Introduction: Imagining the Ponytail

Abstract

You see it everywhere—the ponytail hairstyle. Before the influencers Kim Kardashian West and Kylie Jenner, there were Barbie dolls and the movie stars Sandra Dee and Brigitte Bardot, and popstars Madonna and Beyoncé. Tennis star Serena Williams often sports a ponytail, and among women World Cup soccer players, countless. In this introduction, I outline a theoretical approach with which to show how and why the ponytail has become the hallmark of the female athlete and a total social phenomenon that answers to the experiential totality of modernity. I distinguish my approach from that of critical theorists who often argue that gender and femininities are all about social power relations and female subordination. Instead, I draw on multiple cultural theories about hair, bodies, and icons to argue that a total social fact like the ponytail is only iconic, imitated, and useful if it is polyvocal. A cultural sociology shows how the ponytail, as a material and corporal object, is imbued with codes, narratives, and myths that allow its wearers to access public culture and social inequalities in deeply personal, even existential ways.

You see them everywhere today (Fig. 1)—the ponytail hairstyle. There were the Barbie dolls and movie stars Sandra Dee and Brigitte Bardot, then popstars Madonna and Beyoncé before influencers Kim Kardashian West and Kylie Jenner. On the cover of Time’s 2018 special edition, “Women Changing the World,” Oprah Winfrey is wearing one, and the magazine’s cover announcing its 2020 most influential people displays rapper Megan Thee Stallion with her plaited ponytail sailing above her head like a bullwhip. Tennis star Serena Williams often sports a ponytail, and among women World Cup soccer players: countless. You see them in product advertisements, too, on the heads of women in their 20s that are kickboxing for sure. The ponytail is iconic, everywhere, and imbued with codes, narratives, and myth that allow its wearers to access public culture in deeply personal, even existential ways. Its half-life radiates with symbolism.

Fig. 1

Imagining the ponytail. (Picture credit: martin-dm via Getty Images)

What makes the ponytail iconic? A good place to look for answers may be in sports, where the ponytail is a hallmark of the female athlete. So, I began searching media for ponytails in Norwegian sports, but quickly discovered that the sportswoman’s style overlaps and intersects in intended and accidental ways with women’s hairstyles elsewhere. I expanded my search for the ponytail into all kinds of contexts in Norwegian media from 1945 to today. At a glance, hundreds of newspaper articles show the ponytail in many shapes and lengths, swinging side to side, a quite practical hairstyle that has endured historical shifts and spread through diverse settings. From a closer look, however, the ponytail emerges as an icon with the symbolic agency that journalists and interviewees have imbued it: a physical-cum-cultural aesthetics of movement. In this book, I explore these meanings to formulate a cultural-sociological explanation of the ponytailed (sports)woman.

As an icon, the ponytail is not simply a thing,¹ but a meaningful object that shapes social life through combinations of material and symbolic forces (Alexander, 2008, 2010b; Bartmanski & Alexander, 2012). It has qualities that connote something larger than itself—its dramatic, lasting public presence and the expression of sacred meanings that make it contagious and attractive (Sonnevend, 2012). Consider the clip-on platinum plaited ponytail that 1990s popstar Madonna wore, which recalled the femininity of earlier wearers, but which was dramatically adapted to female empowerment and copied by her many fans (Whitaker, 2018). But iconic experiences also can be intimate, personal, minuscule moments. The ponytail brushing the skin can awaken anticipations and memories of movements. As it distinguishes between those who wear it and those who do not, the ponytail can make someone feel socially powerful or powerless. A ponytail might consist of shafts of hair that are biologically dead, but myths, codes, and narratives animate it with iconic forces.

To be sure, no study of the ponytail, let alone hair, can be done without thinking through issues of gender. In December 2018, BBC News journalist Helen Whitaker declared the ponytail an iconic hairstyle for women—one with a “feminist undercurrent, implying ‘I’m busy, I’m working, and need my hair OFF my face.’” Yet such a declaration is not without irony. Comparing the sweet sense of relief that a woman derives from “taking down a scraped-back ponytail” to the what she experiences when taking off her heels or her bra the very “second [she] get[s] home,” Whitaker alludes to the ponytail’s incorporation into women’s fashion as part of women’s perceived public duty to be beautiful. Although she goes on to trace the ponytail’s historical recurrences in pop culture, Whitaker never explains how or why the hairdo came to materialize these fundamental feminist/anti-feminist paradoxes.

