Show Notes
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? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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