October 2016

For this installment I took to the streets (metaphorically speaking) to interview a few friends about their hair and the intrinsic and imposed identities those little bundles of keratin confer. Settle in and hear their stories.

Amanda Diamond, Fourth-Year

How does your hair play into your personal identity, both tangible and intangible?

Sometimes I feel as though I need to start referring to myself as a “blackwoman,” one word, so people will stop trying to separate those two parts of my identity. This is a sentiment that has been heavy on my mind these past few months since news of Nate Parker’s old rape case came into the forefront.

Story By: Madeline Baker

I am afraid of the dark. When I was young, I didn’t like to sleep because I feared those tiny little colorful beads we see when we turn off the lights. I couldn’t tell them where to go, what to make. They moved on their own accord, dancing to their own mechanisms. They could be beautiful. They made circles or spirals or zigzags, like a display of synchronized swimmers. I remember napping with my mother and telling her that they looked like colorful grains of sugar swirling through the air. Though, more often than not they didn’t dance so gracefully.

I refer to the beginning of my sophomore year of high school as my “Great Awakening.” That is when I found Feminism. It changed my whole life.

Bleached and dyed and tugged and straightened and curled and dried and oiled and trimmed and chopped. It’s a cumulative result, a regenerative but at the very least temporally affected font of keratin that can be a vehicle for self-expression, a curtain of self-defense, or somewhere in between. It’s a woman’s hair.

On September 16, 2016, English majors, English professors, and literature lovers gathered together and fangirled because we had the opportunity to see both Junot Diaz and Salman Rushdie