Millions of women around the world live their lives with facial hair, for better or worse and I was one of them. I once had whiskers, stubble, growth that resembled a moustache, mustache, mustachio, stache, tache, tash, MO...
To everyone, from the age of thirteen I was a bearded lady, a young woman with a crumb catcher growing on my face. Teenage peers poked ‘fun’ at me, strangers thought my face looked dirty, and I don’t know how many times I was approached, only to be called “sir”. T-shirts, tights and sunglasses could not help disguise or hide my facial hair - it was out there - on my face, for everyone, and I mean everyone, to see.
For this piece, every morning I would leave the house and approach a stranger. “I’ve lost my moustache…and I’m hoping that maybe you could help me out…?” became my daily mantra. Responses to my pleas varied wildly. Invariably, however, I handed participants a black eye liner with which to draw a mustache on the canvas of my face. As I began to grow more comfortable with the days’ moustaches, my accomplices grew more comfortable sharing their equally private and personal experiences. Occasionally, before posing me for my daily mustache portrait (my trusty camera readily at hand), participants demanded that a moustache be reciprocally drawn upon them in kind. Soon there was a community of mustaches.
As represented in the images before you, customs, religious beliefs and personal taste led to the creation of countless mustache styles over the years; the Fu Manchu, the Pancho Villa, the Handlebar, the Toothbrush, the Walrus, the Pencil, the Chevron, the Wide Mexican, the Wonsal, the Dali, the Imperial, the English, the Horseshoe and the Freestyle amongst others.
The objectives of this performance piece was two-fold:
-To create, using a critical lens, a platform wherein I am able to examine my complex relationship with facial hair as a marker of my gender; and
-To provide an empowering vehicle by which men, and (particularly) women are encouraged to explore the ostracization of female facial hair, and to discuss identity within a wider spectrum.
Throughout history, hairiness in women has been symbolically demonized.
In a 14th century tale of Saint Wilgefortis, a young woman promised in marriage to a pagan king attempted to evade wedlock by swearing an oath of virginity and, to aid her case, she prayed to be made “repulsive,” and in turn, grew a beard (Toerien and Wilkinson, 2003).
More recently, though in years gone by, “exiling ‘women with facial hair’ to the circus [was] a defensive move that put trouble in a place where [they could] be safely contained” (Whitaker). Indeed, bearded ladies were long marveled in these carnival shows as curiosities to be fabled and ridiculed - femmes grotesques.
Famous bearded ladies include Annie Jones and Julia Pastrana.
Jones (1865-1902) was sold to the P.T. Barnum’s circus at only nine months old, first advertised as the bearded girl, and later as the bearded lady.
Pastrana (1834-1860) had hypertrichosis (…). Theodor Lent purchased her as a child, by from a woman believed to be her mother. Lent toured Julia worldwide as “The Bearded and Hairy Lady”. He later married her, and she gave birth to a child with features similar to her own. Both mother and child died from complications, so Lent mummified their bodies, and continued to tour them in glass cabinets. He remarried a woman whose facial features resembled Julia’s and had her change her last name to Pastrana before finally being institutionalized... but I digress…
Of late, bearded ladies have removed their beards, or otherwise worn them as a political or fashion statement.
Jennifer Miller (1961-) founded the acclaimed New York City political performance troupe “Circus Amok” in order to break down barriers and juggle gender politics, using humor to facilitate discourse.
Henrietta Moore has described the body as an ‘interface’ or ‘threshold’ between the material and the symbolic, the biological and the cultural. Societal norm, to the contrary, has determined artificial cultural boundaries that are rigidly defined by one’s sex organs such that the definition of personhood has been split amongst two distinct categories, with nothing in-between.
The assignment of gender structures, what it means to be female or male, impacts everyday interactions to such a degree that any ambiguity results in shame, distress and secrecy. Anyone found in contravention of cultural norms of feminine or masculine intrudes upon cultural assumptions, thereby putting themselves at risk of forfeiting their association with either group or even of physical assault.
Today’s social and cultural pressures demand active human intervention to insure that sex categories remain absolute. In western culture, the extent to which hairlessness has become synonymous with feminine sexuality has become both unrealistic and disconcerting.
After all, what could be more natural than hair?
