Introduction: Imagining the Ponytail

Abstract

AbstractYou see it everywhere—the ponytail hairstyle. Before the influencers Kim Kardashian West and Kylie Jenner, there were Barbie dolls and the movie stars Sandra Dee and Brigitte Bardot, and popstars Madonna and Beyoncé. Tennis star Serena Williams often sports a ponytail, and among women World Cup soccer players, countless. In this introduction, I outline a theoretical approach with which to show how and why the ponytail has become the hallmark of the female athlete and a total social phenomenon that answers to the experiential totality of modernity. I distinguish my approach from that of critical theorists who often argue that gender and femininities are all about social power relations and female subordination. Instead, I draw on multiple cultural theories about hair, bodies, and icons to argue that a total social fact like the ponytail is only iconic, imitated, and useful if it is polyvocal. A cultural sociology shows how the ponytail, as a material and corporal object, is imbued with codes, narratives, and myths that allow its wearers to access public culture and social inequalities in deeply personal, even existential ways.