Technological advances and changing practicalities form our bodily experiencing of social life (Shilling, 2004). In late eighteenth-century France, the advent of the bicycle greatly affected women’s fashion as they embraced the convenience of pants and underpants that “spared them of raising their skirts and gave them a taste for costumes in which they could sit, walk, or lean back more easily—let alone pedal” (Weber, 1986, p. 102). Centuries later, as the US Army depends increasingly on female soldiers, women are no longer restricted to wearing long hair in buns, which can compromise their identity and also interfere with the fit of helmets. Whenever a soldier wearing a bun gets down in a fighting position, the bun will push the helmet forward, making it impossible to see. Therefore, women are now allowed to wear a combination of hairstyles ranging from buzzcuts to short or long ponytails (Philipps, 2021). Thus, social and technological changes not only transform our practical realities, but cause us to reorder our very sense of what is practical and what are useful bodily practices (Mauss, [1934] 1973; Sahlins, 1976).

Meaningful identities, in other words, shape how we maneuver what Durkheim ([1901] 2014) called the social facts of demography and the economy.1 For instance, the increase in dual-career households creates new practicalities and pressures in family life (Hochschild, 2003; Aarseth, 2011). In this chapter, we will see that for many “working women” who must move back and forth between office and home, paid and unpaid work, and the constraints of workplace safety and the backstage of family life, ponytailed hair remains a practical choice. Yet if we state that simply practicality and rationality order social life, we miss the semiotic structures: Although over time symbol systems have disappeared from much deliberation and can seem ostensibly forgotten, they are still what gives an icon its force.2 With this multidimensional analysis, I set out to understand feminist ontologies—their codes, narratives, waves of democratic progress, and setbacks—as cultural structures.3 I ask when and how ponytailed women—and those who portray them—use feminist codes and narratives (Alexander, 2011; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006). Which feminist narratives, each offering its own path to emancipation, are manifest as ponytailed women maneuver and seek to change modernity? Two competing narratives are vital in this regard: a (neo)liberal feminism that cheers women leaders who maintain social domination relationships and a radical feminism that fights structural oppression and neoliberal capitalism.4

To answer how symbol systems and feminist narratives fuse with long-haired femininities and materialize in ponytails, we must welcome an approach that does not reduce myth to notions of falsity. Instead, we need to explain the archetypal “woman” as multifaceted. To this effort, I combine Beauvoir and Jung. As an archetype of the second sex, “woman is devoted to magic,” Beauvoir ([1949] 2011, p. 187) said. “Woman” is an object charged with fluids. She is not an agent but an effect. Today, critical theorists say that a woman embodies neoliberalism, making her embrace and reproduce a myth of female empowerment through consumption. She distracts from democratization and leads us to social injustice, to a work and family life deprived of existential meaning.5

Yet there is more to myth than this univocal delusion. Archetypes are complex and multilayered, with negative and positive sides, and a whole register of characteristics, Jung said ([1972] 2003, pp. 14–15). Many know of the Statue of Liberty, and some might have heard of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare, or Frøya, the Norse goddess of fertility and war. The woman archetype is not only an effect, but also an agent made up of this variation. In myth, she is both object and subject, both a substance and a symbol that grind reality into moral abstracts. To the category of the figurative woman also belongs the goddess, the goal of our longing for redemption, forces of fertility, protection, sympathy, and a magical authority:

The magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcends reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign; all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility. The places of magic transformation and rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants, are presided over by the mother. (Jung, [1972] 2003, p. 15)

Archetypes aside, what about the lived moral and political realities of women today? We often think of myths and fairytales as providing clear images of a protagonist and her rival——the good opposed by pure evil in neatly differentiated characters. Yet myth and the hero’s moral character are equally full of contradictions and ambivalence.6 As we enter the public sphere of democratic struggle, where universalism is most often articulated in concrete language of practical life and its material objects (Alexander, 2006), we find the ponytail at the contradictory interstice of myth, real life, and feminist narratives. Within this sphere, the pressures and practicalities of the dual-career household sometimes extend and sometimes constrict our solidarities, and are often negotiated with codes and hopes of gender equality (Hochschild, 2003; Aarseth, 2011). Here, hair can be a means to affectively maneuver injustice and equality (Prince, 2009; Synnott, 1987; Weitz, 2004) as civil heroes with ponytails—some representing official women’s movements and some the media’s social commentary––criticize unhealthy ideals. The pro-civil state of Norway holds plenty of actors with women-centered capacities to “work the binaries and invent master symbols that structure social feelings and delineate lines of solidarity” (Alexander et al., 2019, p. 9) as they wear and observe the ponytail.7

