The politics of hair: girls, secularism and (not) the veil in Mustang and Other recent French films

Abstract

This article explores art cinema's association of long, straight, shimmering hair with an idealized white, secular, agentic version of girlhood in Deniz Ergüven's Mustang (2015). With reference to girlhood studies and current debates in France about the politics of hair concealment and display, the essay argues for the central role played by the ‘politics of hair’ in thinking through the complex role of women and girls in a postsecular world. The girl's material body, and especially her hair, is made to support a binary approach toward questions of religion and modernity, rendering her the prime figure through which the relation between Islam and the West, tradition and modernity, patriarchy and feminism is articulated. </jats:p>