Despite the guidance provided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's manual, which encourages workplaces to create policies that respect racial hair texture differences, hair-based discrimination still exists in workplace appearance policies. When Black women contest this discrimination in courts, presiding judges dismiss their racial claims by decoupling hair from the body as a racial signifier and reducing it to an aesthetic choice. While court decisions and workplace policies contend that Black women's hair's mutability separates it from immutable bodily racial markers, the words of Black women tell a different story. This study uses Black feminism qualitative inquiry to understand the meaning of natural hair and hairstyles from Black women themselves through semi-structured interviews of 16 Black women professionals who wear natural hair and hairstyles in the workplace. Results show that Black women's workplace experiences challenge the courts' assumption of Black women's hair as solely an aesthetic choice. By listening to Black women, we find that choosing to wear natural hair and hairstyles in the workplace is an embodied experience, one that makes their Black and female bodies hypervisible in white space and illuminates the systems of oppression at work within workplace appearance policies and practices that impact Black women's professional success. This study illustrates that white institutional spaces are not only racialized but gendered; that Black women have developed a strategy to combat conformity and embrace authenticity in the workplace, which I call presentability politics; and that using hair as a conduit, Black women practice Black feminist love ethic to reflect a love for self while welcoming others to also express themselves freely in the workplace.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ucf.edu/oai:stars.library.ucf.edu:etd2023-1185 |
| Date | 01 January 2024 |
| Creators | Daye, Shameika D |
| Publisher | STARS |
| Source Sets | University of Central Florida |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024 |
| Rights | In copyright |
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