Social life involves contests and alliances expressed through codes and narratives about how moral goods and evils can be allocated in our societies, and then changed or repaired.8 Well accompanied by its Nordic neighbors, Norway is known for the ways in which its national identity is entangled with feminist narratives that position gender equality at the heart of the nation’s idea of what a democracy is and should be (Engelstad & Larsen, 2019).9 Some refer to this institutionalization of the feminist movement as “state feminism” (Mjøset, 2017), and at the onset of the twenty-first century, Norway had a higher percentage of female political leaders than any other nation, and by virtue of the power and influence they wielded they were rated as global leaders (Birkelund & Petersen, 2012).

Notably, this peculiar union has not eradicated gender difference and inequality by far. Norway has a highly gender-segregated employment market and “a gender equality paradox” that begs the question why women (and men) with a high degree of freedom of choice often make conservative decisions (Holst, 2009).10 Therefore, Nordic social democracy is far from the “immaculate conception” that some might think,11 and a simple notion of a progressive, pervasive universalizing discourse of gender equality in the Nordic countries is not only naïve, but dangerous. It is most useful to explore the moral codes used to interpret, criticize, and guide sociopolitical life despite conflict and divisions (Alexander, 2006).

While critical theorists warn against reconstructing myths and semiotic systems that only sustain and naturalize an unjust status quo (Bourdieu, 1990; Fraser, 1990), I explore what happens if change, transformation, and repair of injustice are inherent to the code. If so, and if these codes materialize in the ponytail, then this icon becomes a means to do things with words and grammars beyond the play of semiotic stasis.12 If the woman archetype is a controlled other and a controlling energy holding the beautiful and sublime, tradition and progress, then her body and hair must be capable of holding beliefs and desires of (in)justice and its repair. The fashionable hairstyle of the ponytail, distinctly popular two decades into the twenty-first century, is likely full of ambivalence. Can the ponytail icon materialize a desired gender equality and a belief in women as full partners in social life?

Denaturalizing Inequality and Naturalizing Equality

Speaking up against injustice and inequalities is a regular part of democratic life and feminist living (Ahmed, 2017). Whether feminists or politicians, citizens of democratic societies must deal with—oppose, agree with, reshape—these feminist processes of democratization.13 Feminist thinking and individual decision-making also prompt us to grapple with what is natural and unnatural mundane living (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002).

On June 29, 1959, a local Norwegian paper, Raumnes, took a conscious stance in warning that “marriage is no life insurance for young girls,” and young women need “an occupation to fall back on.” The writer argued powerfully that boys and girls too often “strive to live up to the roles that society expects them to play. Making boys consider whether they should become mechanics, carpenters, doctors or engineers. Making girls look for temporary work and use nail polish and ponytails to up their attraction.” Looking to Sweden, the writer suggested increasing women’s enrollment in higher education. “If this recruiting is to be successful, it has to open up for promotion opportunities for women within business and let women students get an equal chance for practical training. If all this is done, we will see many competent women technicians emerging.”

Culture is at play and gender is the stake. Educational paths and careers might have been open to them, but women were not encouraged to take them. To this 1958 writer, the ponytail was a signifier of a young femininity capturing the ambivalence and “confusion in the enduring and short-minded debate about women’s place [in society]. A debate in which one still talks about an either-or binary and the decay of the home. One should never make such a generalization. This debate is mindless, since the circumstances in our many homes are so different, women’s abilities and energies so strongly discrepant, and their economic needs so diverse.” There is a dramatic stake here. What once seemed natural has now become downright unnatural. Living a consciously gendered life prompts the individual to invent new traditions and ideas of what is natural in a diversified society.

