TikTok, a social media app where users can make and upload short videos to share with others, has become the most downloaded app in the iTunes app store in 2019. Mostly populated by young people, its success hinges specifically off of an algorithm that creates the “For You” page that shows the user content collected based on their personal activity. This creates different corners of the online landscape with wildly varying content, but the self-described ‘gay/stoner/witch” area has demonstrated a particular phenomenon of people cutting, dyeing, and shaving their own hair and eyebrows.
This is a common occurrence, specifically in the gay community, enough so that it is referred to as a “right of passage for queer people…to reach for the peroxide bottle when facing a minor inconvenience” (Longo 2020). I, personally, watched a friend give themselves bangs with the scissors of a pocket knife and another shave down the sides of their hair into a mullet after about a week of being confined to their homes. Why is it that this form of expression has become so ubiquitous amongst queer people? And why has the incidence rate exploded during the isolation imposed by the COVID-19 crisis?
The most drastic styles are seeing the greatest uptick during this quarantine. Dyeing brighter colors, half the head one color and the other half a different one (called a two-tone), and even dyeing patterns into short hair are more frequent. Shaving the ends of eyebrows, as well as the sides of the head (into the increasingly popular mullet), and shaving the entire head are also noted styles that are connoted with the queerness of the model. Tiktok user gaysforjesus stated in one video, “The minute you shave your head I automatically assume you use they/them pronouns. So don’t shave it [if] you don’t want me to call you a they/them”. What this light-hearted quote suggests is the very real use of the body to demonstrate identity. Outlandishly colored hair and unorthodox haircuts are an example of the “aesthetic of deviance” that many queer people practice in the face of heteronormative, cisnormative societal pressure (Pitts 2003, 87). Victoria Pitts writes that “queering of the body reflects a politicized aesthetics of deviance, where overt bodily display is seen as a powerful affront to essentializing norms” (2003, 91). The attempt to create and display explicitly queer bodies through not only the act of transforming the hair/appearance into something that defies societal and gender norms but the sharing of the videos of this process of transformation can be read as attempts to display and signal queerness and/or identity especially in a time where so many younger queer people have been forced to return to their childhood homes or hometowns.
This phenomenon can also be analyzed in conjunction with the idea espoused by DaVinci and Mary Douglas of the body as a microcosm of the macrocosm; the body acting as a mirror for society. Transforming one’s physical appearance can be interpreted as an attempt to simultaneously communicate the state of the ‘outside world’ and control it. The wacky color choices, especially the two-tone and patterns, attempt to communicate the chaos being enacted on the body by the outside world. Simultaneously, they construct queer bodies that are chaotic by nature and by creation; they seek to disrupt a status quo. Contrastingly, using the same theory, changing one’s physical appearance could be understood as the individual exacting control over the macrocosm. These modifications are an attempt to control something and by controlling the way the world sees one, one changes the world in some way. This reaction makes even more sense when considering the magnitude of the conditions that caused the isolation that facilitated this windfall of body modification. Regardless, the changes are functioning as a coping mechanism and a form of protest for those who have been bound by their environment. The pandemic has reminded everyone of how intertwined our freedom and our bodies are, and, despite their isolation, queer young people have freed themselves enough to reach for the scissors.
Citations
Gaysforjesus. and that’s on enby tingz. TikTok. [Internet]. 2020. Available from: https://www.tiktok.com/@gaysforjesus/video/6811108630025358597
Jennings R. This week in TikTok: A whole bunch of quarantine hair experiments [Internet]. Vox. Vox; 2020 [cited 2020Apr11]. Available from: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/3/24/21191329/this-week-in-tiktok-quarantine-hair-experiments
Longo J. Should I, a Gay Man in Self-Quarantine, Crisis-Bleach My Hair? [Internet]. MEL Magazine. 2020 [cited 2020Apr11]. Available from: https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/gay-bleach-blond-hair-crisis-quarantine
Pitts V. Visibly Queer: Body Technologies and Sexual Politics. In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan; 2003. p. 87–119.
Other Thoughts
Go to #quarantinehair on TikTok to see what some people have tried out.
Personally the first day of quarantine, I cut five inches off of my hair.
My best friend is dyeing half her hair pink tomorrow. A friend in LA now has a purple mullet. I watched her do it on Facetime. It was exquisite.
The Body and Manipulation 