Critical theory provides two ways to look at the feminist/anti-feminist paradoxes of hair. Looking at the few studies that mention sportswomen’s hair, this is an obvious choice of perspective.² Undoubtedly, hair is linked with intersecting social power structures of gender, race, and class that reproduce social inequalities (Crenshaw, 1989). In the contemporary West, long, straight hair recreates the hegemony of a White heteronormative femininity (Prince, 2009; Simon, 2000; Tarlo, 2017; Weitz, 2004). Second, in today’s neoliberal world, marketers deceivingly use feminist narratives and images to sell women’s fashion as self-expressions of empowerment (McRobbie, 2009; Toffoletti, Francombe-Webb, & Thorpe, 2018). An up-to-date analysis could show twenty-first-century ponytailed feminism as devoid of any real stance against neoliberalism’s global and local injustices (Gill, 2016). From this critical viewpoint, a fashionable ponytail cannot be feminist since real (second-wave) feminism is antithetical to neoliberalism and to all that is feminine (Lazar, 2013, p. 38). Therefore, the ponytail’s feminism must be a myth, untrue—paradox resolved.

Although the obvious approach to a study of sport, gender, and the ponytail is critical theory, this book adds an interpretive provocation to the literature. If we see cultural practices as mere reflections of metanarratives, we tend to pass over, in silence, the symbol systems that allow people to deal meaningfully with inequalities and ideologies (Geertz, 1973b). If we define myth as untruth, functioning only to reproduce social inequalities and ideologies, we fail to see myth as a powerfully enduring variable of social explanation.³ This study requires an examination of how meanings—myths, codes, and narratives—may materialize in ponytails as a response to the spirits of our time. Then we can explore how journalists and interviewees use metanarratives of solidarity and conflict, feminism and neoliberalism, to reshape and critique the ponytail icon. Therefore, this study consists of intersecting symbolic layers as I show how myth and democratic ideals that charge the aesthetic of the ponytail evoke gendered expectations, ideals of health and modern living which need democratic, neoliberal, feminist, and practical interpretations.

Put differently, this book foregrounds interpretation. I look closely at women’s experiences with the ponytail and how they meaningfully maneuver what Durkheim ([1901] 2014, p. 21) called “social facts”: laws and rules; pragmatic necessities; demography and the economy; emotional currents and crowd behavior; norms and sentiments (Lukes, 1973, p. 12). These material and nonmaterial “facts” are external to individuals, but, whether we wish it or not, they “impose themselves upon” us. Thus, how do ponytailed women maneuver the social facts of their everyday work, family lives, and the economy? How do they balance laws and rules with current psychological currents, norms, and sentiments? To answer these questions, we need to leave behind the early empiricism, realism, and positivism of Durkheim’s ([1901] 2014) The Rules of Sociological Method and start at his later work, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ([1912] 1995). The ponytail, then, becomes a “total social fact” imbued with answers to many material and nonmaterial questions of the day. This path forces us to come to terms with the deeply emotive, semiotic, and sacral elements of modernity and how meaningful actions, such as wearing a ponytail, may shape and root our lives in the material, social realties (e.g., Alexander, 1988a, 1988b).

The meaning of hair varies among groups, individuals and situations, and thus, a study of the ponytail begs for a multidimensional analysis. Returning to the classics of cultural theory, I show that this path is ready to take, if only with an updated toolbox crammed with diverse ideas about hair. First, however, we must begin with the question: Where does the ponytail come from and how did it acquire its name?

A Cultural History of the Ponytail

“A flamboyant head of hair is neither feminine nor masculine, it is human,” wrote Morris (1987, p. 21) in Bodywatching, adding that “the busy fingers of humanity” have rarely left hair in its natural condition. From ancient myth to contemporary pop culture, long hair, bound or free floating, is imbued with meaning. World religions set guidelines for how we groom our hair (Sandin, 2019), and fashion trends introduce “new” gendered signals for hairdos. While graying and loss of hair are biological markers of old age or ill health, the sign of mythical-physical vitality is long, healthy hair (Hallpike, 1969). Examples include the myths of Medusa’s snake hair, and the immensely strong Babylonian, Gilgamesh, as well as biblical accounts of Esau, the hunter (Gen. 25:23–27), King Nebuchadnezzar’s animality (Dan. 4:33) and Samson’s immense power (Judg. 16:17–19). The words caesar and derivatives kaiser and tsar mean “long haired,” titles fit only for leaders. Women who sell their hair online today emphasize not only its length and quality, but the healthy lifestyle that energizes it (Tarlo, 2017, p. 36). Today health performances are crucial to embodying proof of good morals, diets, and training regimes, or simply their stylish renditions (Crawford, 1980; Weitz, 2004). In July 2018, Vogue magazine posted online pictures from Kim Kardashian West’s Instagram feed showing her morning exercise regimen on a sandy beach, with “a bevy of girlfriends, and the partial updo that is fast becoming her signature hairdo”:

West set off on a seaside jog, an undertaking featuring bare feet and exposed abs, along with half-up hair … What makes a worthy seasonal sweat session? A social, outdoors-y approach—and a memorable mane. (Paris, 2018b)

