PRESENCE AND ABSENCE IN THE SAME GUESTURE:

THE POLITICS OF WOMEN AND BODY HAIR IN CONTEMPORARY

TAIWAN

By

Yuin-Ting Ong

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

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Master of Art

(Gender and Women’s Studies)

at the

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSION-MADISON

2008
Yuinting ong

© Copyright by Yuin-Ting Ong 2008

All Rights Reserved

  

ii

List of Figures

Figure 1. “The Lesson of Arrangement on Chaotic Body Hair” 54

Figure 2. “Summer is coming. Don’t do something stunning!” 70

Figure 3. Marilyn Monroe’s pin-up poster 70

Figure 4. “Check it out: It’s a piece of clothes, not hair” 91

Figure 5. Tom Ford’s ad for Gucci in 2003 96

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iii

Table of Contents

Abstract iv

Acknowledgments v

Introduction 1

Chapter One
Stigma and Grace: Symbolism of Body Hair in Traditional Chinese Narratives 26

Chapter Two
Presenting the Absence: Hair-removal Discourse in Contemporary Taiwan 44 
 
Chapter Three
Framing the Shadow: Women's Pubic Hair, Lou-mao Discourse, and Obscenity 76

Chapter Four
Situated Bodies: Taiwanese Women's Corporeal Embodiments on Body Hair 102

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Conclusion
Presence and Absence in the Same Gesture 152

Appendixes 160

Work Cited 167

  

iv

Abstract

The present thesis entitled “Presence and Absence in the Same Gesture: The

Politics of Women and Body Hair in Contemporary Taiwan,” examines the socio-cultural

meanings of presence and absence of women’s body hair and the intertwined

interrelationship between the two corporeal embodiments among women in relation to

gender/sex identities and modern visuality. It combines feminist and Foucauldian

discourse analysis of cultural and media representations of women and body hair,

alongside the first-hand ethnographic study of women’s practices in Taiwan. The thesis

found that the rise of the female hairlessness myth/norm in contemporary Taiwan was not

just one of the several emerging social fictions that masqueraded as natural components

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of femininity, but also an insidious mystique of modern visuality, which means that one’s

modern identity could be de/constructed through the moderation of her visible bodily

surface. Further, it proposes the idea of “pre/absence in the same gesture” to embody the

contradictory coexistence of presence and absence of women’s body hair beyond binary

categories. It reveals the fact that women’s body hair is simultaneously exposed and

removed, visible and invisible in modern discourses, and women’s lived bodily existence

of being subject and object, spectator and spectacle, actor and the acted-on at the same

time. Through establishing the concept of “pre/absence,” the invisible social forces and

individual women’s negotiations in terms of body hair are rendered visible. Finally, the

present study is not merely looking at how and why women’s body hair are asked to be

removed from our bodies; it is further asking what the consciousness must exist in order

to have such impossible beauty standards removed from our lives.

Key words: body hair, visuality, female embodiments, Taiwan

  

Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been completed without the inspiration and assistance

of a number of individuals. First of all, I want to thank my thesis advisor and my mentor,

Professor Anne Enke. Thank you for your unreserved patience and support, whether in

academic or spiritual manners. Without your trust and encouragement, I might never have

completed the work on such unconventional subject.

I am also very grateful to my committee members – many thanks to Professor

Ellen Samuels for her constant considerations and suggestions, and to Professor Judith

Houck for her insightful questions. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor

Susan Friedman, Professor Nancy Caser, and Professor Julie D’Acci for inspiring my

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thoughts during my studying in Gender and Women’s studies at UW-Madison and

discussing this project with me when I only had a preliminary idea.

Moreover, I truly appreciate every girl and woman with whom I interviewed in

this project for sharing your valuable experience. I want to thank you for granting me the

opportunity to listen to your story and for creating a new page of women’s intimate body

history with me. Also, I wish to thank many friends for their warm friendship, cares and

supports. Thanks especially to Piyu Kao, JJ Xiao, Chaolun Liu, Tziyu Huang, Weina

Chen, Samaa Abdurraqib, Christina Steel, and Vivian Su. Thank you all for always

believing in me even at the moment when I lost my faith and confidence. I want to thank

Trini Stickle, for her proofreading and carefully editing of this thesis.

Finally, my deepest indebtedness goes to my parents – Kueitang Ong and Lutzu

Hung, who always lead their lives and their only daughter with great passion and love.

Without your unconditional support, I would never have had what I have now.
  

1 

Introduction

In September 2007, Lust, Caution, a film directed by Oscar-winning Taiwanese

director Ang Lee, was released in Taiwan and in the United States among other countries.

