Power, Pleasure, and White Women’s Hair with Sarah Mesle

Only a small percentage of women are naturally blonde, yet blonde hair has become one of the most powerful symbols of beauty and privilege in American culture.

This week, Christiana sits down with Sarah Mesle, USC professor and author of Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women's Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity, to examine the cultural politics of white women’s hair. Through stories of blonde privilege, Britney Spears, and Princess Diana, Sarah explains how hair reveals the complicated relationship between beauty, identity, and power.

Sarah’s website: https://sarahmesle.com/ 

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1:26 Meet Sarah 

1:47 Hair and white feminine power

3:50 Sarah’s interest in hair

5:08 White visual performances and whiteness as a currency 

8:50 January 6th uprising

10:40 Partisan aesthetics 

13:50 Princess Diana and women with short hair

18:43 Blonde hair 

20:58 JoJo Siwa

21:33 Maternal love and white resource hoarding 

22:40 White mothers giving their daughters elaborate hair styles 

25:00 Blonde privilege and the value of the currency of whiteness

27:47 How Black women are treated depending on their hair styles

29:30 Class and white women’s fear of “trashiness” 

32:40 Relationship between white women’s hair and thighs 

33:30 Thin hair 

35:17 Long hair and the women surrounding Trump 

36:06 Picking white women to focus on in “Tangled” 

40:32 Britney Spears

45:50 Complicating the idea that there are victims and villains

47:00 Cruel optimism 

48:10 Gwyneth Paltrow 

51:00 Opting out and diverging from the norm 

54:30 The game is rigged 

55:20 What’s next? 

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