Embodying Grotesque: Body hair’s subversion of classical notions of the body
Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins.
— Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)
— Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966)
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 attest that bodies do not exist as “natural” or “underneath” culture, but are instead created as cultural, socio-political, and material meaning (Lesnik-Oberstein 2006). 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 power (1993: 2). The body is also ‘libidinally invested’; according to Elizabeth Grosz, it is not merely flesh and bone, but has a meaningful, ‘significatory, cultural dimension’ (1997: 301). 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’ (ibid.).
This understanding sees the human body as politically inscribed entity, a site of disciplinary power whose ‘histories and practices of control and containment’ shape and mark its very morphology (Bordo 1994: 187). 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 practices (Foucault 1988: 43). Contributing to these obedient bodies are seemingly impulsive yet subliminally imposed ‘technologies of the self,’ which are bodily praxis which ‘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’ (ibid.: 18). Depilatory bodily practices form one genre of such technology—a seemingly mundane yet crucial task in the ongoing production of a normative, acceptable femininity within the Western world (Toerien et al. 2005: 399).
This essay maps body hair as the symbol of change, or rather a lack thereof, in dominant approaches to the body, spanning from early modern Europe until today. It begins by examining the revived classical canon of the body in the Renaissance, and how the grotesque bodily genre—as depicted by François Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel and interpreted by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World—was a critical response to these bodily limitations. The essay then analyses the contemporary bodily practices of body hair removal in women, and how the corporeal restrictions imposed by the classical ideal persist in contemporary Western culture. The essay argues that grown-out body hair, especially on specific areas of women’s bodies, occupies the same realm of marginality, subversion, and threat as the Rabelaisian grotesque did. The grotesque can thus be reappropriated and embodied as a feminist critical practice to disrupt the long-held, static classical notion of the feminine body, and potentially liberate it from the limitations still imposed on it today.
This essay is not suggesting a “return” to a “natural” body, or demanding a conversion of all women to not removing body hair. To do so would be dogmatic and, according to postmodern feminist thought, there is no such a priori state. In fact, it is beneficial to remain varied in our approach to bodies, as the grotesque body is fundamentally ambivalent, privileging hybridity, difference, and heterogeneity over a singular, defined way of being (Shabot 2007: 64). Instead, through an exploration of the historical mutations in attitudes to body hair, the essay hopes to reopen discussions around depilation, revealing how creative and playful experimentation with bodies could resist and subvert the forces that repress them. After all, as Foucault suggests, ‘critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes, [it] should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is’ (Foucault 1981: 13).
The 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 them, 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, and his work critically responded to the dominant ideals of the period (Bakhtin 1968: 315). In order to understand and reappropriate Rabelais’ grotesque imagery of the body, it is imperative to introduce the early modern reinterpretation of the classical body.
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 perfection (Gent and Llewellyn, 1990: 3). Early modern European art and science presented the ideal human body much the same as that of the ancient Greek classical period: an athletic, finely proportioned, and completely symmetrical physique of porcelain smoothness. A pale complexion and golden hair were, needless to say, virtuous attributes too.
The pursuit of this ideal led to a surge in body hair removal practices across Europe, and historians have aptly labelled the Renaissance as ‘a golden age of depilation’ (Burke 2012). Dangerous and painful depilation techniques consequently circulated to accomplish this ideal, 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’ (ibid.). These concoctions exemplify how accepted the classical paradigm of the body was, and the extreme measures women were willing to take in order to conform to its ideals.
Although aesthetics certainly formed an element of depilatory practices, the early modern period also understood hair as a bodily excretion that must be removed in order to return to the “proper” balance of the female body (Burke 2012). When approached from a postmodern feminist perspective, the singular version of bodily perfection in early European modernity functions as a signifier of the era’s emergent cultural paradigm. The revived classical body was utterly pure, highly defined, and homogenous; it embodied integrity and rationality, was moderated and well-ordered, and fulfilled the potential of humanity.