The story is based on events that took place during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai

during World War II. It portrays a group of Chinese university students who plot to

assassinate a high-level Chinese collaborator using an attractive young woman to lure

him into a trap. In three featured episodes of “graphic, rapacious sex” between the female

agent Wang (Wei Tang) and her target Yee (Tony Leung), their bodies are entangled with

each other in many sexual positions, and all of their body parts to include every bit of

their body hair are exposed to the audience.1 The sex senses are presented with full-

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frontal nudity of Tang and partial sex organ (stratum) of Leung. This film as follow-up to

Lee’s Brokeback Mountain has caused controversies socially and politically. However, to

many Taiwanese audiences, Lust, Caution is also a “hair caution.” Besides many

unconventional sexual positions, the most shocking pictures to many Taiwanese people

are those in which Tang exposes her armpit hair in short-sleeved cheongsams and during

the nude bed scenes (in which her pubic hair is shown as well). A famous Taiwanese

male host Kevin Cai expressed that “it is even more frightening to see Tang’s armpit hair

than bed scenes!” in his show (S. Chang). The media also focused on Tang’s hairy

armpits; Lee replied during the screen press conference in Taiwan by saying that

A cinematic story can tell better if it is more realistic based on historical

facts of details. During 1930s and 40s, to the 60s and 70s, my mother’s

                                                            
1
 The film’s explicit sex scenes resulted in the film being rated R (Restricted Rate, people under 18 years
old must not view) in Taiwan and NC-17 (“No Children under 17 Admitted”) in the U.S. category.
   
2

generation, women did not shave their armpits. I personally find armpit

hair on women very sexy. So I don’t understand why [Taiwanese/Chinese]

women now imitate Westerners shaving off the armpit hair. (Lee par. 2)

[Emphasis added]

In the same press conference, Tang also implied that she had allowed the hair to grow for

eight months to show the obvious effect (Lee) [Emphasis added]. Lee’s explanation

points out that armpit hair-removal on women is not only a historical product but also a

Western concept in Chinese societies. Moreover, the presence of woman’s armpit hair,

furthermore, has its lustful symbolism on screen, at least to Lee. Quickly, Lee’s “plead on

women’s armpit hair” has ventilated discussions as to whether women should keep or

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remove their armpit hair in Taiwan. Why should Tang’s armpit hair be so frightening?

And why did Lee’s “armpit hair esthetic” cause a stir? Following up on this hot-debated

issue regarding Tang’s hairy armpits, one Taiwanese TV news program reported a brief

history of female depilation and traced its origin back to1915 in the United States and

claimed that the practice became popular in Taiwan decades ago.2

According to Hope, the “great underarm campaign” among Caucasian women in

America indeed took place in 1915 when Harper’s Bazaar magazine published an

advertisement in which a female model in a sexy sleeveless dress displaying her perfect,

clean shaven armpits (94). Naming it “objectionable hair,” the ad initiated an assault on

women’s underarm hair and introduced female shavers. The campaign of hair removal, to

include both women’s armpit and leg hair, swept across the U.S. from 1920 to 1940.

                                                            
2
The TV news program can be assessable online at <http://www.nownews.com/2007/09/27/327-
2163232.htm > Retrieved on March 4, 2008.
 

  
  

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When the advertising strategy of shaver companies won the marketable victory, the

female hairlessness norm had been constructed: shaving became a highly practiced

expectation for women in American culture. Baswo and Braman found that the absence

of body hair is an important physical characteristic of Caucasian female attractiveness in

the U.S. context (14). Accordingly, at the heart of Western feminist discussions, the issue

about women and body hair has been simplified as the female hairlessness myth/norm

that has been taken as a form of patriarchal oppression over women (and women’s

bodies). Nevertheless, the meanings of body hair are socially constructed and differ from

culture to culture, and they are changing over time. In the above-mentioned ‘hair caution’

issue raised in Taiwan, the exposure of women’s body hair in media representation

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unpacks different signifying practices and sociocultural meanings; and more importantly,

it is directly associated with women’s actual practices of hair-removal. Here lies the

dilemma of women’s body hair in contemporary Taiwan: it is unrepresentable except as

representation installed within the binary framework of either exposed or removed.

Therefore, the wider understanding of the relations between women and body hair needs

to be examined in different sociocultural contexts and beyond the oppressed-oppressor

and exposed-removed framework. For this, the present thesis proposes to detail the

complexity between women, body hair and society in a non-Western sociocultural

context −the postmodern Taiwanese society cultivated in Chinese culture.

When we take a look at Taiwanese women’s daily lives, it is observable that

women both enhance and erase body hair in different locations, which shows their

attempts to alter their bodies in order to fit culturally accepted notions of beauty. Women

lengthen their eyelashes and draw on eyebrows; women eradicate armpit and leg hairs,
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which are target areas needing to be ‘cleaned up’. Some female body hair is displayable

while some is eliminated for display; some female body hair has to be removed while

some is concealed. What, after all, does the presence and absence of women’s body hair

mean and what is the interrelationship between the two situations? To answer this

question, this thesis seeks to examine the cultural representations of female body hair –

from pre-modern Chinese narratives to mass media discourses in contemporary Taiwan –

and women’s actual practices on their body hair in Taiwanese society in order to find out

the interrelations among cultural pretexts, mainstream media representation and the

corporal embodiments of the pre/absence of women’s body hair. In addition, this thesis

proposes to better understand how gender identities, sexualities, and (post) modernity in

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Taiwan are established with one another in terms of women’s bodily display through

hegemonic visual culture; and, furthermore, how Western feminist and gender theories

can help us to respond to this issue.

