A Hairdresser in the Family: Mothering as a Kind of Drawing on the Body

This multidisciplinary fusion of creative writing, drawings, family documents and analysis, explores my 1960s childhood experience of being a sentient canvas for my hairdresser-mother’s self-expression. The piece is part of a larger, ongoing research experiment on the terrain of trauma studies, for which I undertake ‘freefall escapades’ (harnessing iterative, truth-seeking, neurodivergent hypertextuality) into my embodied journey growing up female in the racialised, post-WW2 British family. This experiment aims to engage with the forces of social production at work and at play, in minds and in bodies, by locating autotheoretical subjectivity not just within a socio-historical context but within a structural Marxist historical materialist analysis. The imperatives behind my larger experiment are twofold. Firstly, to challenge politically engaged feminist, autoethnographic, family-narrative/photography, new materialist, and trauma theory – where the question of classis habitually reduced to an aspect of intersectional identity expressed through culture, language, materiality, and perceived privilege. Secondly, as a publicly and socially engaged writer, artist, activist and trade unionist, to use creativity to expand Marxist ideas on the family as an adaptive capitalist social institution beyond the critical disciplines of political economy and social history. My aim is to illuminate the class-based nature of changing social relationships in connection with industrial and technological development in the forces of production. For this specific essay, I offer interpretations of how my mother pulled, twisted, curled, lacquered, permed and pinned my baby-hair as an act of social alienation and performance on a political stage within the inflamed post-WW2 British economy. In doing so, I also navigate the ethical and political hazards of bringing together class-based Marxist analysis with subjective experience and family memory – in doing so, tending to the manifestation of alienation in those who are not conscious of being alienated, and the imperative to do no harm. All imagery is by me, unless specified otherwise.