting women in altering, controlling, and, beyond all, perfecting their bodies through the removal of its hair. Ironically, advertising campaigns for body hair removal products rarely show ‘unacceptable’ hair itself, and only refer to it as refuse and present the work that must be done to remove it. This is because, as Laura Scuriatti explains, bodies that are regularly shown become the normative, most “natural” ideal ‘to which women should aspire’29. This aesthetic modification and maintenance of the body not only contributes to the depilation industry—hair provides an endless economy as it regrows and is perpetually removed—but also reinforces the view that underpins all such procedures: the female body is unnatural and unacceptable if left undisciplined30.
As historian Rebecca Herzig acknowledges, hair is a ‘noticeable’ and ‘malleable’ feature—a ready medium for conveying ‘altered political consciousness’31. Choosing not to remove it can thus serve as a symbolic resistance against the historical, repetitive, expensive, and often unpleasant labour of maintaining hair-free flesh. In July of 1972, an article in Ms. Magazine criticised the normalisation of shaving as an ‘embodiment of our culture’s preoccupation with keeping women in a kind of state of innocence, and denying their visceral selves’32. This phrase epitomises the critical attitude of second-wave feminism towards the restrictive body standard, and the increasing embrace of hirsuteness at the time.
This, however, was dismissed as a counterproductive diversion from more urgent feminist concerns—professional opportunities for women and subsidised childcare, for instance—by feminist such as Betty Friedan, while others considered hirsuteness as ‘dangerous political extremism’ against men, marriage, and motherhood33. Any significant paradigmatic shifts in attitudes to body hair, or the classical body in general, have failed to prevail ever since, and hair, pseudomedicine, hygiene, and beauty remain as closely intertwined as they were in early modern Europe34.
The Modern Grotesque
Just as the grotesque movement, as implemented by Rabelais, was one of pure abstraction, transgression, and possibility in reaction to the restrictive ideals of its time, body hair can be deployed as its contemporary embodiment to transgress the rigid binaries imposed on the contemporary female body, transcend beyond the remnants of classical idealism, and challenge the hegemonic traditionalism which impedes what constitutes an acceptable body.
In her seminal book Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas emphasises that knowledges which distinguish, purify, and demarcate transgressions serve primarily to ‘impose system on an inherently untidy experience,’ a sentiment which applies to the classical ideals on the human body35. ‘It is only by exaggerating difference,’ she continues, ‘that a semblance of order is created’36. Only through a grotesque dismantling of these differences, the classical form can be deconstructed, and bodies which are ‘exuberantly and democratically open and inclusive’ become accessible37.
As a result of the culturewide complicity in depilatory bodily practice, grown-out hair on the female body occupies a liminal and paradoxical space, encompassing various dichotomies when it is removed and when it is not. It thus has the potential to disrupt the clearly defined differences and binary conceptions of the classical body, representing the ‘objective frailty of the symbolic order’38. When absent, female body hair embodies the stable, closed, pure, the infantile, and the feminine, yet when left uncontrolled and uncontained, it becomes a symbol of hybridity, openness, impurity, animality, and masculinity. It is precisely this extensive symbolic tension and ambivalence that lends body hair its subversive, grotesque power in opposition to classical bodily notions.
Hair, for instance, manifests the precarious and ambiguous margin between the internal and external, and is thus ‘invested with power and danger’39. While a hair’s bulb remains inside the body, the shaft extends beyond the skin and connects it to the outside world40. By encompassing both the body’s interior and exterior, hair destabilises its clear boundary and instead aligns with the open orifices of the grotesque body41. Body hair thus obscures the smooth, pure, impenetrable façade—and thus the defined and bordered individuality—of the classical ideal.
Body hair also represents the very same hybridity and instability as the grotesque body does. It is an element of the body which sheds, regrows, becomes tangled, and is trimmed and shaved, only to regrow again. Hair thus remains in an irrationally shifting state, refusing permanent definition or objectivity, and occupying a transience that subverts the classical notion of the stable, moderated, and well-ordered body.
It is a privilege to experiment with body hair, to risk becoming wilfully monstrous only temporarily. While the grotesque body may be compelling at an explanatory level, it risks perpetuating systemic harm and ‘reproducing, rather than challenging, histories of violent disgust’ when embodied by already marginalised and abjected women42. As Imogen Tyler highlights in Against abjection, the abject is more than a mere theoretical concept. It is a social experience, speaking to the ‘living histories of violence’ towards Othered bodies43: women of colour, fat women, queer women, disabled women, women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, or transgender women who are often deemed abject and become a ‘magnet of fascination and repulsion’ simply for existing outside traditional ideals44. Practices of self-compassion and care should remain the priority, rather than an adherence to a higher, spectral “feminist principle”.
