As Movember passes into Decembeard, Notches is showcasing some of our great publications that reflect upon the significance of sex, sexuality, and the bearded face. Taken together, these four posts illuminate the powerful meanings associated with facial hair, its employment in policing gender and sexuality, and how it fits into broader national and political questions that […]
Tag: beards
Hirsute Phoenix: Conchita Wurst, Beards, and the Politics of Sexuality
T.J. Tallie Eurovision, the annual continent-wide song contest, is usually a fairly predictable international spectacle. However, this year’s winner—Austria’s Conchita Wurst, a bearded drag queen who performed the popular “Rise Like A Phoenix”—has inspired a flurry of comment and critique both in and beyond the continent. Conchita Wurst is the […]
The Erotics of Shaving in Victorian Britain
Justin Bengry Beardedness, or alternatively clean-shavenness, has long been an important signifier of manliness, inscribing crucial gender and sexual meanings onto the male body. But fashions in shaving are notoriously unstable, even in the nineteenth century, that idyll for the hirsute among us. Beardedness in nineteenth-century Britain, in fact, only […]
Beards, Real Men, and Poseurs: male sexuality and fashion since around 1900
Julia Laite A recent post by regular blogger Nikki Daniels (‘An open letter to bearded hipsters’) that has made the usual rounds of facebook and twitter has got me thinking about how male fashion has long been central to the way we define what it means to be a ‘real’ man. The blogger wrote about […]
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