The dictionary definition of a ponytail—or West’s “memorable mane”—is “a hairstyle pulling the hair together and usually banding it at the back of the head to resemble a pony’s tail,”⁴ which, according to Wikipedia, is often worn in informal office settings or when exercising. The ponytail is popular among school-aged girls because flowing hair is associated with youth and simple to accomplish unassisted, at least when not braided or accessorized. A practical choice for keeping hair restrained, the ponytail is also the hallmark of long-haired athletes and others who are physically active in play or work. Sometimes long hair is even required to be tied up for safety reasons in wood shops, labs, sports, and hospitals. As a fashion statement, a high ponytail may connote a sporty person, a low one a chic personality.⁵

According to Sherrow’s (2006, p. 310) cultural history, Encyclopedia of Hair, the earliest depiction of women with ponytails is found on fresco paintings from ancient Crete, thousands of years old: “These images show women wearing their hair pulled up away from the face and secured high on the back of the head.” Women dancers in ancient Egypt and Rome wore similar hairstyles, Sherrow wrote, but most historical accounts of ponytails are about men.

The “queue” (meaning “tail” in French), which was a single long ponytail, often braided, worn at the back of the head with the forehead shaved, is often associated with the Manchu people prior to their forming of the Qing Dynasty that ruled from 1644 to 1972 (Whitaker, 2018). By curious geopolitical circumstances, these and other queues were cut and marketed in Europe to the affluent who needed these extra “rats” of hair to bind their grandiose hairstyles (Tarlo, 2017, pp. 54–59).

Ponytails also were required for European soldiers in the eighteenth century as a convenience to tie the hair at the nape of the neck (Chertsey Museum, n.d.). French soldiers wore queues, while British soldiers and sailors wore their hair pulled back into greased, powdered, or tarred ponytails (Whitaker, 2018) held with a ribbon or a strap. A rite of passage for a British soldier was to have his ponytail forcefully yanked so hard that he “didn’t think he’d be able to close his eyelids afterwards” (Krulwich, 2015). In 1800, the British army initiated short haircuts, but the navy kept a shorter “pigtail” until about 1820 (Whitaker, 2018).

Early in the twentieth century, the ponytail entered the world of women’s fashion, following the 1920s short bobs, the flappers’ emancipatory statement against patriarchal norms of long hairdos (Tarlo, 2017; Weitz, 2004). In the 1950s, the first Barbie doll, wearing a perky pony, was introduced, and film stars like Sandra Dee made the girl-next-door a commodity (Whitaker, 2018). Dee’s iconic ponytail signified a young “good” girl, comically captured in Rizzo’s song in the musical production, Grease: “Elvis let me be, keep that pelvis off of me, Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee.” Another “good girl” of 1960s pop culture, Barbra Eden, star of the television comedy show, I Dream of Jeannie, added to the ponytail’s popularity, before Brigitte Bardot, “the epitome of sexy, insouciant French chic,” showed that cool, hot girls could wear the style, too (Whitaker, 2018).

Entering the 1990s, Madonna, the queen of the MTV generation, revamped the pony, telling her audience to “express yourself.” In her Blond Ambition World Tour attire, Madonna gave the pony a triumphant, confident swagger that, in conjunction with a cone-shaped bra, oozed fashionable ideals of female empowerment, which according to Vogue (Kim, 2015) “long conveyed strength and tenacity in the women who wore it.” Madonna figures in the midst of Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Janet Jackson and later Beyoncé, Christina Milian, and Venus Williams, who remade and retained the iconic ponytail in its many forms throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Wilson, 2013). Also at this time, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team, a “homogenous group of mostly White women in ponytails” who “conveyed the combination of femininity and athleticism that is inherent” in the style (Schultz, 2014, p. 3), won the World Cup. And sports was not the only male terrain women with ponytails entered. In 2001, Angeline Jolie as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, rose out of the water, slinging her pony through film scenes reminiscent of an Indiana Jones quest.

Contemporary myth-making aside, in 2021 the U.S. army recognized that wearing the hair in a bun interfered with the fit of a helmet and, therefore, eased regulations to allow women soldiers to select a number of hairstyles in combat, ranging from buzz cuts to short or long ponytails (Philipps, 2021). In Norway, the police force is about 45 percent female, which means plenty of ponytailed women are out enforcing the law. Also, the Norwegian military has progressed to “gender neutrality,” recruiting equally among men and women, which means protocols for men’s hair have changed as well, and males are allowed to sport a short pony swinging from under their berets or helmets (Kristiansen & Brustad, 2013).

In 2018, French Vogue declared the high ponytail to be the new look. “Forget midi ponytails and super-slicked, nape-of-the-neck knots—this summer’s most palatable updo is all about buoyancy. Whether worn partially pulled back or entirely tied-up,” the pony transforms any casual moment—at school, work, or in exercise—into a glamorous affair (Paris, 2018a). In 2018, on Instagram, #ponytail brought 2.3 million hits. The public eye was fixated on the “gloriously thick, perky ponytail” of popstar Ariana Grande, who noted that her pony brings joy, surprises, a “true love” as well as pain and tarnish (Whitaker, 2018; Xue, 2019). Evidently, Grande’s fans freak out if she dares to abandon her trademark ponytail. On Grande’s 26th birthday, WMagazine paid tribute to her hairdo with 18 photographs showing her waving it “in all its glory” (Marine, 2019). Also in 2018, Kim Kardashian West accepted the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s first Influencer Award wearing her “dark lengths whipped into a taut, sky-high ponytail” with “thick, wispy waves trailing down the back to buoyant effect, putting a fresh twist on the bombshell ponytail famously popularized by Barbara Eden in ‘60s fantasy sitcom I Dream of Jeannie” (Valenti, 2018).