Although the true essence of the grotesque movement may be lost to time, a reappraisal of its transgressive, playful, and ambiguous qualities through body hair offers one way of confronting the small yet pervasive tyranny of the classical bodily ideal. As Donna Haraway argues, we must take ‘pleasure in the confusion of boundaries’ and ‘responsibility in their construction’45. And although a paradigm shift in the perception of the body and attitude towards female body hair is unlikely, the ‘extreme difficulty of producing social change does not diminish the usefulness of these symbolic models of transgression’46. Each action contributes to a future of an unrestricted female body, even at the most seemingly minute, intimate, and trivial of scales.
1 Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, “The Last Taboo: Women, body hair and feminism,” in The last taboo: women and body hair (Manchester University Press, 2006), 1–17.
2 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (Routledge, 1993) 2.
3 Elizabeth Grosz, “Psychoanalysis and the imaginary body,” in Feminisms, ed. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford University Press, 1997), 301.
4 Elizabeth Grosz, “Psychoanalysis and the imaginary body,” in Feminisms, ed. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford University Press, 1997), 301.
5 Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Foucault and the politics of the body,” in Reconstructing Foucault (Brill, 1994), 187.
6 Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the self” in Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Tavistock Publications, 1988), 43.
7 Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the self” in Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Tavistock Publications, 1988), 18.
8 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 315.
9 Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, Renaissance bodies: the human figure in English culture, c. 1540-1660(Reaktion Books, 1990), 3.
10 “Did Renaissance Women Remove Their Body Hair?” Jill Burke, accessed May 14, 2024, https://renresearch.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/did-renaissance-women-remove-their-body-hair.
11 “Did Renaissance Women Remove Their Body Hair?” Jill Burke, accessed May 14, 2024, https://renresearch.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/did-renaissance-women-remove-their-body-hair.
12 “Did Renaissance Women Remove Their Body Hair?” Jill Burke, accessed May 14, 2024, https://renresearch.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/did-renaissance-women-remove-their-body-hair.
13 Mary Russo, The female grotesque: Risk, excess and modernity (Routledge, 2012), 62.
14 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 221.
15 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 225.
16 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 321.
17 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 321.
18 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 226.
19 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 226.
20 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 3.
21 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 224.
22 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 26.
23 Geoffrey Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton University Press, 1982), 53.
24 Sarah Cohen Shabot, “The grotesque body: Fleshing out the subject,” in The Shock of the Other (Brill, 2007), 57.
25 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 316.
26 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 316.
27 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 320.
28 Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, The last taboo: women and body hair (Manchester University Press, 2006); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966).
29 Laura Scuriatti, “Designers’ bodies: women and body hair in contemporary art and advertising,” in The last taboo: women and body hair, ed. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Manchester University Press, 2013), 150.
30 Merran Toerien, Sue Wilkinson, and Precilla Y. L. Choi, “Body Hair Removal: The ‘Mundane’ Production of Normative Femininity,” Sex Roles 52, no. 5/6 (2005), 400.
31 Herzig, Rebecca (2015) Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. New York University Press, 128.
32 Herzig, Rebecca (2015) Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. New York University Press, 115.
33 Herzig, Rebecca (2015) Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. New York University Press, 115.
34 Burke, Jill (2012) ‘Did Renaissance Women Remove Their Body Hair?’ Available at: https://renresearch.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/did-renaissance-women-remove-their-body- hair/ [Accessed 14 May 2024].
35 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966), 15.
36 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966), 15.
37 Mary Russo, The female grotesque: Risk, excess and modernity (Routledge, 2012), 78.
38 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982), 70.
39 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966), 149.
40 Anneke Smelik, “A close shave: The taboo on female body hair,” Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty 6, no. 2 (2015): 238.
41 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1968), 320.
42 Imogen Tyler, “Against abjection,” Feminist Theory 10, no. 1 (2009): 77.
43 Imogen Tyler, “Against abjection,” Feminist Theory 10, no. 1 (2009): 87.
44 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982), 118.
45 Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, 1991), 150.
46 Mary Russo, The female grotesque: Risk, excess and modernity (Routledge, 2012), 58.