For 8yrs, my hair was a bright, flaming red. I dyed it red to set fire to my rage and find my power. But what good was the power of a crown of flames, during a pandemic, when I am at home all the time? How to signal power now? I shaved it all off. feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-ki…
The longer lockdown became, the shorter my hair had to be. I knew that, every time I looked into the mirror. But I was terrified. I hate being scared of anything. Always, whatever scares me the most, in just the thinking about doing it, is what I need to do the most. 📷 @rerutled 
What was I scared of? Fuck that shit. I refuse to be scared! From a very early age, my hair has been the site of a dance between disobedience and independence. My mum cut my hair very short when I was about 3yo.
When I moved to London in 1975 at the age of 7, the first time I went downstairs to play with the other children, they asked me if I was a boy or a girl. My English wasn’t so good and I ran back home.
What does a girl look like?
What does a girl look like?
Every time I publicly dared myself to shave my hair off, I was privately daring myself to look ugly in the eye and see who would blink first. When I was 13 an aunt said I was so ugly my parents would have to pay someone to marry me. What does ugly look like?
What does a girl look like? Who taught me to be a girl? If pretty is the root of obedience, then ugly surely equals disobedience & independence squared. And at the heart of that equation sits femininity on a 3legged stool of capitalism, racism & misogyny feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-ki…
And then Sekhmet found me and told me to stand in my power. She found me at my most vulnerable and helped me to weaponize femininity and render my hair the site of excavation and reinvention.
There are more statues built of Sekhmet than any other ancient Egyptian god or goddess. She burned a path for me to rediscover Hatshepsut - Egypt’s woman-god-king who is now being seen through a gender-bending lens that holds out the promise of power of a different kind.
Why did it take me so long to learn that Hatshepsut - who for more than 20 years was the most powerful person in the ancient world - alternated pronouns? She/he/they. Are you a girl? Are you a boy? The King Herself theblackprintau.com/article/2019/0…
Sekhmet told me “Stand in your power” - she is the warrior and the healer; she is Disobedience - and Hatshepsut showed me how - she is the King Herself who walked away from gender; she is Independence. notchesblog.com/2017/04/11/egy…
Once upon a time there was a girl who was told she was ugly and she believed it. And she could not free herself from that yoke until she understood that “ugly” was the “too much”: those who talked too much, those who would not hide, those who were asked “Are you a boy or a girl?”
Ugly is not about aesthetics but about power. I was going to disarm and dismantle that weapon and refurbish it. I stood in the lightness and liberation of my scalp,running my hand across it, soft and tough at once, like the new skin after a scab peels away feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-ki…
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