“Don’t Bring Your Feminism Here!”: The African Hair Braiding Salon As A Rhetorically Charged Space For Feminist Activism

This project extends scholarship on Black beauty and hair care spaces in the US as rhetorically charged for various forms of activism. It specifically explores the nature of work, conversations and feminist ways of being among a group of braiders working together in an African hair braiding salon to legitimize the African hair braiding salon as a site with unique contributions to this body of work. Grounded in Feminist Geo-criticism and Conversational Rhetoric, the study seeks to make contributions that are relevant to the field of Rhetoric and more specifically the sub-field of feminist rhetorics, African and non-Western feminist rhetorics, Transnational feminism and gendered perspectives on immigration. The project seeks to answer calls pushing for more inclusion in our recovery of women's voices and their contributions to rhetorical theory. Ultimately, it seeks to determine how else we could extend African feminist activism into certain demographics offline and to challenge the common perception that feminism is "un-African." To which this study found through a series of interviews with braiders in a salon that African women in informal settings construct their own feminist identities and move towards a new feminist ethos where they embrace feminism with no threat to their religious identities as good Christian wives. This is useful for theorizing around the conditions that facilitate the sort of learning and unlearning that goes on in the space, the models of learning that contribute to this process, and the forms of knowledge-mediation that occurs to advance feminist activist work on the continent and in African spaces abroad.