THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CHOICE

The parallels between the growing popularity of complete genital depilation in affluent industrialised nations to the sorts of ritual female circumcisions routinely lambasted in Western media were made explicit by a recent issue of the London-based New Statesman magazine.

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. his paper was originally prepared for 'Technology and Formations of Power', in a workshop held at the University of California at San Diego, May 2008. The author thanks the workshop's participants for their helpful questions and comments, particularly Marisa Brandt, Monica Hoffman, and Steve Epstein. The author also gratefully acknowledges the astute suggestions of two anonymous readers for this journal, and the generous assistance of Sandra Groleau of Ladd Library, Bates College.1 See box 0924-16: Zip—Special Data, 1917-1941, Historical Health Fraud Collection Historical Health Fraud Collection . 1917–1941. Box 0924-16: Zip—Special Data, 1917–1941. American Medical Association , Chicago, Illinois [Google Scholar], American Medical Association, Chicago, Illinois. 2. Several other popular plant-based hair removers, such as Nad's hair-removing gel, are promoted as alternatives to waxing. Like waxes, however, these depilatories essentially yank hair from the body with the aid of gluey compounds. 3. Bauman writes: The production of 'human waste', or more correctly wasted humans (the 'excessive' and 'redundant' …), is an inevitable outcome of modernization, and an inseparable accompaniment of modernity. It is an inescapable side-effect of order-building (each order casts some parts of the extant population 'out of place', 'unfit' or 'undesirable') and of economic progress (that cannot proceed without degrading and devaluing the previously effective modes of 'making a living' and therefore cannot but deprive their practitioners of their livelihood). (Bauman 2004, 5; original emphasis) It seems worth nothing that Bauman likens the production of shunned, 'wasted' humans to the ritual removal of hair (2004, 22–23). 4. In their study of women's hair removal, Toerien, Wilkinson, and Choi aptly note that the work of femininity places 'women in a double-bind: trivialized for taking them [requirements] seriously; treated as feminine failures for not doing so. By refusing to trivialize women's "beauty" practices, then, we question the narrow definition of "acceptable" feminine embodiment' (2005, 405).