Feminist New Materialism

This paper is going to analyse the ways media and bodies interact and how their relation can be understood from a feminist new materialist perspective. To help to make sense of the theories which will be exposed, I will introduce a case study: a marketing campaign by the haircare brand Pantene focusing on trans women and gender non-conforming people to promote The Dresscode Project, an initiative aimed to educate hairstylists to approach LGBTQ+ customers. In the last few years, many beauty brands opted for progressive and liberal advertising campaigns which would ensure them the support of black women, elderly women and other women which not represent the normative standard of beauty – Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty launched in 2004 or Always’ Like a Girl in 2004 to name a few notorious ones. Pantene was not the first campaign celebrating LGBTQ+ culture: in early 2019, Sephora launched the campaign We Belong to Something Beautiful, featuring activists and influencers such as Fatima Jamal and Hunter Schafer doing their make-ups, dancing or kissing. As much as this advert is visually appealing, without any text or the knowledge of who these people are it is difficult to understand that the people in the video are trans or gender non-conforming. This is one of the reasons why Pantene’s advert, which highlights interviews quotes from the cast, is a more suitable alternative for this type of analysis. In fact, an analysis of Pantene’s campaign under a feminist new materialist approach can be useful to make sense of relations between bodies and media. The complexity of this case study provides some interesting insights on different levels: not only will I discuss how women’s bodies are portraited in a specific media platform, but I will focus on transgender and gender non-conforming bodies, bodies that change(d), transform(ed) and, as I will analyse below, are in constant process of becoming. 

Through this example, I will explore some main theories that are central to a feminist new materialist approach, such as how matter needs to be taken into consideration while examining how bodies are constituted (‘Acknowledging the Material’), where bodies stand in relation to their surroundings and environment (‘Bodies and the Environment’) and finally how can the relation between bodies and media be understood through the concept of becoming (‘Becoming though Images’). 

‘As human beings we inhabit an ineluctably material world. … In light of this massive materiality, how could we be anything other than materialist?’ 

– Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010: 1) 

Opening the introduction of New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010), Diana Coole and Samantha Frost wonder how materiality could be excluded from the equation in philosophical and sociology studies for such a long time. What they call a poststructuralist ‘allergy to “the real”’ – with no intention of discredit discursive or linguistic research – translated into a neglect of the empirical work that is necessary to investigate material structure and processes. This critic was embraced by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman in their introduction of Material Feminisms: even though postmodernists aimed to reject all dichotomies, they seem to embrace the duality of both language and reality arguing that ‘real/material is entirely constituted by language’ and therefore ‘what we call the real is a product of language and has its reality only in language’ (2008: 2). According to Susan Bordo, ‘[w]hen bodies are made into mere products of social discourse, they remain bodies in name only’ (2003: 35, emphasis in original): the materiality of the body and the fact that everything we experience is embodied are forgotten, the body becomes mere matter which is controlled by the mind. Feminist scholars’ departure from materiality can be understood as the fear of a reinforcement of the male-mind/female-body duality and, as suggested by Frost, they believe that ‘to talk of matter … is to occlude these manifold and historically specific constituents of objects and embodiment, to obscure or even perpetuate the power relations that both make possible and produce facts, things, and subjectivities’ (2011: 75). However, ‘the more feminist theories distance themselves from “nature”, the more that very “nature” is implicitly or explicitly reconfirmed as the treacherous quicksand of misogyny’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 4). 

Therefore, a new wave of feminist materialists spread in Academia over the last two decades, initiating a new methodology for critical analysis. If post-modernists granted too much power to discourse and language (Barad 2003), the attention needs to be brought back to matter and the materiality of the body. As clearly explained by Frost, new materialists ‘consider matter or the body not only as they are formed by the forces of language, culture, and politics but also as they are formative’, suggesting that matter has its own ‘peculiar and distinctive kind of agency’ which is independent of human intentionality (2011: 70). This is the aim of feminist materialists: to shift the critical analysis from a methodology which accounts for a unidirectional agency – human shaping and giving meaning to objects – to one in which all bodies and objects have agency which has a reciprocal effect on each other. New materialists ‘seek … to challenge the very notion that matter is passive and unthinking, to undo the opposition between reason and passions, and to question the distinction between self and world that positions individuals as separate from yet in relation to the contexts of their actions’ (Frost 2011: 72 referring to the work of Wilson 1998 and Brennan 2004). Adopting this short overview of new feminist materialist theory as a lens for the following analysis, I will examine the relation between media and bodies through the case study of the recently published campaign on trans and gender non-conforming people by Pantene. 

In November 2019, Pantene released two videos on YouTube to announce their partnership with The Dresscode Project, an initiative started in 2017 by hairstylist Kristin Rankin to create Gender Affirming salons for LGBTQ+ people and provide training to hairstylists to help them to avoid the mistake of misgendering trans or gender non-conforming people. Her mission was supported by Pantene with the Power of Hair campaign accompanied by the hashtag #hairhasnogender. Pantene x The Dresscode Project Group Film (Pantene UK 2019a, fig. 1) is a two-minute video which features interviews with trans women and gender non-conforming people describing their relationship with their hair, including writer Paris Lees and performer Travis Alabanza. 

