A lecture by Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (University of Reading) as part of the lecture series "Unruly Hair – From Disobedience to Agency. Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Children's Media".

Location: online via Zoom: LINK
Language: english

Abstract:
Following on from the arguments of English literary and gender theorist Jacqueline Rose in her foundational book The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984/ 1995) and Karin Lesnik-Oberstein's own edited volume The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair (2006/2011), approaches to and issues around both body hair and gender and childhood and children’s literature will be discussed in terms of a critique of ‘representation’ as the often taken-for-granted underpinning of claims in these fields. Selected children’s literature around body hair, such as Babette Cole’s Hair in Funny Places (2001), Kyo Maclear and Gracey Zhang’s The Big Bath House (2021), Shelley Anand and Nabi Ali’s Laxmi’s Mooch (2021) and/ or Georgina Gooley’s A Kids’ Book About Body Hair (2025) will be discussed to consider some of the implications and consequences of reading differently in this way.

About the lecture series: 

From dust-free shoes to a neatly combed head, the “well-groomed” child becomes the focal point of discursive negotiations surrounding contemporary ideals of hygiene education and virtue. Unruly (children’s) hair, on the other hand, reflects a tension between praiseworthy cleanliness and reprehensible vanity, a tension that is culturally, historically, and regionally coded. In contemporary art and literature, unruly hair can be portrayed as a symbol of self-empowerment, but also of exclusion. These depictions continue to reflect social taboos, particularly when (female) body hair is addressed. When unruly hair is portrayed as untamed, diverse, and independent, viewers are invited to rethink beauty: as something that is linked to diversity, texture, and resistance itself. In this lecture series, national and international experts will shed light on the multifaceted aesthetics and semantics of (children’s and adolescents’) hair as depicted in stories and artistic imagery from the perspectives of cultural studies and literary studies.

Participants are expected to productively and critically engage with the subject matter and to be willing to actively participate in the discussions.

The lecture series will take place during the 2026/27 winter semester and is open to students from all disciplines at TU Darmstadt, Goethe University Frankfurt, and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, as well as to the interested public. 

The lecture series is part of the Strategic Alliance of the Rhine-Main Universities (RMU) and is funded by the RMU Teaching Funding for Teaching.