"If My Husband Calls I'm Not Here": the beauty parlor as real and representational female space.

 
  You have no ease of manner. Why? Because you're never sure about your 
  personal appearance. When a girl feels that she's perfectly groomed 
  and dressed, she can forget that part of her. That's charm. The more 
  parts of yourself you can afford to forget, the more charm you have. 
  --F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," 1959 
 
  What makes a woman beautiful? Is it her eyes? Is it her skin? Her 
  hair? Or, is it her sass? It's all that. And we make it all happen 
  here, at the beauty shop. And I'm not just talking about making you 
  look fly. In here we share everything. Nothing's off limits: family, 
  gossip, money, and especially men. Trust me. We got ways of making you 
  talk. So ask yourself. Are you ready to walk through these doors? Are 
  you ready to hear what I hear? 
  --Gina (Queen Latifah), trailer for Beauty Shop, MGM, 2005 

As UNISEX SALONS REPLACE beauty parlors, as big box retailers oust department stores, something, arguably, is lost to women. Both beauty parlors and department stores, sites of female social, economic, and cultural participation, serve as key locations of women's gendered practices, their objectification of self, their performance not only of becoming but of being "female." It is easy to see the disciplinary power of such sites, the degree to which they impose limited definitions and practices on women. But women's participation in bodily adornment through hairstyle or dress is complicated, as Bernice's cousin argues in the short story quoted above. In a world in which the female is defined by the body, attention to some aspects of the body and its beautification can serve, paradoxically, as a way to move beyond those demands, to secure personal space in which considerations other than beauty might also emerge. Likewise, female spaces, as Gina declares her salon to be in the recent film, Beauty Shop, provide challenges as well as directives to women who live their lives in the shadow of such disciplinary scripts. These sites also arguably provide a potential "safe space" in a continuum of female-only spaces. In beauty parlors, women not only accommodate to or resist male-defined femininity, they also actively create beauty culture on their own terms.

Although beauty parlors did not originate as female-only places in which to interrogate the rituals and practices of beauty or other oppressive regimes, they arguably have the potential to serve as spaces in which pleasure and resistance coincide with oppression. Beauty shops in Willi Coleman's poetic exploration, "Among the Things That Use to Be," served black women in the pre-Black Power era as places where "lots more got taken care of than hair." In Coleman's telling, beauty shops provided a space for mulling over "our mutual discontent" and "could have been a hell-of-a-place to ferment a revolution." (1) This essay explores the ways in which beauty parlors are represented in contemporary cinema as fulfilling a similar anticipatory role. In films directed at women, these sites of female activity serve to engender positive female identity, challenge rather than simply reinforce negative notions of female beauty, and sometimes promote solidarity across differences of class, race, and age. On screen, beauty parlors serve as female spaces of limitation, but also of potentiality and of promise.

This essay also complicates the on-screen depiction of the beauty shop by inviting in and connecting with the cinematic, the real, and the historical neighborhood beauty parlor. The cinematic beauty parlor provides viewers with what film enables: "the reimagined, reinvented version of the real." (2) The beauty parlor becomes a space in which viewers can imagine for themselves a corner of resistance, a place in which to enact a feminist fantasy of personal growth and sisterly solidarity. Arguably, the progressive nature of these on-screen beauty parlors provides viewers with alternative ways of imagining relationships women have with themselves and others. By ignoring or negating the more complicated nature of beauty culture and of socially constructed differences among women, however, these "safe spaces" on film obscure power relations within gendered beauty culture and practice. Recent ethnographic scholarship on beauty parlor workers, for example, explores the ways in which the shared gender of women in salons is mitigated in significant ways by differences and dynamics of race and class between service providers and their clients. (3) If film viewers "cannot live social reality outside of the cultural forms through which we make sense of it," can they enact the cinematic promises of beauty culture given the complicated nature of social reality? (4)

COMBING MEMORIES: THE BEAUTY SHOP