Worn by both men and women, boys and girls, the ponytail comes in many shapes and sizes and may resemble a pony’s tail, a tightly braided queue, or a rat’s tale. When Kylie Jenner, an American media persona with more than 160 million Instagram followers, posted her 2020 “seriously long braided ponytail,” she drew fan comments like “You got a tail,” “Rapunzel, Rapunzel let your hair down,” and “Truly the year of the rat” (Rendon, 2020). In this book, I narrow the focus to examples of women’s ponytails, long and short, braided and rats alike, found in Norwegian news media.

Bodies and Hair as Multidimensional

This brief cultural history of the ponytail indicates that the human body is not merely an object of nature, a vessel for a free mind, or a machine preset by DNA.⁶ Instead, it reveals how bodies are shaped by culture, how culture shapes our thinking, and how cultures shapes the ways our bodies—including those with ponytails—enter and recreate social life (Douglas, 1970). In sociology, performance theorists show how individuals can use their bodies to display notions of the self that conform or rebel against situational (Goffman, 1959) or broad social norms (Butler, 1990, 1993; Goffman, 1976; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Critical theorists argue that social or institutional conflicts alone shape the body and are shaped by it (Bourdieu, 1984, 1990). Post-structuralist analyses of discourse and repetitive drills highlight how docile and machine-like bodies abide social power (Foucault, 1977, 1980). Phenomenologists discuss the body as the ground from which we engage the world (Merleau-Ponty, [1945] 2012), a starting point for recreating the existence of others and other things (Csordas, 1990; Turner, 1995). Thus, as we manage these several sociological dimensions, hair as a bodily entity can become a multidimensional medium for constructing societies (e.g., Shilling, 2004).

In his article “Magical Hair,” Leach (1958) distinguishes between private and public meanings of hair.⁷ He proposes that growing and cutting hair are social acts, performances that demonstrate how others should think about us and situations, regardless of one’s inner emotions. He makes a Durkheimian ([1912] 1995) claim that cultural forces reside in objects. Hair, like fingernails, consists of dead material growing from a living human body and with the ability to hold shared culture and to be part of the living subject at once. Hair is a private symbol and a public object, and hair performances are emotionally charged, fusing hair with collective representations to connect actions to public culture and to allow audiences to identify with the various meanings.

Underlining the social power of hair, Synnott (1987) stated that hair’s symbolic functions exercise social distinctions. His article “Shame and Glory: A Sociology of Hair” is a direct reference to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians and an historical elaboration of gender dichotomizing. Hair fashion is always relational and should be understood in light of individuals relating to changing social contexts. To understand this process, Synnott suggested three intersecting binaries: men’s versus women’s hairstyles; head hair versus body hair; and the opposing hairstyles of opposing ideologies. For example, heteronormativity shapes hair customs for men and women: short hairstyles for men and ungroomed body hair, with the opposite for women, according to Synnott’s 1987 study of British and North American cultures. Yet, there are always rebels with opposite ideologies who shape their hair in opposing or unconventional ways, such as hippies, punks, and feminists. To Synnott, hair displays a deeply private commitment to moral and social distinctions about shame and glory (1987, pp. 409–410). Social divisions develop and are expressed in meaning-making about hair growth and cuts and in individuals’ biological-cum-political lives.

Obeyesekere (1981) argued that hair should be “related to the life experiences of the individual and the larger institutional contexts in which they are embedded” (p. 13). Shared and personal culture belong in an interdependent system; although personal and shared myths and narratives differ in content, they are organized by the same modalities. The content of a personal myth is often an altered version of the public myth, amended to an individual’s biography. For individuals to appropriate public culture then, a myth or narrative must be deeply felt and imbued into one’s own biography and motivation. Personal myth about hair can reshape public hair myths, and vice versa, with favorable institutional contexts and sociopolitical and economic factors.

As a bodily entity, hair is part of how enact social life, how we respond to social inequalities and how we recreate our own and others’ positions in the world. Hair is a deeply personal means to display and shape the dramaturgy of a situation or the policing of our social power relations. It positions us within and orients us toward the creation of our life worlds. These dimensions are well addressed in the theorizing of hair and in the sociology of bodily performances, social power and phenomenology. Therefore, as we take a cultural-sociological perspective of the body, we can study how journalists and interviewees imbue the ponytail and actions surrounding it with meanings used to maneuver these social dimensions, and the ponytail materializes as a total social fact, an agent itself, with solutions to several aspects of social life. Before presenting my multidimensional approach to the ponytail, I review how critical theorists view the hairstyle.

