The luscious locks of lust: Hair and the construction of gender in Egypt from clement to the Fāṭimids

This article examines the tensions between normative discourses on gender and the hair on top of the head, and actual practices in Egypt from the late Roman to the Fāṭimid period. Early Church Fathers preached a clear gender binary, naturalised through oppositions in hair, but reality was often more fickle. Whereas women’s hair was discursively connected to immorality, “big hair” also embodied femininity and attractiveness. Long and well-groomed hair was used to accuse men of effeminacy, but hair fashions grew steadily longer in the Byzantine period. Normative views on the length and grooming of male hair were markedly different under Islam, however. Gendered boundaries shifted, as the turban also blurred the existing association between large headdresses and women. In addition to the opposition of male versus female, two categories are discussed that defied the gender binary: wayward ascetics, who denied their worldly gender through hair, and gender-bending entertainers, from pretty long-haired boy servants to slave girls dressed and coiffed as adolescent boys.