As the ponytail oscillates between fashion and custom, childhood and adulthood, in ways that are important to gender issues, the 1980s ponytail appeared in a quite different version than the one in the 1958 Raumnes article. As a fashionable custom, the hairstyle was found on many young adult women entering male-dominated occupations, and as such, the ponytail not only signified heteronormativity, but embodied gender diversity. It showed that women were entering new and a priori gendered ground14 and was inconsistent with normative practicalities of the material and symbolic context, as well as predominantly male bodies that inhabited them.

On Monday January 31, 1983, VG asked readers if they were on board the recent Widerøe Twin Otter propeller flight, and if they believed they “caught a glimpse of a ponytail in the cockpit” (p. 11). If so, VG can confirm that they were right. Copy that. “However, if you have spent the weekend writing a complaint” about the male airline pilot’s hairdo, the writer continued, “there is no need to pay for postage. The ponytail belongs to Tove Frendal Fagerhøy (27) from Hakadal, and you had the honor of riding along on her debut behind the Widerøe levers.”

To readers who might have believed (or feared) Fagerhøy to be a pioneer and a (woman) rookie, the journalist pointed out that Fagerhøy had thousands of hours in the air. Educated in the United States to fly DC7s and DC4s working to extinguish wildfires, she studied alongside Siri Skara, the first female student in Norway’s air force academy. Fagerhøy reckoned she would be stationed in Hammerfest, on the Russian border in the very north of Norway, and fly up and down the northern coast, “undoubtedly one of the toughest routes along our coast,” the journalist explained. This woman has plenty of backbone, or “a solid nose-bone,” as we say in Norwegian. Even more fascinating than her toughness is the way she does gender.15 Not only is she a trained wildfire extinguisher and propeller flight veteran, she dares to challenge the airline’s masculine, male-dominated conventions.

None of these deep matter-of-fact issues are conveyed explicitly in the newspaper text, but they resound beneath its surface as a feminist undercurrent. Our iconic consciousness of this depth makes this pilot’s ponytail fascinating, daring, and telling of cultural change. Although the hairstyle might have caused complaints if it had figured on a man’s head (sexist as that is), on Fagerhøy’s head it becomes a signifier of egalitarian femininity—daring and spirited, declaring, “Here I am, a highly skilled and competent woman.” This social performance of a heteronormative, long-haired woman meets expectations, but conflicts with an institutional context dominated by men and heteronormative masculine practicalities. The ponytail reproduces heteronormativity, but in a way that makes it perfectly clear that the female sex has entered this new terrain. To the journalist, the ponytail is welcome, with all its diversifying social effects and affects as traditional notions of gender are wed with modern behaviors and progress. What is more, Fagerhøy is a woman pioneer, as naturally bold, daring, and practical as her male colleagues.

It is perhaps tempting to suggest that Fagerhøy must be exceptional, but this book shows that this is far from the case. Expectations of long hair and moral dictates like heteronormativity leave room for meaningful choices. The notion of lived moralities is, in some respect, more usefully understood as plural rather than singular,16 which better captures the human predicament of somehow being responsible for yet without control over one’s life.17 Under the headline Norwegian Housewife’s New Leader: Equality, Equity, and Choice, Ingunn Birkeland is introduced in Aftenposten in 1958 as the newly elected leader of the Norwegian Housewife Foundation (NH). As she attended various classes to learn about taxes, social security, and insurance, issues concerning housewives’ lack of rights came to her attention.

[Birkeland] quickly reveals great mastery of the laws of marriage, tax and social security. The long, light blond ponytail swings energetically back and forth while the 50-year-old mother of four and new leader of NH picks up case after case. ‘I have never felt that my work was inferior, but it is necessary to increase the value of unpaid work. Since we do not receive a salary, we will not achieve more than the absolute minimum rights of the Folketrygden [Public insurance]. We do not collect a pension. Nearly 75 percent of all women become minimum pension earners.’ Birkeland and NH promote an equal share in the taxes and benefits, within marriage, to promote equity of work within and outside of the home. (Aftenposten, September 16, 1985, p. 8)

Wearing a ponytail, Birkeland fights for a meaningful equality and to destroy a code that devaluates the private sphere and unpaid labor. Practicalities and politics are contextual, Birkeland demonstrates, by drawing attention to the many ways to deal with gender (in)equalities and power.

