Ethnographic Conversation about Hair and Gender Identity

Interviewer: “Have you ever cut your hair very short?”
Informant: “Actually once I got it cut from there [below my chest] to like below my ear lobes and the woman did something funky like buzzed the back shorter. So then my mom and I evened it up, so it was above my ears. And I hated it so much. I think I felt masculine. And I had dyed my hair and when it was that short I dyed it pink to make it feminine.”

Here the informant, a twenty-year old Caucasian woman, talks about the length of her hair as a symbol of her femininity. Before the cut, she took for granted the fact that her longer hair served as a symbol for her femininity. After the cut, she expressed hatred with it because she lost one of her main expressions of femininity—her longer hair. It is interested how she chose to add the color pink to her hair—a shade undoubtedly associated with femininity—as a semi-permanent alternate of expressing her femininity through her hair. This quote serves as great evidence that North American women use their hair to assert their femininity.