Keywords

Black Women, Natural Hair, Workplace, White Space, Black Feminism, Gendered Racism

Abstract

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.

Completion Date

2024

Semester

Spring

Committee Chair

Armato, Michael

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Sociology

Degree Program

Sociology

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

DP0028309

URL

https://purls.library.ucf.edu/go/DP0028309

Language

English

Rights

In copyright

Release Date

May 2029

Length of Campus-only Access

5 years

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Campus-only Access)

Campus Location

Orlando (Main) Campus

Accessibility Status

Meets minimum standards for ETDs/HUTs

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Restricted to the UCF community until May 2029; it will then be open access.

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