Body hair and its entanglement: Shame, choice and resistance in body hair practices among young Icelandic people

Abstract

Iceland's performance on the Gender Gap Index has been outstanding in the last nine years. It now has a reputation for being one of the most gender equal countries in the world. However, local feminist activists argue that challenges to full gender equality remain. Underlying both the dominant gender equality rhetoric and feminist activism is a neoliberal, postfeminist sensibility that all are free to choose their most preferred body practices and that empowerment is a fact. There are, however, more subtle indications that young people's views of body hair practices, hinging around binaristic gender norms, are more ambivalent than that. This paper investigates how body hair practices are performed among young Icelandic people. The theoretical framework draws on feminist, poststructuralist, and affect theories. The data was collected between 2012 and 2016 and consists of semi-structured interviews with young women and men, group interviews with five young women based on co-operative inquiry, and an instrumental case study focusing on the issue of body hair practices. The analysis shows that shame and disgust remain entangled with practices around body hair among both men and women. It is gendered in that women's bodies are under more surveillance than men's. The paper concludes that, notwithstanding feminist activism and gender equality rhetoric, policing around body hair practices still exists in contemporary Icelandic society.