Lecture by Alexandra Karentzos (Technical University of Darmstadt) as part of the lecture series "Unruly Hair – From Disobedience to Agency. Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Children's Media".

Location: Technical University of Darmstadt, room: S101/A4, Karolinenplatz 5, 64289 Darmstadt
Online participation via Zoom: LINK
Language: German
 

Abstract:
Hair is wayward, stubborn, and unruly—it’s not easily tamed or controlled. It grows incessantly and must be washed, combed, and cut. As such, hair is closely linked to social norms and styling conventions, particularly those concerning the female body. It is part of everyday beauty practices—that is, the practices through which the body is shaped and presented in relation to societal ideals of beauty. In this respect, hair also holds the potential for nonconformity, resistance, and uncontrollability.

Especially since the 1970s, (body) hair has increasingly become the subject of critical engagement with power structures, colonial legacies, and normative beauty ideals. Particularly in feminist and postcolonial contexts, hair functions as a medium of resistance through which marginalized subjects challenge hegemonic discourses. Hair becomes an aesthetic and, at the same time, political sign through which Western-influenced beauty norms are problematized and other identities, affiliations, and bodily expressions are made visible.

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.