Why hair is such a potent protest symbol

The images are indelible: Iranian women and girls chopping off their hair, burning their hijabs and walking down the streets of Tehran with their heads uncovered in defiance of the Islamic Republic’s hijab mandate. With internet service being suppressed by the government, the images that do get through to the outside world are all the more poignant.

It is coming up on a month since the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on Sept. 16, three days after she was arrested by Iran’s morality police for incorrectly wearing the hijab. Protests have spread across some 40 Iranian cities, and the number of deaths — 185, according to Iran Human Rights — is only an estimate.

In solidarity, women around the world are marching, too, and some are posting videos of themselves shearing their own hair: Swedish politician Abir Al-Sahlani chopped her hair at the European Parliament in Strasbourg; Turkish singer Melek Mosso

hers onstage. A group of makeup-free French actresses took scissors to their hair, including Juliette Binoche, Marion Cotillard, Charlotte Rampling and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Despite the perennial risk that celebrity involvement might deflect the spotlight from where it belongs, these acts seem to have done their intended job to raise awareness and take the subject viral.

“This is a really tough time for us,” says Toronto-based fashion designer Dorian Who, who arrived in Canada in 2016 from Iran via Turkey, where she studied at Lasalle College’s campus in Istanbul. She can barely work for worry about the events going on in her homeland.

Who says she, too, was detained by the morality police when she was growing up in Tehran. “Honestly, for me as a woman who grew up in Iran, it is not something super shocking. We’ve been saying this for our entire lives,” says Who. “Mahsa has become our hero. Gen Z is going for it. The world is seeing what is happening. We just want more people to support us, more media to cover this. We don’t have freedom as long as we have this government.”

Hair is the medium for the message of the women of Iran, says Who. “This is not about hair, not about hijab, not about religion. It is about the most basic human rights,” she says. Still, “hair is very powerful, very symbolic for us.”

The cutting of hair has strong roots in Persian culture and is part of the mourning ritual. The Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, is an epic poem by Ferdowsi dating back 1,000 years. Its lessons and parables are familiar to modern Iranians, and remain part of the culture today. When Siyâvash, a hero of the tale is killed, his wife, Farangis, cuts her hair, as do the women with her. “Women used to do this when they lost their great men,” says Who. “This was a way of mourning. It is very meaningful and people used to do this to show their protest and their anger. Now this has become something that people have started to do in Iran and outside Iran. It is beautiful for us to see people in the world show Iranian women so much love and passion.”

Hair has always been a potent symbol, across time and cultures. The issue is really choice: whether or not to show your hair, how to wear your hair. Here in Canada, Quebec’s Bill 21 bans Muslim women in certain professions from wearing a hijab, and Sikh men in “positions of authority” from wearing a turban.

Hair is a very important topic in the politics of beauty and protest, says Canadian documentary filmmaker Jennifer Holness. “Iranian women are being killed for wanting to have the right to be independent human beings,” says Holness, whose most recent film, Subjects of Desire, examines the cultural shift in North American beauty standards and Black female esthetics (watch it on TVO.org, and on the Hot Docs platform from Oct. 17 to Feb. 28).

In the 1970s, the natural hair movement brought with it an examination of how Black people’s hair had been controlled by colonial structures and ideals for generations. It remains just as charged today: It was only in 2019 that California’s CROWN act began protecting Black students and employees from discrimination related to their hair.

Black women’s hair “has been a source of great pain and great joy,” Holness says. “Even more so than complexion, hair and hair texture are some of the things that define your Blackness. What Black women were told to do was cover it up; we don’t want to see it. Wear wigs, wrap it, because that texture is not valuable or good or pretty or professional.” Black women wearing natural hair is still a political statement, she says, five decades after Angela Davis and Audre Lorde wore Afros proudly at the time of the civil rights protests of the 1960s and 70s.

Holness lists some of the words used to describe natural Black hair: “unruly, untamed, dramatic, unkempt, over-the-top, scary. Think Scary Spice — she wasn’t scary, that was prejudice talking.”

The film also deals with the sexualization of natural Black hair. “Men are afraid of women’s hair,” says Holness. “Exoticism of Black women is very much connected to their hair, a feline, aggressive sexualized package. That goes with the myth that men can’t control themselves.”

Again, it is about choice. “For Black women, we don’t need to straighten it for the European gaze, but if we want to we can.”

Cutting hair in support of the women’s rights protests in Iran is a very effective way of getting attention, Holness says. “It is brilliant, because cutting hair is very powerful,” she says. “There is a sense that a woman’s beauty is very connected to her hair. I love that they are taking this narrative, hair cutting as act of revolution, saying, ‘You can’t control us.’”

Other forms of hair protest have included the Russian band Pussy Riot’s electric-coloured dye (green, to match their prison uniforms), and Vivienne Westwood shaving her head in 2014 to bring attention to the climate crisis. Even the first flappers shocked the establishment by chopping their hair short into bobs and donning androgynous silhouettes. It’s a mixed bag of images and metaphors, but it shows how hair so often serves as symbolism wrought in keratin.

The politics and values around hair is something Carolyn Mila Shariff, master colour technician at Thic Hair Studio in Toronto, thinks about a lot. She is uncomfortable with French actresses being lauded for cutting off their hair in solidarity because there are no consequences for them doing so. “Hair grows back. It can take a long time, but it grows back,” she says. “The women protesting in Iran by cutting off their hair and going out without head coverings are putting their and their loved ones’ physical safety at risk. They’re being incarcerated, beaten and killed for showing autonomy, rather than confirming to their government’s forced idea of feminine beauty.”

Hair is a point of control, she says, as many women’s issues are. “There are so few things as women that we have control over. But our hair belongs to us. No one — men, the government and even our hairdresser — should be telling us what to do with it.” She acknowledges the delicate dance hair professionals do between parsing trends and beauty standards and recommending what will be empowering for their clients. “My job as a hairdresser isn’t to dictate what is beautiful or feminine or appropriate,” Shariff says. “It’s to facilitate women feeling as much like themselves as possible.”

Who’s eponymous fashion label is very much focused on self-expression, something she never takes for granted now that she lives in Canada. “It has been a new chapter of my life, to get to know who I am, get to know my style after years of not being accepted by friends or men because they didn’t like the way I dressed,” she explains. “There were too many restrictions on me. Now my clothing line is based on my personal style.”

She fervently wishes the same freedom of expression for her countrywomen, someday soon.

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