The tangles and knots of my morning hair don’t hurt anymore when I pull them out; I have become accustomed to the soft tug and immediate static separation of strands, like polarized magnet ends. I pried red wisps from my clothes as I readied myself today, and I recalled when the strands were black and orange and blue and blonde. My hair is an identity of mine, the style and cut can define who I become for a time – imbued with confidence or dysphoria. We use it to express or resist, but also to categorize, admire, or control. Hair evokes emotions, represents identities, provokes thought, and also, perhaps most importantly for me, remembers.

Before my mother’s hands I recall sitting, gazing in the mirror as she guided a brush through my tresses, brown in this faded memory, and saying it reminded her of her mother; of youth spent under the sun, of gardening together, of running barefoot. Hair is a bridge for many, a symbol of what was lost or where you came from. It is at once a memory and memorabilia; it can provide us with identity or strip it, it constitutes our expressions but at once evokes it from us and from others. It separates us by aesthetic, vanity, and personhood, but connects us to our cultures – to our people, our interests, and our own lives. Hair is both an object of the body and an embodied object; we don’t just use it, we think using it. It affords us a sense of belonging, resistance and expression, but can afford others the ability to categorize and stereotype. It is a medium requiring thought – it is communication without words that shapes social interactions. Furthermore, Bill Brown would argue that hair is a material medium – it is not just symbolic, but has physical affordances. My hair has been braided, fishtailed, space-bunned, chopped, dyed, and styled an uncountable amount of times in my life. It becomes most visible as an object of the self when we manipulate it, but it is the perception (and often, preconception) that it affords us that defines it as an embodied medium, too. It is evocative because, as Turkle would say, it acts as the “companions to our emotional lives” and as a “provocation to thought”. As I lay the fresh blood-red dye in my hair last week, I thought of my mother doing the same to cover up her greys. I thought about whether people would notice that it stained my ears. I thought I looked a bit like Carrie at prom. It reminded me that hair is not only an object that sits on my head and tells people how much I rolled around in my sleep, but by understanding how it mediates our actions and thoughts, we can reconsider the boundary between medium and body. Our correspondence with the world is through these strands – through memories, rituals, and cultural practices. It defines how I interact with the world, and how society interacts with me. 

Hair is also a rare physical representation of a moment that has passed and yet remains unchanged. Some wealthy Victorians kept locks of hair from late loved ones in jewelry, and many cultures view the cutting of hair as a spiritual severing of sorts (grief, marriage, coming of age etc.). Hair, when it is detached from the human body, stops being part of the living self and becomes a “thing” – an artifact that represents an identity or relationship during a specific moment in time. Hair is no longer an object of mediation, but as Bill Brown may say, a “thing” once it has been removed from the context of its existence within the self. This “thing” is that which mediates memory and loss, but is also that which is in direct opposition to the very nature of hair – growth. Hair exists as an object between the transient and the permanent: on the head, it changes daily; off the head, it becomes a fixed representation of a particular time, person, or feeling. Like photographs or audio recordings, preserved hair mediates the present and the past, turning lived moments into material memorabilia.

Hair, as both living material and preserved artifact, reveals the complex ways media mediates identity, culture, perception, and time. Through our attentiveness to styling and care, hair functions as an embodied medium of self-expression, a form of communication without words. When it is cut, saved, or transformed, hair becomes a tangible record of specific moments, anchoring personal and collective memories in a physical form. Victorian mourning jewelry makes this especially obvious: hair becomes a medium that bridges presence and absence, life and death, permanence and change. The ways in which we view hair on both ourselves, others, or alone reveals how bodily objects participate in broader cultural systems of meaning. Hair is not simply something we have; it is something through which we express, connect, and remember. This perspective challenges us to look beyond conventional technologies and recognize how our bodies mediate the world, and how medias are woven like threads through the very fabric of our lives.

1. Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE.” Evocative Objects: Objects We Think With. 
2. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
3. Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 49–63.