The Ponytail: Icon, Movement, and the Modern (Sports)Woman

Description

This open access book adopts a cultural sociology of materiality to explore the hallmark of the female athlete: the ponytail. Studying a wealth of news articles about ponytails in sports and society, Broch uncovers this hairstyle’s polyvocality and argues that it is a total social phenomenon. By separating his approach from the cultural studies tradition, Broch highlights how hair is imbued with codes, narratives, and myth that allow its wearers to understand, maneuver, and criticize social gender relations in deeply personal ways. Using multiple theories about hair, bodies, myths, and icons, he creates a multidimensional method to show how icons are imitated and used. As women navigate their practical lives, health issues, and gendered expectations, the ponytail materializes their dynamic maneuvering of cultural and social environments. Sporting a ponytail―itself an embodiment of movement―is filled with a performativity of social movements: a cultural kinetics that is never apolitical.  Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures Introduction: Imagining the Ponytail A Cultural History of the Ponytail Bodies and Hair as Multidimensional A Critical Sociology of (Sports)Women’s Hair The Polyvocality of a Total Social Fact A Note on Methods and Outline References Object Touching Culture Norwegian Horsetails Gendering Analogies Ponytailed Pride Notes References Primary Sources Secondary Sources Expectations The Materiality of Expectations Fashionable Ploy or Democratic Credibility? Fashionably Extraordinaire and Deceptively Normal Ponytailed Men and Women Notes References Primary Sources Secondary Sources Health Childhood Youth Adulthood Notes References Primary Sources Secondary Sources Practicalities Denaturalizing Inequality and Naturalizing Equality Moving with Practicality Constrictions and Expansions in Ideological Boundaries Notes References Primary Sources Secondary Sources Movements Bodily Movements and Naturalized Progression Kinesthetic Freedom and Woman Nature Notes References Primary Sources Secondary Sources Experience Democratic Hopes and Setbacks Changing Rules and Boundaries References Primary Sources Secondary Sources Charge References Primary Sources Secondary Sources Index