HAIR offers a compelling new perspective on the everyday politics of beauty, religion, and identity by placing the under-researched topic of Muslim women’s head hair - rather than the headscarf - at the center of analysis. Focusing on Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, the Starting Grant HAIR explores how women feel and express themselves about their bodies as they navigate changing socio-religious expectations.
What makes HAIR unique is its interdisciplinary and innovative blended methodology. The project brings together Islamic studies, social anthropology, and the anthropology of emotions to explore the plurality of beauty practices in relation to understandings of religiosity and identity. It combines fieldwork, digital ethnography, and literary analysis to comparatively examine how women experience, share and talk about their intimate selves – both online and offline.
By foregrounding gendered body politics and the emotional and cultural dimensions of beauty, HAIR challenges dominant narratives and offers new ways of understanding rapidly changing societies. It opens up fresh perspectives on the entanglements of the body, beauty, and belief in diverse Muslim contexts. The project will produce scholarly publications and an online exhibition that rethink how concepts of gendered beauty and religious lifeworlds are constructed and re-imagined in globalised contexts.