In order to better clarify my research question, there is a demand to define clearly

some terms frequently used in the study. First of all, the term ‘body hair’ in this paper

refers to all hair on human body except scalp hair.3 Nevertheless, in the following

deliberations, ‘body hair’ is more frequently referred to the socially defined ‘superfluous’

and ‘unwanted’ hair on women, especially the underarm hair, leg hair, and sometimes

pubic hair depending on specific contexts. Another often used term ‘hair removal’ means

                                                            
3
Scalp head is excluded here because a lot of academic research has been done on this topic while other
body hair has left unimportant. According to Lesnik-Oberstein, “[h]ead hair has been the subject of
academic studies in literature and the social sciences, but there are almost no academic studies on body hair.
There is only a more extensive medical literature around women's body hair defined as ‘excessive’, and as
an abnormality or aberration, called ‘hirsutism’. The only other writing on it is a fairly prolific amount of
pornographic material, in magazines or on the internet, on women's body hair as fetish, or on shaved
women as fetish”(1).
 

  
  

 5

the removal of some or all ‘unwanted hair’ from the human body except from the head.

The ambiguity of this term ‘unwanted hair’ also asks for further examination of why and

under what situation some body hair is wanted while others are not. Has the use of the

term already presupposed the absent condition of some body hair? Here, my use of ‘body

hair’ instead of ‘unwanted hair’ aims to negotiate and juxtapose the potentiality of

simultaneous coexistence of the presence and absence of women’s body hair. Similarly,

my use of pre/absence is for the same purpose. The definition of presence and absence of

body hair in this study is often determined by its visuality (ways of seeing), visibility

(ability to be seen) and representability due to the nature of modern visual culture.

Nonetheless, the boundary between the two is in fact instable. My project also highlights

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the ambiguity of modern visuality and explores how women’s body hair represents

hyper-visibility and invisibility at the same time.

The complex interrelationship between the presence and absence of women’s

body hair lies at the heart of my discussions of cultural symbolism, modern discourses,

and women’s corporeal practices. Generally, throughout this project, I argue that the

presence and absence of women’s body hair always coexist and conspire with each other

whether in stereotyped female images in the media or in individual women’s corporal

existence. In terms of media representational practices, the media’s power to use the

modern gaze not only installs stereotypical visual mechanisms through images but it also

permeates people’s lives by instituting daily sanctions and routines which are particularly

apparent within its images of the female body. Furthermore, the modern visuality

spatializes the female body too. The female body, as a bodily space, is fragmented and

symbolized into bodily parts – also bodily margins as the corporal borderland between
6

the visible and invisible, public and private, sexy and sexualized, cleaned and polluted. In

this sense, I argue here that body hair in different bodily spaces have been culturally

inscribed differently and granted different degrees of engagement of visualization and

spatialization, and therefore result in dissimilar perceptions and practices. Finally, I want

to suggest that in contemporary Taiwan, female practices of hair-removal from different

bodily locations indicates different levels of socialization on women – that public hair

removal (arm and leg hair) signifies beautification while to remove private hair is a

gesture of publicizing and civilizing the female body for display.

The body of this thesis has two parts composed of four chapters. In the first part,

from chapter one to chapter three, the thesis examines the cultural narratives and social

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discourses about women’s body hair – the discursive female body in representational

practices. The second part, the fourth chapter, based on my interview data, explores

women’s embodiments on their own body hair and asks how women’s corporal practices

interact with social situations understood by the first part. The interrelationship between

the discursive female body and women’s corporeal existence thus takes center stage in

my analysis. Some critical issues or texts might reappear in different chapters and be

portrayed from different perspectives. My own analysis in the first part might be

challenged or restated by my interviewees in the second part. Each chapter of my thesis

engages with the instances of reinstatement and resistance in different ways. For example,

the hairless female pubis is found stigmatized by a sex taboo called white tiger in chapter

one. It is said that a woman without pubic hair will bring bad luck to her husband. In

chapter two and three, this cultural narrative is also found as a rearticulated advertising

rhetoric and as a mark of Asian value in modern media representations. However, my

  
  

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interviews also found that not all women know such a taboo but most of them accept the

idea that “hairy pubis is normal.” The recurrent themes as such in this thesis seek to

locate our understanding of the topic within a complex knowledge-network.

In my first chapter, I examine the cultural symbolism of body hair in pre-modern

Chinese narratives and suggest that the meanings of body hair have been constructed in

terms of the gendered, sexualized and racialized differentiations between “self” and

“others.” In this, women’s body hair is more associated with gender transgression and

sexual taboo while men’s body hair with masculine verification, racial identity and

nationality. My second chapter focuses on how the modern “hair-removal discourse,” as

cultural hybridity, establishes the female hairlessness norm by turning the stereotyped

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hairy woman into a social spectacle through the voyeuristic, fetishistic, and terrorist gaze.

It also suggests that the local representational practices not only rearticulate the Western

esthetic canon but also reflect the fictionality of femininity-construction through hair-

removal. The third chapter examines why and how women’s pubic hair, simultaneously,

has invisibility (unrepresentability) in film regulations and the hyper-visibility within the

“hair-exposure discourse” in Taiwan. It argues that this paradoxical social phenomenon

in fact indicates the danger of exposed female pubic hair locating in its visibility which

disturbs the corporeal boundary drawn by the concept of obscenity, between private and

public, invisible and visible; the ambiguity of modern gaze, therefore lies possible bodily

resistance. My fourth chapter examines how individual women, as lived bodies, usually

perceive, experience, and act on/with their bodies as well as social expectations

contradictorily due to the inter-subjectivity. Women’s practices of hair-removal signify

the process of publicization of female body as not only a feminine but also as a modern
8

and civilized social object/subject. My thesis thus brings together Foucault’s idea of

“docile body” and Moi’s “lived body” in order to see how the discursive body and

embodied subjectivity challenge and enrich each other.

