ebonyicons

On gender performance, Black hair, and the freedom of refusing to pass

By Nic Harris (ebonyicons)

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Before I tell you about my hair, I want to tell you what this essay is for.

I write about the body — mine, and the larger body politic it moves through: the collective body that decides which of us are protected, which are policed, and which are simply expected to fail the test and apologize for failing it. The personal and the political are not two conversations. They are one, held at different scales. This essay is an invitation to find yourself in that argument. I’ll use my own body — Black, non-binary, fem, and specifically the hair on top of it — as the worked example. But the point is not my hair. The point is that you have a location in the body politic too. You are performing a role that was written for you, policed in you, and mistaken by all of us for nature.

I move through the world read as a woman more often than not, and I have learned the grammar of that reading — the way a room recalibrates based on what is happening above my forehead. Loced, I am one thing. Braided, another. Shorn close, something the world has no comfortable name for, so it hesitates. In the hesitation I have learned the entire architecture of who is allowed to be a woman in America and who is only ever auditioning for the part.

Because that is what it is. An audition. And the casting was finished before any of us walked in.

Judith Butler gave me a word for what I’d been doing without language for it: performativity. In Gender Trouble, Butler argues that gender is not an inner essence we express but a set of repeated acts that produce the illusion of an inner essence. We are not women who then behave in womanly ways. We are taught to behave in womanly ways so constantly that everyone — including us — comes to believe there was a woman underneath all along. There is no underneath. There is only the performance, and the belief it manufactures.

This sounds like bad news, as if Butler is calling our identities fake. The argument is more freeing than that, and more damning. If gender is something we do rather than something we are, then the rules of that doing were written by someone, for someone. And the someone was never going to be me.

The performance of ideal womanhood in this country was choreographed with white women at its center. The softness, the silhouette, the hair that falls — past the shoulders, down the back, moving the way the commercials promise. That is not a neutral standard Black women happen to fall short of. It is a standard built to be fallen short of. My hair does not fall. It rises. It reaches. It holds its shape against gravity and does not apologize — and for most of my life I read that as a personal failing rather than as evidence that the ruler was never calibrated for me.

The sociologist Sabrina Strings names the mechanism precisely. In The End of Love, she describes how desirability is organized around the “sufficiently white” woman — and how Black women, and others she calls “insufficiently white,” are sorted out of the category of the loveworthy before any encounter begins. Hold that word: insufficiently. It tells you the measurement is real, that there is a threshold, and that the threshold is whiteness. We are handed the tools — the relaxers, the weaves, the flat irons, the ritual labor — and told that if we work hard enough, we might approximate the thing well enough to be granted partial entry.

I have watched my own access to protection change in real time depending on what my hair was doing. When it reads closer to the performance — longer, softer, more legible as feminine within a white grammar — doors open differently. Strangers are gentler. Spaces extend a provisional welcome. Beauty, which is really proximity to an ideal, is dispensed and withdrawn like a utility. I was billed for it my whole life without ever signing up.

So: the haircut.

When I cut my hair short, I expected to feel free. Instead I felt dysphoria I had not anticipated — a real grief, a disorientation, the sense of having lost access to a language I’d spent my life learning to speak. It did not fit the tidy liberation I’d scripted. What I understood eventually was this: the grief was not proof the performance was natural. It was proof of how deeply it had been installed. I’d been given femininity conditionally, on the basis of how well I approximated a white ideal, and my hair was one of my only tools for that approximation. To lose it was to lose an instrument for entering a room I was never actually welcome in.

Butler would say the dysphoria is instructive. If gender were an inner truth, a haircut couldn’t shake it. The fact that it could — that changing an external act disrupted my whole sense of self — is evidence the self was built from those acts in the first place.

Here is the turn, and the reason I’m writing at all.

The freedom was not in the short hair or the long hair. It was in the moment I stopped experiencing my hair as an audition and started experiencing it as a medium. Passing assumes there is a real thing to pass as — a genuine article I’m forging a copy of. But if the genuine article is itself a performance choreographed for someone else’s body, then I am not a failed copy. I am an artist handed materials and told there is only one thing to make.

I make other things now. Some days I perform a femininity legible to the white grammar, on purpose, knowing exactly what it will unlock — and that knowledge is its own power. Other days I refuse it entirely and accept the cost, because the refusal is mine to make. The point is not which style I choose. The point is that I became the one choosing.

And this freedom is not only mine. The queer refusal I’m describing — the insistence that gender performance is authored, not natural — is a gift on offer to everyone the performance has exhausted. Including cisgender women, who have been told their whole lives that the shackles were their own skin. The cis woman straightening her hair at five in the morning so she’ll be taken seriously is inside the same apparatus I am. The standard punishes her too. It has simply convinced her the punishment is her own reflection.

That is what queer theory offers the world beyond queer people: a way out of the belief that we are failing at something natural, when we are being terrorized by something invented. We are not inadequate. We are governed. The difference is the whole essay.

I don’t want to end on the machinery. I want to end on joy — the thing the machinery is built to withhold. There is real beauty in the performance of gender; I’m not arguing for its abolition but for its authorship. What I’d surrender is the rigidity, the policing, the narrowness enforced until it masquerades as biology — the lie that a woman’s power lives only in her proximity to a white ideal of softness, or a man’s only in his distance from anything tender. Those aren’t powers. They’re cages with good lighting.

Imagine what our whole society would feel if we believed this — if cis women and trans women and non-binary people and men, so starved of permission to be soft, could set down a performance we’ve been failing on purpose and pick up one we actually get to write. I think it would feel like joy. Not the small, rationed joy of approximating the standard well enough to be let in for an afternoon. The larger joy — the kind that does not require anyone else to be locked out for you to be admitted. Joy that was never meant to be reserved for the women sufficiently white to be included in femininity in the first place.

My hair rises. It reaches. It holds its shape against gravity and does not apologize. I stopped reading that as failure. I started reading it as the truth of what I am — not a woman failing to be white enough, not a self hiding under a presentation, but a person authoring myself in public, in a language I was finally free enough to write.

That freedom is on offer to you too. That is the whole reason I told you about the haircut.