Published in 2000
197 pages
Ingrid Banks is Associate Professor of Black Studies at University of California Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Banks’ main research and teaching areas are within African American Studies and include race, gender, and culture. Her research and teaching areas also examine beauty culture, black popular culture, black feminist theory, politics of the body, critical race theory, and ethnographic methods. She is the author of Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness (New York University Press, 2000). Dr. Banks’ publications appear in Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Feminist Teacher, Work and Occupations, Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, Feminist Frontiers (Sixth Edition), The Chronicle of Higher Education, and New York Newsday.
What is this book about?
Drawing on interviews with over 50 women, from teens to seniors, Hair Matters is the first book on the politics of Black hair to be based on substantive, ethnographically informed research. Focusing on the everyday discussions that Black women have among themselves and about themselves, Ingrid Banks analyzes how talking about hair reveals Black women’s ideas about race, gender, sexuality, beauty, and power. Ultimately, what emerges is a survey of Black women’s consciousness within both their own communities and mainstream culture at large.