A Critical Sociology of (Sports)Women’s Hair

Hair can undoubtedly divide society along power structures of gender, race, and class to reproduce social inequalities. In the contemporary West, long, straight hair can reflect a capitalist, patriarchal hegemony in the form of a White, heteronormative femininity (Prince, 2009; Simon, 2000; Tarlo, 2017; Weitz, 2004). Many argue that marketers fuse this toxic femininity to images of feminism to sell consumption as self-expressions of empowerment (Gill, 2016; McRobbie, 2009; Pickren, 2018; Rutherford, 2018; Toffoletti et al., 2018).

In her study of hair, Weitz (2004) argued that “if, in a religion-driven world, men gained status by having a wife who appeared modest, in a market-driven world, men gained status by displaying an attractive wife” (p. 6). Today, young women’s self-esteem “comes to depend more on appearance than any other factor, including their social lives, academic achievements, or athletic abilities” (p.72). This White, heteronormative feminine ideal also forms disparities of race and class. From the nineteenth century in the United States, Black and Native American women faced severe constraints in styling their hair either in obedience or opposition to the norms of White culture (Weitz, 2004). Natural Black hair still falls low in a beauty paradigm celebrating White straight hair (Tarlo, 2017; Weitz, 2004), making the daughter of comedian Chris Rock ask “Daddy, why don’t I have good hair?” (Prince, 2009, p. 140). Although the countercurrents of the 1960s slogans “Black power” and “Black is beautiful” brought more acceptance to Black hairstyles, in many ways White hair norms persist and make curly styles subordinate (Bagalini, 2021; Simon, 2000). Weitz (2004, p. 27) argued that “although the feminist movement improved women’s lives in many ways, it freed few women from fashion norms” (p. 27). With more complexity than can be recounted here, these important studies crystallize how a White capitalist patriarchy is reflected in heteronormative hair.

In the book Qualifying Times: Points of Change in U.S. Women’s Sport, Schultz (2014) used the compelling example of (sport)women’s hair to combine critical theory with insights into how hair can reproduce inequality. Schultz asked, “Consider U.S. women’s sport without its ponytailed participants. It is difficult, for the ubiquitous style has become a hallmark of female athleticism” (2014, p. 1). At the 1999 Soccer World Champions, the U.S. women’s team, was dubbed the ponytail express, and their fan club, the ponytail posse; argued that the ponytail icon conveys “the combination of femininity and athleticism that is inherent in putting your hair up in a ponytail.” However, that image of athletic empowerment is false, Schultz concluded because the hairdo only reinstates women’s oppression through heteronormative patriarchy.

Similarly, in Ponytailed and Polygendered, Daniels (2009, pp. 143-144) argued that the ponytail is key for women athletes who seek to present themselves as hetero-sexy females. Both Daniels and Schultz noted the ponytail’s usefulness. Daniels cited a quote from Weitz (2004, p. 63) in which an interviewee said wearing a ponytail makes her feel most like herself, a sporty girl, “always ready to play, energetic, running, and willing to do things. I can’t do that if it’s not in a ponytail.” Yet these critical theorists describe the ponytailed female athlete as a “product and producer of gendered ideologies” (Schultz, 2014, p. 2),“the feminine presentation of self” as, sadly, the best way for women athletes to garner social acceptance (Daniels, 2009, p. 145), and young women as identifying with pursuits of appearance rather than sports (Weitz, 2004, p. 72).

Apart from the notable exceptions mentioned above, the very visible actuality of sportswomen’s hair usually only figures as sidenotes in sport and gender analyses. The ponytail is an example of “the homophobic agenda” in sports and schools in which coaches and peers encourage players to wear their hair long and in a ponytail to reinforce a heteronormativity (Blackburn, 2007, p. 44; Lenskyj, 1994, p. 359) through “an impression of conventional femininity” (Cox & Thompson, 2000, p. 14). Indeed, the ponytail allows long-haired women to perform multiple femininities, to satisfy the medias’ search for “babes” as they let their hair down outside the arena (Sisjord & Kristiansen, 2008, 2009). Still, the vast number of ponytailed athletes in North America and elsewhere seems to indicate that this polygendered hairdo is as mandatory for participation as a team uniform (Daniels, 2009, p. 153). Physical education textbooks in Sweden systematically depict boys with short hair and girls with ponytails (Alsarve, 2018, p. 846), and in Norway, elite women athletes in unisex or shapeless uniforms find long hair to be a vital expression of their femininity (Kolnes, 1995).