Hair is important for many people; when these people are transgender or gender non-conforming, hair becomes a crucial part of their identity: ‘My relationship with my hair is the most significant relationship I’ve ever had. … I think, particularly as a transgender woman, hair is such an important signifier of identity’, says Paris Lee (Pantene UK 2019d). The materiality of the hair has an essential role in the constitution of a body. From this perspective, one can say that hair has its own agency, as not only it is shaped by human agency but it also shapes a person’s identity. Of course, this is mediated by other cultural factors such as education, race, class, geographical provenance and representation in the media; I will expand on this point in the section ‘Becoming through Images’. First, I will focus on the process of embodiment which characterises this example, and how this can demonstrate the reliability of a feminist new materialist approach to the study of bodies and media. ‘Finding my identity was finding how I want people to see me, and hair is such a big part of that’, explains Alabanza, ‘and I think, now I’m starting my journey with my hair’ (Pantene UK 2019a, 0:53). In reaction to Alabanza’s quote, trans woman Alice E. Martin (Righini 2020) firmly agrees: ‘I think hair to trans people is so important because it frames every part of your body. When people have long hair, they associate them with being a girl. Like [Alice’s friend], her whole life she had long hair because from behind people would mistake her for a man, because she is quite big’. The risk of being misgendered is one of the reasons why trans people – and with this, I am not generalising to all trans people – try to ‘pass’ and conform with beauty standards assigned to the gender they identify with. According to the research commissioned by Pantene and carried out by Ketchum Research and Opinion Matters over 206 people (P&G 2019), 96% of transgender people agree that hair is crucial for their gender representation. However, the same survey indicates that misgendering in hair salons happens to 93% of transgender people in the UK, generating discomfort and anxiety in communicating the preferred hairstyle. Therefore, if from a poststructuralist perspective this reinforcement of the masculine/feminine dichotomy should be frowned upon – resulting perhaps in a transphobic analysis – from a feminist new materialist view the acknowledgement of the entanglement of materiality and culture can demonstrate the need for such identification and thus avoid wrongful judgement. 

The first video is followed by the Pantene x The Dresscode Project Documentary, which features an interview with Kristin Rankin and a few customers of her salon in Toronto. She explains that she believes misgendering happens because both hair stylists and clients were always told that there are haircuts suitable for women and haircuts suitable for men. In 2017, she started The Dresscode Project to educate hairstylists and support transgender and gender non-conforming customers. Her mission is to make sure that when ‘a transgender person … walk into any salon, anywhere in the world [they do not have to] worry about having to pick a men’s or a woman’s cut’ (Pantene UK 2019b, 2:26). The description of the documentary video states that the Pantene and The Dresscode Project partnership is a Europe wide initiative ‘part of the brand’s commitment to exploring the social, psychological and emotional power of hair and its impact on personal identity, self-esteem and confidence’ (ibid). 

Pantene’s campaign helped to establish the importance of the materiality of hair in gender affirmation, but this is not the only case in which hair is fundamental for one’s identity. In describing the struggles of doing her adopted black daughter’s hair as a white woman, Bordo (2008) highlights the issue around racist aesthetics. She reflected on the cultural differences in haircare for white women and black women and when her five-year-old daughter Cassie was recommended by a black hairstylist to have her hair straightened, she realised how some black women adopt white beauty standards: ‘[h]aving straight hair has achieved a trans-racial beauty status almost as important as not being fat. It pains me when Cassie tells me she hates her curls (as she calls them). But how could she not … ?’ (2008: 404), she wondered in light of all the media representation of beautiful black women with sleek, silky, straight hair. Bordo provides another example in a different cultural setting of how hair – and its materiality – cannot be seen as an object without an agency. On the contrary, the analysed examples show how hair has its own meaning, its own cultural background, which is in constant conversation and exchange with human agency but is also independent of it. 

As Barad argued in the interview with Dolphijn and van der Tuin, ‘[m]atter itself is not a substrate or a medium for the flow of desire. Materiality itself is always already a desiring dynamism, a reiterative reconfiguring, energized and energizing, enlivened and enlivening’ (2012: 59), as I will elaborate in the section ‘Becoming through Images’. Thus, ‘[h]ow matter makes itself felt’ becomes a feminist project as ‘feeling, desiring and experiencing are not singular characteristics or capacities of human consciousness. Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers’ (ibid). Therefore, feminist scholars need to re-consider their approach to matter and acknowledge the weight that materiality carries, together in its entanglement with culture, in the shaping of bodies and the environment. 

‘Imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from “the environment”.’ 

– Stacy Alaimo (2010: 2) 

The common conception of matter as inert and non-agentic is a consequence of Descartes theory according to which material objects are identifiable and concrete and they move only under the effect of external agentic forces (Barad 2003, Colebrook in Alaimo and Hekman 2008, Coole and Frost 2010). While the cogito ergo sum – ‘I think therefore I am’ – supported post-structuralists in focusing on an ontological level rather than on a material one, feminist new materialists refuse to accept this definition of matter, ‘[f]or materiality is always something more than “mere” matter’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 9). Feminist new materialists can help to make sense of how bodies are strictly linked with the environment they inhabit. Defining materiality as ‘an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable’ (ibid) gives the option of repositioning human subjectivity into a different level, one that cannot be at the centre anymore but rather intertwined, constantly being affected and affecting its surroundings or, in other words, what we simply call ‘the environment’ as explained by Stacy Alaimo (2010). Indeed, if we consider human corporeality on Alaimo’s terms, as ‘trans corporeality’, we are not able to separate it from the environment, as this becomes ‘the very substance of ourselves’ (ibid: 4). In relation to disability studies, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson reminds us that, since conception, all bodies are fabricated by their envir