Kristin Denise Rowe (“Kris”), Ph.D. is a scholar of Black hair and beauty culture, body politics, feminism(s), and popular culture.

Her forthcoming book project is titled: “It’s the Feeling I Wear: Black Women, Natural Hair, and New Media (Re)Negotiations of Beauty. This book is an original scholarly analysis of narratives and depictions of Black women’s natural hair in 21st-century art, social media, and popular culture. It is currently under contract with the University of North Carolina Press, and its scholarly promise has merited a Institute for Citizens & Scholars fellowship, funded by the Mellon Foundation.

The manuscript is concerned with the contemporary natural hair movement, a movement of the last two decades in which Black women have been embracing their natural hair, building community around it, sharing ideas and techniques on how to care for and style it, creating hair products and brands, representing their hair and themselves on and via social and other media, and also contesting various hierarchies and exclusions within the movement itself. Kris offers visual and discursive analyses of a number of select cases and sites, in different kinds of media and genres of content—from mainstream television series, to film, to music and music videos, to blogs and other digital media content.

Centering Black women’s voices, feelings, self-representations and practices, the aim of the work is to understand the racialized body politics of the natural hair movement, including how Black women view, experience and aim to attach positive values and affects to their hair in the face of dominant Eurocentric beauty standards, and how their hair practices can be understood as complex sites of the ongoing formation and expression of their agency and subjectivity.

This project is not simply about hair, and it is not interested in cataloging the artistry in hairstyles, hair’s appearance, or the cultural capital of hair within communities. Others before have done this important work. Ultimately, the project uses hair as a vehicle for recovering the agency and interiority within Black women’s uses of and narratives about their bodies, in a cultural landscape that constantly tries to tell them who and what they are.

The book is among the first of its kind to explore art and popular culture representations of natural hair in new media within the context of the current natural hair movement.  Additionally, it is the first scholarly project to explore the phenomenon from a cultural studies and American Studies perspective. The project addresses a pathbreaking and understudied topic, taking up Black hair and beauty culture in the 21st century.

Kris has also published work on Black hair, beauty politics, Black girlhood, Black sexual politics, and (most recently) the concepts of body neutrality vs. body positivity in relationship to Black women and femmes.

Interested in collaboration, consultation, or bringing her to speak? Contact Kris here.

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS:

Rowe, Kristin Denise. “Embodied Absence: Black Womanhood, Beauty, and Exploring “Body Neutrality.” Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty Special Issue: “Black Beauty: Perspectives, Views and Representations” (Forthcoming, TBA).

Rowe, Kristin Denise. “‘Unmanageable’: Exploring Black Girlhood, Storytelling, and Ideas of Beauty.” Open Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, Issue 1 (October 2022): https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2022-0160

Rowe, Kristin Denise. “Rooted: On Black Women, Beauty, Hair, and Embodiment” in The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics Ed. By Maxine Leeds Craig (Routledge, 2021)

Rowe, Kristin Denise. Beyond “Becky with the Good Hair’: Hair, Beauty, and Interiority in Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s ‘Sorry.” eds. Baade. C, Smith, M., and McGee, K. Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times (Wesleyan University Press, 2021).

Rowe, Kristin Denise. “Nothing Else Mattered After That Wig Came Off’: Black Women, Hair, and Scenes of Interiority.” Journal of American Culture, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Spring 2019): 21-36: https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12971 - Top Downloaded Paper 2018-2019, Journal of American Culture, Wiley Publishing Company.

Rowe, Kristin Denise. “Beyond ‘Good Hair’: Negotiating Hair Politics Through African American Language.” Women and Language, Vol. 42, No. 1 (May 2019) doi: 10.34036/WL.2019.004 - Inaugural Article of the Year Award (2019), Women and Language, Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG), Miami University.

Randolph, Antonia, Holly Swan, and Kristin Denise Rowe. “That $hit Ain’t Gangsta’: Symbolic Boundary Making in an Online Urban Gossip Community.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 47, No. 2 (2018): 609-639 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241617716744