The major trend in sport and gender research concludes that femininity recreates gendered inequalities and depletes athleticism of empowerment (Broch, 2016; Bruce, 2015; Musto, Cooky, & Messner, 2017). Accordingly, the obvious way to study ponytailed sportswomen would be to carry on with critical theory to show how neoliberal-cum-patriarchal ideology makes women athletes consumers who defy outdated forms of patriarchy in politically correct ways, “yet fail to dislodge the devaluing and commodification of women’s physical pursuits” (Toffoletti et al., 2018). Although much can be gained from critical theory, I seek a wider focus than ideology and social power alone. Crucially, I propose a study of sport and gender that stress the multidimensionality revealed in the cultural history of the ponytail and the many ways that cultural theorists have dealt with hair. From biblical and mythological sources to sportswomen’s athletic prowess and Kim Kardashian West’s memorable mane, hair is imbued with animality, strength, asceticism, and heterosexuality in ways that can mediate and overwhelm social power. To limit the meaning of any symbol, let alone hair, to social power or ideology alone, is to deprive it of its rich symbolic associations. Therefore, it is not enough to recognize that hair involves bodily performances, phenomenology, and biographies if we explain away these dimensions as the results of patriarchy and neoliberal ideology. Any plausible interpretation of how the ponytail became iconic, how it entered and shaped social life, must examine the ponytail’s performativity in cultural contexts and situations.

The Polyvocality of a Total Social Fact

My search of Norwegian newspapers from 1945 to the early twenty-first century for when, how, and why the ponytail is portrayed generated data rich with contextual, individual, and social variation. As a result, I do not try to explain the performativity of the ponytail icon in light of one significant event, one dramatic representative, or one historical period alone. Rather, this is a study of the polyvocality of a total social fact.

I argue that the ponytail is used to maneuver social facts, namely, a collective conscience outside of individuals that constrains social life (Durkheim, [1901] 2014, p. 27). Social facts can be material objects, like architecture and bodies in a crowd, but also nonmaterial beliefs and morality internalized as norms, emotions, and expectations. Social facts may involve the authority and sanctioning of legal rules and customs, or procedures followed out of pragmatic necessity, like language or currency. They range from objective factors such as the economy and the demography of a recession and migration, to the psychological compulsion and currents in collective movements.⁸ In 1901, Durkheim stressed that social facts constrain us (Lukes, 1973; Smith, 2020), so to get to how the ponytail became a meaningful object in social life, we need to move along.

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim ([1912] 1995) shifted the viewpoint from constrained to active individuals engaged in meaningful construction of social life through rituals and totemic worship (Alexander, 2005). These actions allow individuals not only to maneuver social and natural facts, but to do so with a cultural force that “weighs on its members with all its authority,” leading them to “suppose that they are not without foundation in the nature of things” (Durkheim, [1912] 1995, pp. 17–18). At the core of this meaning-making process are culture structures, codes that separate sacred from everyday, and the sacred pure from its impure forms (Kurakin, 2015). Long hair in mythology, whether Samson’s powerful mane to Medusa’s snake hair, is storied with existential fears and awe. To be able to maneuver social facts, powerful, long hair, must be practically handled with the care and control that a narrative professes.

Although Durkheim’s ideas allow us to see the ponytail as imbued with meaningful answers to social facts, he was too insistent on ritual causality and moral consensus (Alexander, 2017; Smith & Alexander, 2005). In today’s complex and fragmented modernity, we must underline how actors imbue objects with multiple meanings and how polyvocal objects guide experience.

Drawing on the idea of social performance (Alexander, 2004), I examine how journalists and interviewees interpret, criticize, and praise the ponytail in multiple and diverse ways as they consciously and unconsciously use macro-culture to display and shape the meaning of situations and actors.⁹ The ponytail icon is imbued with meanings and mediated by hermeneutical power: “the understandings and evaluations offered by independent interpretation” (Alexander, 2012, p. 27). In contrast to the rituals Durkheim (1912) studied in assembled worship, my focus is on performances in which journalists and interviewees interpret, contest, and use ponytails in multiple contexts with polyvocal affects and effects. Even so public interpretation still has ritual-like qualities and aims, via the text, to project meanings that persuade and create emotional connections between performer and audience (Alexander, 2004, 2017, 2021). We still use macro-semiotic structures to bring objects and micro-cultural settings to life with codes, myths, and narratives that portray and shape situation’s broader existential and moral verisimilitude.¹⁰

Therefore, my study of the ponytail goes beyond common sense ideas that icons are unambiguous or simply highly recognizable—admired or despised—with great influence in a specific sphere. Rather, I view icons as the ongoing performative achievement of polyvocal objects that speak to and shape a multitude of situations. With their own performativity generated by multiple symbolic layers, icons can be used to maneuver both our affection for and aversion to social facts (Smith, 2008). To tease out these symbolic processes, I follow culturally oriented sociologists who define objects as composed of an aesthetic surface and a discursive depth.¹¹ Neither the ponytail nor hair itself are simply pure material objects imbued with meanings by journalists and interviewees, but are composed of two layers:

The surface is form and shape, and its texture is sensually experienced via the five senses, sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. “Inside” the aesthetically formed surface are discursive meanings—moral associations, collective beliefs, socially shaped emotions. They are inside metaphorically, in the sense that discursive meaning is invisible to the senses … The invisible depth meaning and visible surface form are analytically separate, yet, at the same time, they are, in a concrete empirical sense, wholly intertwined. (Alexander, 2020, p. 384)

With “icon theory” the ponytail’s meanings are contingent on how we experience its surface and sense its cultural depth. In material form, the ponytail is a symbolic condensation (Alexander, 2010b, 2012) that helps us grasp the “essence” or “deep meaning” of a situation (Sonnevend, 2016, 2020).¹² Moreover, the ponytail’s joint aesthetic surface allows both the wearer and the viewer to see, touch, and sense how its symbolic depth exerts performative power in their lives of social facts (Alexander, 2008, 2010b, 2020). It is a bodily object, deeply personal yet culture structured, that can be used to display, enter, and sustain our affective options and constraints in social life (Champagne, 2018, forthcoming).¹³ As the ponytail allows us to maneuver social life through a blend of material and nonmaterial sources, I suggest it is “total” phenomenon (Mauss, [1950] 1966, pp. 36–36) that generates aesthetic emotions tied to our interactional expectations and desires (e.g., Mauss, [1950] 1966, p. 77). Therefore, a cultural sociology of the ponytail icon shows how journalists and interviewees thread a multitude of symbolic layers through the materiality of hair, how this symbolic process is sensed through its aesthetic surface, and how the ponytail’s meaningful materiality shapes our experiential maneuvering of social facts.

A Note on Methods and Outline

The aim of this book is not only to document the many meanings of the (sport)woman’s ponytail across historical times and cultural contexts, but to map out the codes, myths, and narratives imbued in this hairstyle’s performativity. Drawing upon documentation of the ponytail in the Norwegian press, I show how this hallmark of women’s sports shapes and is shaped by meanings outside and inside sports. Much more than a sporty hairdo and a signal of heteronormative femininity, the ponytail is a “total” phenomenon that answers to our expectations of gendered life in felicitous and upsetting ways. It incarnates myth-like ideas of health and youthfulness, yet allows its bearer to maneuver work and family life with the speed and gusto of a modern woman. The ponytail is a total social fact that roots experience in the material culture of hair.

The data for this project consists of newspaper articles in which the ponytail appears in passing or as a major part of the story. On the about 4000 pages of public discourse from 1945 to the early twenty-first century, the ponytail condenses and elaborates the cultural dimensions of news articles. Beyond reading the sentences in which the ponytail is mentioned, a culturally oriented analysis of this data required that I read the whole text to grasp how the ponytail was related to micro- and macro-cultural contexts. Thus, it is important to note that many critical theorists who analyze glossy magazines and ads for the beauty industry often accumulate data well suited for a critique of neoliberal and patriarchal ideologues. I, too, have made a strategic sample of the Norwegian news press to see if the public sphere holds femininities different from those that critical theorists study. If I am successful, the vast array of femininities discovered might allow me to create a complimentary, meaning-centered approach to the study of gender symbols. As symbols are polyvocal by definition, a symbol analysis should question ideological clarity. Through the notion of “thick description” (Geertz, 1973a), I aim to show how multiple landscapes of meaning are brought to bear on action, materiality, and events (Bordo, 1999; Reed, 2011; Small, 2009; Spillman, 2014). This makes for a good abductive starting point (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014) to study the mostly taken for granted presence of the ponytail and to use these insights to theorize about gender relations as multilayered.

Encountering something as ubiquitous as the ponytail, a sociologist applies one of the oldest tricks of the trade—to make the familiar strange. In the search for new insights into the ponytail as a hallmark of sportswomen, I map out in the first four chapters the symbol systems that critical theorists tend to pass over in silence. By first exploring the ponytail’s aesthetic surface and moral depth, then mapping three codes and a set of accompanying symbolic layers, I show that the ponytail can be understood as a total social phenomenon. This is no old-fashioned functionalist argument or claim of consensus, but one that describes how symbolic codes operate to make the ponytail publicly meaningful and, at the same time, allow different points of view (Spillman, 2020). The ponytail’s material form displays performativity in codes (1) of expectations, health, and practicalities that (2) intersect with symbolic layers expressing diverse viewpoints. Ponytailed women express their individuality in deeply cultural ways as they maneuver the ideological realities of their social lives through deeply private yet public culture.

As a foundation, in this introductory chapter, I have described how the long-haired men and women of ancient and popular myth exemplify zoomorphism. In Chap. 2, I depart from Durkheim’s ([1912] 1995) theory of ascribing animal traits to people and human characteristics to animal life to create “objective” or “natural” realities. The cultural creation of the natural through analogies, resemblances, and inductive reasoning makes symbolic work disappear from aesthetic surfaces, yet survive in an invisible cultural depth, reappearing in Freudian slippages and affective snippets of text. I show how meaning moves through the sensual materiality of the ponytail, and how this aesthetic surface awakens a cultural depth to mediate social relations. The ponytail, or horsetail, as it is called in Norwegian, exudes kinetic energy, recaptured on the catwalk of global fashion capitals. Like a horse’s tail provides balance for the animal, the ponytail balances the wearer’s stride and allows a feeling of movement, being moved and passionately moving others. The ponytail moves to move us.