Literature review

The study on women and body hair has occupied a double marginalized position in

the Western feminist body theories and sociological cultural studies. First of all, the issue

of women’s body hair has never drawn as much attention as those of diet, weight control

and cosmetic surgeries in both Western and Taiwanese feminist scholarship. The

women’s ‘body hair problem’ has been treated as ‘trivial’ and even ‘disgusting’ in both

everyday culture and academia without being fully problematized as a social and political

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issue. Secondly, while considered as an avenue of research inquiry, women’s head hair

obviously has overwhelming stories to tell while the issue of ‘unwanted’ body hair is still

‘unwanted’ in terms of academic theorization. Similar to Lesnik-Oberstein’s observation

in Western culture, in contemporary Taiwan, although the hair on the top of women’s

heads is often appraised as one of the ultimate signs of femininity, all other women’s

body hair is described unfeminine, frightening, or unwanted hair (1). This review,

therefore, aims to locate women’s body hair in the center of academic map by virtue of

three different approaches taken by previous research: (1) the cultural semiotics of (body)

hair; (2) feminist empiricism and the hairlessness norm; and (3) the theorization of

women’s body hair as “last taboo.”

Hair that Matters: The Cultural Semiotics of (Body) Hair

  
  

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The study on human body hair has not received respectable response in the

academic fields of humanities even though body hair has a valuable mine of unrevealed

meanings. The previous studies on this topic mainly engage in the decoding and encoding

the cultural symbolism of human body hair. In other words, the former scholars on the

one hand examine (decode) the cultural representations of body hair, and on the other

hand, disclose/encode its symbolic meanings in relation to identity-making processes.

Body hair on human is found to be profoundly associated with animalistic, sexuality,

fertility, racial and gender identities, and social class/status in both European-American

and Asian contexts.

Human body hair is treated as a mark, a signifier referring to different identities

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based on the dichotomy of categories such as human and animal, the civilized and the

wild, maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity. Fundamentally, “body hair is

thought to emphasize the animal in us, and the idealized version of the human body either

untruthfully omitted it or conveniently concealed it by a covering hand or drape” (Cooper

84). Cooper subjects the significance of body hair to deep cultural and sexual

investigation and makes a distinction of the symbolic meanings between male and female

body hair. By providing expressive evidence from ancient Egypt to African tribes,

Cooper argues that (body) hair and its attached social meanings are deeply associated

with both virility and sexual dominance. Female head hair, in Cooper’s accounts,

signifies virginity and promiscuity simultaneously; nevertheless, “the belief that hairiness

indicates virility in men is paralleled by one that hairiness indicates wantonness in

women” (77). In this, hairiness in women refers to the excessive body hair rather than

head hair, which is believed to have the “universally erotic appeal to men” (Cooper 68).
10

Cooper’s analysis (consciously or unconsciously) does not question the visual

dissymmetry in which men are located on the center of defining and evaluating women’s

body hair and reproduces the patriarchal hetero-normative.

In the context of Asian culture, (body) hair also serves as a visible bodily mark of

the differentiations of social and personal identities in relation to its historical

backgrounds. Hiltebeitel demonstrates that in the “tropes” of hair, the “cultural

grammars” of hair created by the interaction between individual bodies and social

contexts, locates the possible resistance to social control by “unworking” the cultural

meanings (xii-8). In terms of gender, Hiltebeitel claims that “women have much more

symbolic capital in their body hair than men, and men often have more such capital in

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women’s hair than in their own” (7). This indicates that female body has been centered in

the socially systemic demarcation as “to-be-marked-ness” while the male body is left

unmarked as the owner of both the symbolic and material property of the female body. In

this sense, how women could ‘unwork’ their ‘symbolic burdens’ demands further

theorization. The gender-imbalanced semiotic possessions also connect to other social

identity-constructions. Dikötter’s and Cheng’s studies on hair symbolisms in China

expose the gender-specific associations with racial and sexual identities: men’s body hair

is connected to race and ethnic identity while women’s is linked to sex/gender identity.

Allison’s analysis on women’s pubic hair and sexuality in Japan emphasizes the latter

point as well. She concludes that invisibility of the female public hair on screen due to

prohibition in Japan confines the enactment and representation of female sexuality (204-

05).

  
  

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These studies of (body) hair’s symbolism reveal a presupposition that the

meanings of (body) hair are socially inscribed on the materiality of human bodies; the

naturalness of human body provides scours in the face of cultural representations as well.

Therefore, when asked why body hair is repeatedly allied with sexuality and virility

cross-culturally, those researchers seek its “root meanings” to biological conditions of the

body. That is in human beings, in addition to head hair with which one is born, there is

hair growth at the onset of puberty and sexual maturity, and therefore body hair signifies

sexuality. Further, hair that is cut regenerates itself and it can therefore pick up

associations with other cultural symbols of regeneration and fertility (see both Cooper

and Olivelle). In other words, the semiotic approach rearticulates the ‘specific’ cultural

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interpretations of body hair based on the ‘general’ physicality of human body, but ignores

the varied actual embodiments of individual bodies.

