In my first philosophy class, in the mid 90s, I raised my hand. “Isn’t it strange that none of the philosophers we’re reading mention gender?” We were discussing existentialism. I thought bodies and appearances might matter. The professor had a goatee and a shaved head. I had hair down to my butt. He stared at me, perplexed. He asked, “What would gender have to do with it?” I squirmed.
My second philosophy class focused on critical theory. The absolute powerhouse of a professor had fantastic hair—dark and curly and full, which, memorably, she wore on the first day pulled up in a pink scrunchie. (This was late Scrunchie Era 1.0, back before plastic hair clip ascendancy; it was the kind of pink scrunchie Jason Momoa, #hairstudies expert, later wore to launch Scrunchie Era 2.) Her pink scrunchie made an intellectual space for interrogating gender’s philosophical significance in a way that little else could, arguably even Gender Trouble, which was assigned.
My third philosophy class, taught by a man with close-cropped curls, focused on aesthetic theory. Guys like Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, I learned, shared an interest in the power of beauty. They also shared a vexing disinterest in women and hair. (What they thought about race is by well now documented, and related.) This is not to say The Critique of Judgement doesn’t mention hair: it does, three times in passing, which is three times more than hair appears in Gender Trouble. These are hair’s only three appearances in all my philosophy coursework. (I hope it’s different now.) In no philosophy class, including the scrunchie class, was hair ever directly mentioned.
Yet hair mattered to all these philosophers, all these professors. I could tell because every undergraduate philosophy syllabus, no matter the topic, featured philosophers who had the same hair: shortish, brushed back, regularly praised for its thickness, never reading as anything but racially white. Kant’s hair was blonde. Burke wore a wig but was a redhead; numerous Burke-loving essays mention how Burke’s hair grew thick his whole long life. A Reddit thread debates the relative merits of Søren Kierkegaard’s impressive coif. The documentary Derrida (2002) features a long loving scene of the philosopher having his hair brushed and trimmed; Time’s review praises Derrida’s hair for a whole paragraph.
I myself now teach a course on the philosophy of aesthetics. It has its own developing hair curriculum. I walk into the classroom with my (still) long hair down, loose and scraggly over my back. Only when I reach the front of the room and turn to face the students will I gather my hair. I grip it in my left hand, and with my right begin to twist, until my hair doubles up on itself into a rough bun. I tuck its ends in and under, knotting hair in place. Every day, this is my flex, my question, my sign to my students that I’m ready, that they should be ready: that it’s time for philosophy to begin.
— Art by Lara Schaberg
