Experience

Abstract

AbstractFor the ponytail to evoke meaningful experience, its materiality must be enmeshed in culture. Its material texture—touch and sight—must hold public culture in ways that allow us to feel hair as an iconic source that lives and moves through health, practicalities, and gendered expectations. Having established a sociological idea of movement embodied in the aesthetics of sports, I now show how body movements evoke the moral depth of health, practicalities, and gendered expectations, as the ponytail swings in athletic endeavors. In this final analytic chapter, I draw on the previous chapters to reveal how sports are shaped by and shape social life as the woman athlete’s movements are imbued with broadly available folklore, codes of democratization, and myth, which make the ponytail an icon of progress. We see how the coded experience of sports snaps into alignment to yield a ponytailed experience of sports.