Feminist Empiricism and the Feminine Hairlessness Norm

The practice of hair removal, especially among women, did not draw a lot of

consideration within the previous studies of hair symbolism. Not until the early 90s, did

Western feminist scholars in social science pay more attention to the feminine

hairlessness norm and the practices of hair-removal in women.4 Most of the studies are

conducted by the quantitative methods using questionnaire surveys, mainly concerning

three themes: (1) the social attitudes and perceptions about women’s body hair; (2) the

practices of hair-removal in women; (3) the construction of the female hairlessness norm

and femininity.

                                                            
4
The following literatures cited were done by Western feminist social scientists in U.S. (Basow, Basow &
Bramman; Basow & Willis), U.K. (Toerine & Wilkison “Exploring”; Toerine, Wilkison & Choi), and
Australia (Tiggemann & Kenyon; Tiggemann & Lewis).     
12

As Basow states, “although shaving is viewed as a trivial, habitual behavior, the

intense social reaction to violations of this norm emphasizes its power” (95). In general,

the previous studies find that the social attitudes and perceptions towards women with

visible body hair are negative: sexually and interpersonally less attractive, sociable, and

intelligent, as well as more aggressive, active, and stronger (Basow & Braman; Basow &

Willis), and even worse, disgusting (Tiggemann & Lewis). Female hairlessness norms are

powerful in the Western context and they are strongly enforced by women themselves.

The studies of women’s practices on hair-removal find that Caucasian women depilate

for pursuing femininity, sexual attractiveness, and releasing social pressures (Tiggemann

& Kenyon). In addition, Toerine and Wilkison’s research points out that the practice of

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female hair-removal in Britain is on the basis of smoothness (physically touching),

cleanliness and tidiness (hygienic morality); at the same time, this norm is found to be

continuously reinforced through interactional sanctions ((“Exploring” 88-89).Western

feminist theorization of the female hairlessness norm focuses on the constructive aspect

of “normative femininity,” for which functions to exaggerate the difference between

women and men, and to equate female attractiveness with youth (Basow 86). Similarly,

Hope’s study on the hair removal advertisements in the United States (1915-1945) finds

that “the literature on hair removal regularly expounds the belief that hairiness signifies

masculinity and the lack of hair signifies femininity”; therefore, hair-removal on women

serves to keep “the two sex roles in polar opposites” (98). Moreover, the norm that asks

women to remove body hair growing in both sexes since puberty is seen to infantilize

women. “Thus ‘feminine’, when applied to the absence of body hair, doesn’t really mean

  
  

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‘womanly’; it means ‘childlike’ and ‘masculine’ means ‘adult-like’” (Hope 99).5 In other

words, female hairlessness is not merely the outcome of one trivial ‘beauty’ practice, but

serves as an important requirement of appropriate femininity (Toerine, Wilkison & Choi).

The feminist critique repeatedly states that “fundamentally, the hairless norm

signals that women’s bodies are not attractive or indeed acceptable when natural” (Basow

86). Moreover, feminist scholars locate the potential sites for resisting the hairless norm

on those bodies of feminists, lesbians, as well as women of color (Basow; Tiggemann &

Kenyon; Toerine & Wilkison “Gender”). Rigakos’s work on women’s attitudes toward

body hair and hair-removal through a racial lens unpacks that the female hairlessness

norm is in effect a white, middle-class, heteronormative norm. In recent years, studies on

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(heterosexual) male body depilation have emerged and followed by the procedures

conducted by former feminist empiricist models of survey studies and factor analysis.

The surveys find that in practice, Western men do remove some of their body hair as one

way of displaying masculinity (Boroughs, Cafri, & Thompson).

Although this feminist quantitative approach indeed provides a large sampling of

women and men’s common sense regarding body hair, it oversimplifies the complex and

contradictory experiences embodied by individual women, and so does it overlook the

sociocultural backdrops influencing those personal embodiments. Also, the critique that

feminine hairlessness norms reflect that a woman is not socially acceptable as her

‘natural’ state is not without question. Along with this thinking, (the preservation of)

body hair represents the natural ‘femaleness’ while hair-removal signifies the social

construction of ‘femininity’ and symbolic ‘infantilization’ of the female body. This

                                                            
5
Lewis also makes a similar argument that “female body hair removal behavior may be a metaphoric
statement of control over female sexuality through the removal of the signs of maturity and adulthood” (12).
14

argument, therefore, is trapped in the binary separation of culture and nature, symbolism

and materiality, and fails to deeply theorize their interactions, especially the relation

between female body display (with/out body hair) and social responses. Furthermore,

these studies reveal the mainstream white middle-class heteronormative viewpoints. To

claim that the bodies of feminist, lesbian, or women of color are the rebellious sites

without further discussion of the differentiation of their political stands, gender roles, and

racial/ethnical identities behind these ‘big names’, it creates the crisis of reproducing

stereotypes by appertaining hairiness to such figures and reducing them to ‘imaginary

others’.

Theorizing the Last Taboo

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Two earlier researches in the 80s represent a dissimilar approach to the issue of

women’s body hair. Hope’s textual analysis of the ads in women’s magazines firstly

contextualizes the Caucasian female body hair-removal costume in a historical context in

American society and concludes that the hairlessness norm is socially constructed. Hope

also criticizes that the social function of hair-removal on women is to physically

differentiate the two sexes and deny full adulthood to women. The above survey-based

research follows the same line of reasoning. Nevertheless, losing touch with women’s

bodily experiences, to what extent can the numbers of ads reflect women’s actual

behavior and social responses to this hair-removal norm? 6 Lewis compensates this short

by conducting interviews with both Caucasian men and women in the U.S. about their

                                                            
6
Hope (93-99) divided four historical phrases of female hair removal advertising and behavior by analysis
the content and changing amount of the ads. The four periods are (1) the ivory complexion (prior to 1915),
(2) the great underarm campaign (1915-1919), (3) coming to terms with leg hair (1920-1940), and (4)
minor assault on leg hair (1941-1945).

