Hairography

The Fall term has not yet begun for me and I've been scrambling to finish my syllabus. Here's how I've been doing my hair most days:
I really like my hair--it's dark and wavy and generally looks good even when I don't do much to it. It tends to photograph either darker or lighter than it actually is and in the sun it looks a bit auburn. It suits me. But it also can convey the sort of en deshabille look that Yeats pathetically obsessed over in Maud Gonne for years. Which is not exactly tantamount to academic authority:
There is a lot of talk about how we dress/accessorize differently for teaching or conference-ing than we do for parties, dates, dinner, etc. But I also tend to treat my hair differently. When I'm in the classroom I want it to look tidy, organized, and professional. For that reason I tend to straighten my hair or pull it back/up. Outside of the classroom it can often be found in the messy knot (refer to Figure 1) or down with a scarf wrapped around it. And the other night it looked fantastic when I fastened a massive hair pin to it on a warm and rainy evening when Shakespeare's Masculine Ending and I went to a bar for a friend's birthday.
1. Hair Pin - Anthro/gifted
2. Earrings - Anthro/gifted







Obviously, the hair pin is not appropriate for teaching, but it made me really happy to attach it to my humidified hair and wear out for drinks.

I have an appointment to get my hair cut on Wednesday and I'm thinking about what I want to do. It's below my shoulders now and I'd like to grow it even longer. I am currently a childless, dissertating woman in her late-20s, but I also realize that those days are numbered and I might not have the opportunity to have long, Mad-Woman-In-The-Attic-cum-granola-girl hair in the relatively near future. But I also know that I do look older and more professional when it's at my shoulders. If I cut it, not only will I spend less time styling it this fall, but it also means I could wear it down on those first few weeks of the term, you know those weeks when we don our spectacles, blacks, and blazers.

I am not just concerned about the discourse of long, wavy hair--that it conveys youth and carefree-ness--but that in the classroom long, wavy hair makes me look more like one of my students and I really do think that my students desire that their instructors set themselves apart from them. I think difference is one of the major ways that authority gets conveyed (LHdM: Do any of your female students have hair as short as yours?). Last week, Prof E-Jo at In Professorial Fashion wondered about projecting authority to graduate students. In my experience, the performance of authority is much more important to undergraduate students than it is to graduate students--in fact, they seem to desire it more.

By the way, here's the rest of the non-academic outfit that I wore on rainy, humid night:
1. Top - Bordeaux/Anthro
2. Skirt - H & M
3. Scarf - Street vendor in Santiago, Spain
4. Umbrella - FishsEddy, New York

* Note on the blazon-like photos: I'm a little camera shy and am still trying to figure out how comfortable I feel with presenting the entirety of me to the interwebs. For now I'm going to be a bad Early Modern feminist and continue to photographically catalog my parts instead of the whole.