The embodiment of excellence and enhancement that the Renaissance aspired towards could, however, be considered as dogmatic, ‘austere, and bitterly isolating as the official religious culture of the Middle Ages,’ to which it saw itself diametrically opposed (Russo 2012: 61). The revived classical body was an ‘individual, strictly limited mass’ whose ‘impenetrable façade’ mirrored the pioneering yet restrictive canon of thought that dominated those times (Bakhtin 1968: 320). Its sculpted, sleek, self-actualised, and hairless human form was ‘monumental,’ yet ‘static’ and ‘closed,’, corresponding to the aspirations of a bourgeois, humanist individualism (Russo 2012: 63).
It must be acknowledged that norms are seldom monolithic; while this was the mainstream ideology of this period, cultural variations certainly existed. Moreover, although the Renaissance marked a shift towards a more secularised and widespread acceptance of this bodily ideal, it also existed before the Renaissance’s revival of classical antiquity. For example, a similar attitude to female body hair can be traced back to early medieval depictions of an ape-like Mary of Egypt, a reformed prostitute who is often illustrated as completely covered in ringleted hair—a shameful fur of her animalist lust.
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’ (Russo 2012: 62). 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. At its core lay an alternative conceptualisation of the body as a whole, and of ‘the limits of this whole’ (Bakhtin 1968: 315). Namely, 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. Before continuing with this episode, it is important to acknowledge Bakhtin’s claim that Rabelais is amongst the most challenging classical authors (Bakhtin 1968: 3). To understand his work, Bakhtin argues, requires an ‘essential reconstruction’ of artistic and ideological perception, and the renouncement of ‘deeply rooted demands of literary taste’ (ibid.). While a full exploration of these demands is beyond this essay’s scope, it will attempt a focused analysis.
Following an over-indulgence on tripe—the intestines of fattened oxen—during dinner, the pregnant Gargamelle began to ‘groan, lament and cry out’ (Bakhtin 1968: 221). 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!”’ (ibid.: 225).
Contrary to the early modern canon in which the body is ‘self-sufficient’ and concerns its ‘individual, closed sphere’ alone (Bakhtin 1968: 321), 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 ambiguous (ibid.). This intimate and carnal intertwining represents a truly grotesque image, on 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 body (ibid.: 226).
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’ (Bakhtin 1968: 226); according to Bakhtin, ‘no dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness’ could coexist with Rabelaisian images (ibid.: 3).
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, merely 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’ (Bakhtin 1968: 224). 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’ (ibid.: 26). It is hybrid and undefinable, ‘both and neither, a mingling and a unity’, lying at the margin between metaphor and myth (Harpham, 1982: 53). By recognising the richness, depth, and complexity of the grotesque movement, it can be faithfully reappropriated in order to instigate a development in modern perceptions of the body.
Another way that the body is rendered grotesque is through its presentation as a constantly changing form. In further opposition to the early modern notion of a finite bodily unit, the grotesque form is continuously in ‘the act of becoming’ and opposed to all that is ‘finished and polished’ (Bakhtin 1968: 317). 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 form (Shabot, 2007: 57). It remains ever unframeable and unfinished, outgrowing itself and transgressing its own limits in ways that are absurd and excessive. This continuous process of creation and destruction, exemplified by the episode of Gargamelle’s disembowelment and Gargantua’s birth, holds the power to subvert and liberate the modern body from the dogmatic and rigid constraints imposed on it (Russo 2012: 33).
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 world (Bakhtin, 1968: 316), 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 hyperbolisation 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 animal (ibid.: 316).
While Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel revels in the grotesque through farcical bodily functions and exaggerated features, there is a notable absence of body hair mentioned, a silence which, amidst the grotesque excess, must not be overlooked. It could be interpreted as a subtle subversion of the idealised, hairless notions of the body of Rabelais’ time, and body hair should therefore not be dismissed when discussing the disruptive potential of the grotesque. Contemporary influences for the purification and hygienisation of the body through depilation are arguably more compelling and accessible than ever before, presenting an opportunity to reclaim and reinterpret the grotesque tradition in order to defy pervasive classical restrictions.