  
  

 15

attitudes towards body hair. Lewis’s study finds that “body hair and its control are heavy

with taboo, but primarily the taboos concentrate on females” (13).

How does women’s body hair obtain the status of taboo? And, in any sense, can

women destigmatize themselves from this taboo? Turner theorizes the ‘ambiguous’

existence of human body hair that it is simultaneously inside the body, beneath the skin

as well as outside the body, beyond the skin; it is alive and growing inside while dead and

without sensation outside the body at the same time (18). The physical materiality of

body hair, in this sense, disturbs the boundary between inside and outside, bodily parts

and bodily waste. Macdonald further argues that body hair can be regarded as bodily

excreta, the abject, due to its uncertainly existent location, “which provides one account

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of the fears that it [body hair] may evoke” (70). Therefore, the appearance of body hair

on a body surface, as matter out of place, “can both constitute the animal within, which

constantly threatens to overwhelm the human, and, in gender terms, may trigger anxiety

about sexual identity” (Macdonald 70). In terms of gender, women’s body hair is more

taboo than men’s for it not only transgresses the border between human and animal, but

masculinity and femininity. Lesnik-Oberstein locates the danger of body hair on female

bodies in its “visibility,” for it reveals the potential masculinity hidden within femininity

(11). Scruiatti argues that body hair on the female body is a source of anxiety which “is

expressed by the need to remove the hair, which grows outside the specific areas of the

body in which it is allowed to be,” and moreover, “despite its existence, it must not be

seen” (147).

In addition to exaggerating gender differences and female attractiveness,

Macdonald pointes out that the compulsory hairlessness norm connotes the position of
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“to-be-looked-at-ness” that a female body lives in (70). Since the visibility of women’s

body hair signifies the “threatening femininity,” it is thus important to analyze different

meanings and conditions of its visibility (Caselli 20). Lesnik-Oberstein argues that

feminists should take women’s body hair as a site of contestation different from body

weight “in terms of possible meanings which could be developed for it and from it

[women’s body hair], politically and socially speaking, in that body hair is seen as either

removed or not. Unlike ‘fat’, it is conceived to have a ‘point zero’ when it is not removed:

it is then simply present to whatever degree, while body weight does not reach such a

point…” (8-9). However, in terms of practice, do all women’s unshaven bodies have the

same degree of “point zero”? And, does female body hair in different bodily locations

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have the same degree of potential to challenge the taboo of visibility? As Caselli said,

“only if we think of body hair as a construction will we be able to see it, discuss it and

analyze it” (19); nevertheless, we should not avoid (1) the various physical materiality of

body hair on women (its darkness, density, thickness and amount). Not every woman

reaches the same “point zero” when presenting their own body hair; and (2) that body

hair in different locations demands different strategies of ‘revelation’. For example, even

for a woman, to reveal her unshaved female pubis does not reach the same “point zero”

as to revealing her unshaved armpit. Indeed, body hair is an important margin which is

helpful “to understand the limits of a feminist position which claims to have overcome

the stereotype and reached an enlightened state, able to make us either denounce injustice

or celebrate justice” (Caselli 30).  

To sum up, the review of literature furnishes the methodological frames for the

present study. First of all, the approach of looking for cultural semiotics is helpful for the

  
  

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thesis to explore the symbolisms of body hair in Chinese culture. Moreover, the abundant

achievements made by Western feminist social scientists provide the common senses of

the issue in the Western culture, serving as the base of cultural comparison for this

project. In addition, Hope’s textual analysis and Lewis’s interview work together to

demonstrate how to contextualize cultural narratives of women’s body hair based on

textual analysis and how to bring women’s voices and embodiments into light by

qualitative methods. The methodological combination of their research and the

theorization from the lens of feminist cultural criticism sets a good methodological model

for this project as an interdisciplinary study in the field of women’s studies.

Theoretical Framework & Methodology

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“The mystique of the everyday is joined here with the discipline of the minute”

(Foucault, Discipline, 140). In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argues that

modern “discipline is a political anatomy of detail” which operates the “micro-physics”

of power on individual bodies through meticulous observation and technologies of detail

(139-141):

These [technologies of discipline] were always meticulous, often minute,

techniques, but they had their importance: because they defined a certain

mode of detailed political investment of the body, a ‘new micro-physics’

of power…as if they tended to cover the entire social body… (Foucault,

Discipline, 139)

Here Foucault’s emphasis on bodily details in relation to systemic power relations

provides a powerful starting point to theorize the issue of the trivialization of women’s

body hair. From this perspective, women’s practices regarding their body hair – hair
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removal, trimming, concealment and so on – are “small acts of cunning endowed with a

great power of diffusion, subtle arrangements, apparently innocent, but profoundly

suspicious” (Foucault, Discipline,139). Based on Foucault’s politics of detail, the thesis

seeks to provide an infinite observation of a set of techniques, methods, descriptions and

knowledge as to women and body hair in Taiwan in order to provoke common political

awareness of these small things which have been infiltrated with complex social power.

