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Tangled

Seven Iconic Moments in White Women's Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity

Author: Sarah Mesle

Available soon to download: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Libro.fm

A witty and incisive exploration of 7 iconic moments that expose the roots of America’s perverse entanglement with white women’s hair

America’s obsession with the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Kate Gosselin, and Britney Spears goes beyond headlines and clickbait. The stories we tell about white women and their hair are tightly woven with our ideals of purity, aesthetics, and power. This book unpacks white hair as a potent emblem of the “all-American” woman—and as a meticulously fashioned weapon of racism and classism.

From Reagan’s rise in the 1980s to the zeitgeisty early aughts to MAGA’s triumph in 2016, these essays uncover a nation’s entwined hopes and sins through 7 iconic hair moments in pop culture. Cheeky and relatable with the research to back it up, Tangled teases apart

Bo Derek’s cornrows
Mary Lou Retton’s bob
Anne Shirley’s carrots
Julia Roberts’s Pretty Woman curls
Jennifer Aniston and “The Rachel”
Britney Spears’s baldness
Gwyneth Paltrow’s body hair

Some say “the higher the hair, the closer to God,” but white women’s hair has less to do with holiness than it does with hegemony. Tangled highlights America’s glorification of white bodies and the privilege it affords white women. And it calls those women in, urging them to confront their own hair stories so they can begin to untangle the knots.