Pervot karvat?

Authors

• Susanna Paasonen Turun yliopisto
• Annamari Vänskä Aalto-yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23980/sqs.121875

Abstract

The mundane routines of growing, trimming, removing and refusing to remove body hair are connected to the ways of conforming to and resisting norms pertaining to gender, sexuality and desirability. This is especially the case with bodies coded as female. This article explores the natureculture of body hair, with a focus on pubes. We move from distinctions drawn in cultural history to the fashions, norms and modes of resistance associated with pubic hair. Our focus lies especially on binary divisions within which hair has been seen to mark boundaries between the human and the animal, the clean and the filthy, the modest and the obscene, the normal and the abnormal, often in highly paradoxical ways.