Call for papers: Cultivating and Contesting the Meaning of Male Hair in Religious Traditions

Grateful to the Oxford University Byzantine Society for this notice. In brief:

CfP: Cultivating and Contesting the Meaning of Male Hair in Religious Traditions

https://www.europeanacademyofreligion.org/euare2023

Hair is a bodily component that is both readily changeable and renewable as well as highly visible and confronting. Because of this, hair has often developed as a potent site of contested meaning, with maintenance of particular styles or follicular locations freighted with both religious and gendered connotations. How to grow, shave, or groom hair are daily choices that can advertise religious affiliation and entwine with entire ontologies of belief. This panel explores the religious significance behind hair grooming choices and is open to papers which engage with a range of time periods and religions. The organisers are particularly interested in underlying emic arguments for why hair choices are legislated or encouraged, how internal justifications bend or shift between cultures, and how arguments about hair intersect other social constructs such as gender. Papers could also explore the use of particular arguments in different contexts and/or to legitimate or stigmatise different fashions. The panel’s primary focus is male hair grooming. Beards, moustaches, head hair, body hair, wigs and false hair, shaving, and tonsures are all of interest. In particular the panel organizers are eager to accept papers studies of religious manscaping in traditions other than historical Christianity. Proposals that address female hair will also be considered if they are able to develop arguments that sustain comparisons with male hair.

We are inviting abstract submissions for an open panel on "Cultivating and Contesting the Meaning of Male Hair in Religious Traditions" for the European Academy of Religion Sixth Annual Conference, 'Religion from the Inside', held at St. Andrew's University, Scotland, UK (June 19-23, 2023). Please send abstracts directly to the co-organizers Dawn LaValle Norman (dawn.lavallenorman@acu.edu.au) and Miles Pattenden (miles.pattenden@acu.edu.au).

 

Deadline for abstract submission is January 29, 2023.

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