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It is likely that even during the eighteenth century Charles II's sporting a wig made from the pubic hair of his favorite mistress would have raised an eyebrow or two. But, from our twenty-first-century point of view, those quizzical eyebrows may themselves have been rather curious; for during the eighteenth century the practice of shaving one's eyebrows and replacing them with mousefur wigs was still current. Hair, both natural and artificial, human or otherwise, always serves to communicate, but these particular hair extensions remind one that it is imperative to take each cultural moment on its own terms.
Over the past two decades scholars have focused great attention on the body as a site for the cultural production and staging of the self. The body has been viewed as a key medium for the communication of social meanings, the expression of erotic desire, and the enunciation of symbolic values. Cosmetic and sartorial practices, fashionable accessories, and corporeal prostheses-such as beauty spots, tattoos, feathers, and fans-have been discussed as articulating the body in terms of gender, generation, class, ethnicity, and "race." More often than not studies of eighteenth-century culture have overlooked or underemphasized the importance of hair. To eighteenth-century individuals, however, hair was of great moment, both in life and in representation.1
Emerging from the flesh and thus both of, and without the body-at once corporeal and a mere lifeless extension-hair occupies an extraordinary position, mediating between the natural and the cultural. It prompts one to scrutinize and question those boundaries defining seifand other, subject and object, life and death. It is perhaps on account of this liminality that hair has so often been thought of as containing the essence of individuality and personhood; a lock of hair can serve as a synecdoche for the body whence it came, possessing in the eye, or rather fingers, of the beholder stronger representational power than, for example, a painted portrait. It is for this reason not surprising that the growing, grooming, cutting, shaving or losing of hair-on the body and head-were often associated with transformative life experiences, with rites and rituals, and with the marking of cultural difference.
Indeed, the particular urgency of hair in eighteenth-century culture is, to my thinking, related to fundamental notions of sexual, national,...