Moreover, the works within feminist body theories hone Foucault’s scope by using his

ideas to focus specifically on gender issues which then allow me in this thesis to

concentrate on two intersecting dimensions: power relations and gender construction, as

well as the interrelations between visuality, space, and modernity.

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Power, Gender, and Docile Bodies

Foucault proposes a power-knowledge nexus within which the human body is

located in the center. In Foucault’s concept of power relations, power works as “a

dynamic or network of non-centralized forces while these forces are not random or

haphazard but configure to assume particular historical forms, within which certain

groups and ideologies do have dominance” (Bordo, Unbearable, 26). Nevertheless, in

Foucauldian concept, power is not repressive but constitutive and operates from “the

below” rather than “the above,” through the internalization of norms and automatic self-

surveillance in individual bodies. It is therefore helpful to understand how the normative

femininity (masculinity) has been perpetuated and reproduced by women themselves in

terms of bodily modification and appearance enhancement. Moreover, Foucault’s ideas

about “productive power” and “omnipresent resistance” inspire the postmodernist

interpretation of the multi-dimensionality and fluidity of the body against the hegemonic

  
  

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values, as well as feminist thoughts on women’s resistance and challenge beyond the

binary framework of men–oppressor vs. women – the oppressed.

Moreover, through operations of the “micro-physics of power,” modern discipline

“produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” that “may be subject, used,

transformed, and improved" (Foucault, Discipline, 138; 136). The “docile body,” which

comprises the “intelligible body” and the “useful body,” is simultaneously the product

and the tool of modern power. Borbo therefore elaborates Foucault’s categories of

“intelligible body” and “useful body” into “textual body” and “practical body” to

examine how ‘femininity’ has been socially constructed and manipulated in Western

societies. According to Bordo’s rearticulation, “the intelligible body includes our

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scientific, philosophic, and aesthetic representations of the body – our cultural

conceptions of the body, norms of beauty, models of health, and so forth,” while the

useful body is formed by “a set of practical rules and regulations through which the

living body is … becoming, in short, a socially adapted and ‘useful body’” (Unbearable

181). Based on the framework, the thesis locates the multilayered meanings of women’s

body hair in both cultural representations and practical embodiments of the materialized

bodies. More importantly, “the intelligible body and the useful body are two arenas of the

same discourse; they often mirror and support each other” (Bordo, Unbearable, 181-82).

The project highlights the intertwined relations between the textual body and the practical

body to make the invisible social force and individual women’s negotiations visible.

Gaze, Space, and Modernity

Foucault locates the modern power in the use of “gaze,” and found the origins of

modernity in the reordering of power and knowledge and the visible (Friegberg 396).
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Jeremy Bentham’s design of panopticon provides the model for Foucault to theorize the

panoptic gaze and the disciplines of imagined scrutiny – surveillance.

There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a

gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight

will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each

individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself.

(Foucault, “The Eye,” 155)

In practice, the panoptic gaze permeated in the society conveys a “sentiment of an

invisible omniscience” within which individuals become socially normalized

subjects/objects through self-discipline. Moreover, the panoptic gaze has been invoked by

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feminist theorists to highlight the dissymmetry of gendered looking, in which women

have internalized the voyeuristic gaze and are always subjectively “objects of the look”

(Friegberg 396). In other words, the binary ocular-centrism here produces a “brutal

dissymmetry of visibility,” in which the unseen guard/ male camera is always looking at

the visible inmate/female body. By Mulvey’s term, the female body, therefore, always

subjects to the position of “to-be-looked-at-ness.” This thesis, thus, seeks to

demythologize the female hairlessness myth that is constructed by visuality of the

panoptic gaze and gendered voyeuristic gaze.

Moreover, based on Bentham’s architectural device where the invisible scrutiny

controls its inhabitants (prisoners) in an enclosed spatial arrangement, Foucault’s model

of panoptic power demands further expansion to analyze the surveillance outside of

institutionalization. In others words, do the self-scrutiny and interpersonal inspection that

a female body usually experiences in daily life have something to do with the spatial

  
  

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arrangement? How do individual women act when they are both seers and the seen in

opened public social space? Indeed, the panoptic gaze suggests a model for the increased

priority of the visual register, but this thesis also asks for the alternative gazes that are

more unstable and situated. They might still restructure the privilege of vision over other

bodily sensors but provide different forms of subjectivity. Therefore, it is important to see

how the operation of modern power together with the process of visualization and

spatialization of women’s bodies produces modern womanhood in Taiwan. From this

perspective, the thesis will demonstrate that the meanings of pre/absence of women’s

body hair signify a process in which a (Taiwanese) female body, as a bodily space,

becomes a spatialized and visualized modern sub/object.

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Discourse Analysis: Visual Power and Spatial Structure

In terms of sources gathered and research method, the thesis is organized as two

parts. The first part (from chapter one to chapter three) presents the textual sources of

pre-modern cultural narratives (of physiognomic manuals, hand books of sex, and

folklores), media representations (of newspaper reports, magazine articles, TV

commercials), and graphic texts (visual advertisements)7. In these discursive and visual

texts, women’s bodies (and their body hair) are the object of knowledge, the intelligible

body.