Chapter 3 explores how the ponytail maneuvers gendered expectations. Although this hairdo can be long or short, it undeniably demands a certain hair length. Critical theory tends to equate long hair with expectations of capitalist, patriarchal ideology, this chapter stress the many ways that women may use ponytails to meet a multitude of expectations. I argue that codes of fashion and customs permit women (and men) to wear this hairstyle to display gendered expectations in amplified and sober ways (Goffman, 1976). This dynamic process generates a half-life of the ponytail in which its many forms and imitations are manifest in a diversity of situations (Mauss, [1934] 1973). According to Tarde (1903), imitations that intensify and condense customs are what makes fashion and that imitations of fashion in turn recreates customs. Hairstyles signal community norms and may be worn proudly. In my data, men with ponytails were depicted as creative, deviant, rebellious, bad-boys, or downright criminal. On girls and women, ponytails signaled confident, heterosexual, creative, assertive, morally good females on the move, exiting femme fatales, or ordinary girls next door. What directs the ponytail’s performativity are the codes that define the ways we meet fashion and customs: as commercial ploys or with altruistic intentions, as normal or deviant in diverse situations.

In Chap. 4, I show how myths of youthfulness and vitality, but also hope, courage, and willpower give the ponytail a democratic half-life. As human hair grows fastest in healthy youth and during recovery from illness, slowing in old age, illness, pregnancy, and cold weather, it is no wonder then that cultural constructions of health are shaped by observations of hair. Throughout history, the ways we act regarding biological health is shaped by culture and myth (Alexander & Smith, 2020; Crawford, 2006; Martin, 1991; Zola, 1972). Thus, I show that the ponytail’s performativity of youthfulness energizes females of all ages in democracies. For example, ponytailed girls participate at summer camps and sport tournaments that pioneer gender equality and multiculturalism. Adult women with ponytails retain their youthfulness. They move as soft as sap and with a feminist vigor. Some are right-wing politicians professing neoliberal equalities. Others speak social democratic justice. The ponytail’s youthful half-life provides vitality when modern women steadily enter new domains and challenge old conventions. The iconic charge is so powerful that it not only gives youthfulness to elderly women, but retains the democratic vitality these women sported as young, mature, and now aging feminists.

In Chap. 5, work-life pressures on the modern woman are explored to shape hair fashions and customs. The ponytail binds hair in practical ways that naturalize women’s presence in male-dominated jobs and roles. Although Whitaker (2018) noted that the ponytail radiates the social progress of former feminist generations, some women today believe they live in a post-feminist reality, even as others remain on the barricades, fist raised, ponytail waving. Ponytailed women are at times loud youthful, bold, and unapologetic; other times, they perform bold body politics: positionality, presence, and existence. Clearly, the ponytail is iconic, a total social fact used to feel, see, and enact a meaningful relationship with complex modern society. As modern women navigate their practical lives, a new code emerges: a code of movement that fuses the corporeal and practical with the social and feminist environments in which they reside. This code gives the ponytail—itself an embodiment of movement—a performativity of movement: a cultural kinetics that is never apolitical.

In Chaps. 6 and 7, I explore how the codes outlined heretofore shape ponytailed experiences in the realm of sport, a specific operative context with its own cultural dynamics. In sports, the ponytail’s cultural kinetic—and its accompanying symbolism—is accentuated, elaborated, and condensed. Chapter 6 highlights how sports accentuate a symbolic dimension that has charged the ponytail icon throughout the analyses: movement. Chapter 7 shows how body movements evoke the moral depth of gendered expectations, health, and practicalities as the ponytail swings in athletic endeavor. Together, these chapters reveal how sports are shaped by and shape social life as the woman athlete’s movements are imbued with broadly available folklore, codes of democratization and myth—to make the ponytail an icon of progress.

A ponytail icon does not create consensus but allows its wearers to join and recreate social life with a multitude of symbolic options. Materiality is critical to this process as it makes moral and mythical codes tangible. However, although a ponytail carries shared meanings, it is not felt alike by all who wear it, nor is it understood in the same way in all contexts. Symbolic codes operate and intersect to make the ponytail publicly meaningful and, at the same time, allow different points of view (Spillman, 2020). Ponytailed women express individuality in deeply cultural and aesthetically tangible ways. Not equally charged at all times, the ponytail’s iconic power is strongest when it materializes multiple symbolic layers—to be revealed as a total social phenomenon. This book therefore highlights our ability to adopt to diverse situations and shows that we need a multidimensional tactic to grasp the material meanings of the ponytail.