I U A E S The Re-invention of Traditions in the Middle East

ABSTRACT 

Utilizing a critical posthumanist¹ and anti-colonial lens on the metaphors of naturecultures² of medical professionals around hair transplantation, we aim to disclose the medico-colonial, technological imaginations³ around the contested bios that is hair. Previous studies on hair and masculinities have shown that men’s bodies are socio-technically constructed,⁴ culturally loaded and politically contested.⁵ However, bodies are relational becomings⁶ at the border of which hair is to be found.⁷ Favoring “cartography rather than classification”⁸ we scrutinize how medical jurisdiction is intertwined with a colonizing discourse, and how these metaphors reveal the medical urge to tame the hair and categorize men’s bodies through hair transplantation in this particular technoculture. Based on semi-structured interviews with medical professionals and participant observations in a hair transplant clinic in Turkey, we utilize the cartography approach in a double sense; firstly, as purpose-oriented communication tools and dispositifes⁹ in understanding the Körpereigensinn(self-will of the body),¹⁰ and secondly, as embedded in "material power formations".¹¹ The medical jurisdiction not only diagnoses and intervenes into the bodies of balding men, but also stereotypes them through its classifications, i.e., curly hair as peculiar to black bodies. Although these metaphors facilitate an alternative communication throughout the entire procedure for medical professionals, such essentialist approach, through erasing individual differences, they help to define the re-constructed masculinity as re-naturalized bodies and not as what it is: socio-bio-technically constructed.

A drawing of a participant explaining hair transplantation process. Image taken from hairyless.hypotheses.org.

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