Here, I apply Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine how the female body

(hair), as a text of culture, has been constructed as a particular topic at the particular

sociocultural moment of Taiwanese society. Foucault argues that discourse defines and

produces the objects of our knowledge and nothing which is meaningful exists outside

                                                            
7
 I have done all the Chinese-English translation of those documents unless otherwise noted. 
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discourse. According to Hall, Foucault does not mean that the physical materiality is not

important; rather, the physical/material objects do exist, but they have no fixed meaning;

they only take on meaning and become objects of knowledge within discourse (44).

Based on the gathered textual scours, the project finds two prevailing discourses as to

women and body hair formulated on the mainstream mass media – “hair-removal

discourse” and “hair-exposure discourse.” It also finds that when specific discourses are

formed as ‘truth’ to ‘lead’ our thoughts and conducts of a topic, other ways of talking and

conducting in relation to the topic are marginalized. Nevertheless, Foucault points out

that the discourse only functions as ‘truth’: “[e]ach society has its regime of truth, its

‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes

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function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and

false statements” (“Truth” 131). Thus, it is the task of the thesis to discover how these

discourses of the “truth” of women’s body hair operate in relation to the dominant power

structures in contemporary Taiwanese society.

To do so, I first of all apply the visual analysis to look at how the graphic texts

represent women’s bodies visually and how women’s real experiences of seeing and

being seen in daily lives. For visuality and visibility are the key concepts that explain

how women’s bodies are socialized which is considered as “modern.” As I explained

above, visuality is critical to understanding the power operation and the construction of

modernity in Foucauldian model, within which process, the pre/absence of body hair in

women plays a curial focal point. Furthermore, I employ spatial analysis to examine how

women’s bodies become a space of display within the interactions to the outer social

space and others’ gazes. The spatial analysis of women’s bodies is connected to the

  
  

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notion of visuality as well. How does power of vision or the gaze of others visualize and

spatialize women’s bodies? And, how does the spatialization of women’s bodies relate to

the modern identity-making process, especially to gender and sexual identities? By the

tool of visual studies and spatial analysis, the thesis explores new meanings from the

complexity between women and body hair.

Ethnographic Interviews: Situating the Lived Bodies

The second part (chapter four) presents the ethnographic sources gathered from

my interviews with Taiwanese women.8 The interviews were conducted during the spring

of 2007 and the early winter of 2008. The ethnographic data were collected from

interviews with thirty-one Taiwanese girls and women, ranging in age from 15 to 96,

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with diverse backgrounds of occupation, family structure, gender and sexual

identifications. Otherwise, most of my informants are middle-class based. All the names

have been changed in the transcribed responses that serve as the backdrop for the text

(see Appendix A for the interviewee demography). I apply one-to-one interviews with

semi-scheduled and open-ended questions (see Appendix B). Except for the follow-up

questions and probes for different individuals, the basic questions cover three motifs: (1)

the women’s receptions and conceptions of sociocultural meanings of body hair; (2) the

women’s perceptions of others’ and their own body hair; and (3) the women’s corporeal

practices on their body hair. The first-hand ethnographic source helps to see how the

individual body in society serves as the useful body, as a practical text. Moreover, the

interview data supplements my analysis of symbolisms/representation with women’s

experience and locates potential sites of resistance in female embodied subjectivity.

                                                            
8
 I have done all the transcription and translation of my ethnographic data.   
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In order to disclose women’s corporeal embodiments and the complex power

relationships between the intelligible body and the useful body, here I suggest that the

integrated avenue of feminist phenomenological idea of “lived body” and Foucault’s

concept of “docile body” is useful. Foucault’s demonstrations about the operation of the

relationtive modern power prevailingly focus on how the institutionalized regulations

work onto and produce the individual docile bodies; rather, how a personal body’s

agency works to resist the domination is left obscure and ambiguous. The idea of “lived

body” can supplement the gap. According to Iris Young’s articulation,

The lived body is a unified idea of a physical body acting and

experiencing in a specific context; it is body-in-situation. For existentialist

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theory, situation denotes the produce of facticity and freedom. The person

always faces the material facts of her body and in relation to a given

environment. (16) [Original emphasis]

In terms of the issue of women’s body hair, first of all, Foucauldian discourse

analysis is still significant for it makes possible our understanding of how the female

body (hair) becomes an object of knowledge, its materiality is a part of given social

environment where individual women locate/situate. In the second part of interviews, a

woman’s body returns to the position of subject to know while at the same time it is an

object of knowledge; a lived woman body, therefore, embodies a complex inter-

subjectivity, and her view is not omniscient but partial. For this, it is halting to

experience such partial perspectives and the voices from individual women as a way to

find a collective subject position. Secondly, the “lived body” theory directly locates the

‘agency’ in every lived body that always in negotiation with its changeable social

  
  

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situations. Therefore, when we shift the focus on women’s lived bodies, we look at how

the body becomes a practical ground producing utility not only for the society but also for

her own use in relation to the social context. Finally, the concept of “lived body” or

“body-in-situation” is useful as to know how a woman self-disciplines her body through

interactions with other lived bodies, which means the interpersonal contacts – the non-

institutionalized examinations that Foucault does not describe at length. The “lived body”

explains the female bodily existence that a woman is simultaneously a subject and object;

most of time, she lives her body in contradictory situations between being a seer and the

seen, an actor and the acted upon duce to the fact that the female body has been

objectified materially and imaginarily in a patriarchal sexist society.

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