Tondues, Rasées, Voilées, Défrisées: The Therapeutic Re-memberings of Francophone Women’s Hairstories

Abstract

This dissertation, entitled “Tondues, Rasées, Voilées, Défrisées: The Therapeutic Re-memberings of Francophone Women’s Hairstories,” asks the question: How do women’s personal narratives about their hair overlap and interplay to create a more globalized account of the female experience, historically and today? The study of hair is an untapped avenue for literary research that offers an innovative lens through which we envisage the gendering of the body and its representations in literature and the visual arts. By investigating the aesthetics of hair, this dissertation also question the aesthetics of testimony by teasing out the nuances between literary invention and historical accuracy. This study explores the role of hair in the construction and performance of female identity in novels by Éliette Abécassis and Fawzia Zouari and films by Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras, Céline Sciamma, and Mame-Fatou Niang. Due to the simultaneously intimate and public nature of hair, socially and religiously determined hair practices are at the root of traumatically imposed ideals of “womanhood” amongst the tondues of France, the Hasidic rasées of Mea Shearim, the Sunni Muslim voilées of Algeria and Tunisia, and the African diaspora of défrisées in France. This study contends that literary and visual testimonies of women’s hairstories are therapeutic acts by which they re-member, in the sense of recall to memory and reassemble, both their bodies and their stories. This dissertation shows that by re-membering their hairstories, women begin to understand the traumatic role that hair played in the repression of their sexuality and to reassemble their corporeal integrity by reappropriating their hair as a performative site for self-creation.