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’ (Bakhtin 1968: 320). 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 meaning (Lesnik-Oberstein 2006, Douglas 1966).
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, Gillette’s Milady Décolletée, in 1915, 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 normative “real” and “natural” female body ‘to which women should aspire’ (2012: 150). 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 undisciplined (Toerien et al. 2005: 400).
As historian Rebecca Herzig acknowledges, hair is a ‘noticeable’ and ‘malleable’ feature, a ready medium for conveying ‘altered political consciousness’ (2015: 128). 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’ (ibid.: 115). 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 motherhood (ibid.). Any significant paradigmatic shifts in attitudes to body hair, or the classical body in general, have failed to prevail ever since, and hair, (pseudo)medicine, hygiene, and beauty remain as closely intertwined today as they were in early modern Europe (Burke 2012).
Specifically, a 2005 study revealed that over 90 percent of female participants voluntarily removed hair from their underarms and legs, 85 percent did so regularly, and over 80 percent removed hair from their pubic area and eyebrows (Toerien et al. 2005). A similar study from 2008 found that the most frequent reasons for the removal of underarm, leg, and pubic hair were femininity, sexual attractiveness, self-enhancement, and hygiene (Tiggemann and Kenyon 2008: 875). Despite varying with participant age and identity, these practices transcended ethnic, racial, and regional boundaries, unequivocally presenting the normativity and universality of hair removal in the contemporary West and the endurance of the ideal classical body.
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 body (1966: 15). ‘It is only by exaggerating difference,’ she continues, ‘that a semblance of order is created’ (ibid.). 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 accessible (Russo 1994: 78).
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’ (Kristeva 1982: 70). 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’ (Douglas 1966: 149). While a hair’s bulb remains inside the body, the shaft extends beyond the skin and connects it to the outside world (Smelik 2015: 238). By encompassing both the body’s interior and exterior, hair destabilises its clear boundary and instead aligns with the open orifices of the grotesque body (Bakhtin 1984: 320). 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.
This ambiguity of bodily classification and transgression of boundaries also encompasses gender; as Joan Ferrante notes in her study on hirsutism, perhaps it is because ‘the division between masculine and feminine hair growth is physiologically arbitrary’ yet ‘socially rigid’ that any deviation from hairlessness is considered threatening (1988: 231). The danger of body hair’s visibility on female bodies lies in its disturbing of clear gender binaries, in that it ‘reveals’ femininity as that which ‘hides within itself the potentially masculine’ (Lesnik-Oberstein 2006: 11). Body hair on women composes a grotesquely androgynous, gender-defiant figure which embodies a mutable, multifaceted subjectivity, thus defying the emphatically categorical conception of the modern body.
Conclusion
The grotesque approach towards body hair will not be equally practiced by all women, and, needless to say, it is essential to remain conscious of and critical about one’s positionality during this conversation. As an able-bodied, White woman, I am unfamiliar with how it feels to face the violent and objectifying consequences of Otherness. 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 women (Tyler 2009: 77). 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 bodies (ibid.: 87): 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 ideals (Kristeva 1982: 118). This discussion is not seeking to prompt women become further harmed, marginalised, and abjected. Self-compassion and care should remain the priority, rather adhering 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’ (1991: 150). Over the past six decades, feminist artists have increasingly represented grotesque and abjected body hair in their work, from Paula Santiago’s sculptural embroidered costumes (1996-2002) to Migdalia Cruz’s Fur: A Play in Nineteen Scenes (2000). While these works have been instrumental in challenging the classical ideal of the human body, the quotidian practice of growing out this very hair and embodying grotesque, as this essay has argued, may hold even greater power.
Although a drastic 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’ (Russo 1994: 58). Each action contributes to a future of an unrestricted female body, even at the most seemingly minute, intimate, and trivial of scales.
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