While some women with ponytails are considered spirited in their fight for equality and conquering men’s terrain, others struggle with the image of being a little bit too spirited and thus lacking that “masculine” seriousness of male-dominated contexts. After 22 years as a news reporter, Guro Rustad cut her ponytail, perhaps to attract more “masculine” or “adult woman” respect.

But the woman absolutely does not hide at Marienlyst [the center for Norwegian television broadcasting at that time], even though the leaders are all men. Guro is still cheap with her smiles, but is as kind, sincere, and skilled as she will appear on the evening news tonight. She reads the news and comments on political events with great knowledge and authority. There is no fooling around when Rustad is on the air. If she is fed up with the good girl image, we do not know, but the label has followed her. (Aftenposten, 24.11.1987)

And now she abandons the ponytail. The half-life of the ponytail has a powerful charge. Its presence demonstrates that Rustad is an energetic young woman. Some might not take this signification seriously, and therefore neither does she. To meet this gendered challenge, Rustad cut her ponytail. Reasons for these choices arguably vary around the axis of progress. If the horsetail slows you down, cut it. If you are on the move, let it accentuate your pace.

The ponytail’s iconic charge resides in its varied imitations that naturalize its symbolism. Critical theorists might suggest, and Tarde would agree, that imitations have a close relation to hierarchies and social power. However, Tarde (1903, pp. 229–233) was quick to note that majorities have prestige in democratic societies, and public opinion inspires us to imitate people or ideas that hold a superior morality. Beliefs in transcendental aims and a never fully realizable democratic ideal influence how we draw boundaries between and within communities (Alexander, 2006), and icons condense irreconcilable oppositions of inclusion and exclusion, of hierarchal and democratic power. Imitations then take the positive psychological and biological realties of democratic actors, naturalize these cultural ideals through embodiment (Mauss, [1934] 1973, p. 73), and make our understanding of social power and moral form our bodily view of the world (T. Turner, 1995).

Imitation forcefully naturalizes new and progressive meanings—and conservative meanings, too—by fusing “traditional representations” to new problematics in ways that generate affective answers to new and old challenges. In 1988, Kari Hauge Rasmussen, the guerilla leader of a teacher’s strike in the east coast city of Stavanger, was battling for women’s rights, recognition, and emancipation through better pay and security. She declared the government’s suggested pay raise “a shame,” and noted that without proper actions, “we risk ending up with a school where only old women like myself are left teaching.” The 57-year-old woman is “no nonsense,” and seldom bereft of speech. She adds color to Stavanger where she “on the 17th of May can be observed with a swinging ponytail happily participating in the children’s parade, and on any given weekday riding her bike” (NTB, March 3, 1988).

Not only does Rasmussen fight for women’s rights, she takes part in the May 17 Independence Day celebration in which teachers semi-voluntarily and by convention walk with their pupils in the children’s parade. Streets are draped with the national flag, and women wear local variations of the national costume, the “bunad.” The holiday celebrates the finalization of the Norwegian constitution, national identity, and democracy (Buxrud & Fangen, 2017). Here, in this quite sane and rational modern nation, myth, utopias, and democratic hopes are highly prevalent. Norway’s Independence Day and the children’s parade celebrate humanism and egalitarianism, a mythical defense of and hope in the weakness but promise of children, as well as a celebration of mothers, who reproduce life (Witoszek, 1998, p. 151). Despite not being paid for her efforts, Rasmussen, seemingly, with her spirited and long-haired ponytail, is not one to shy away from her democratic duties of representation and criticism. We are primed to be receptive to such civil and evocative narratives by virtue of our belief in civil society’s discourse, “that it is sacred and that its ideals should be protected from harm” (Alexander, 2019, p. 13). In the story of Rasmussen we are also primed to recognize the archetypical woman—long-haired and wearing bunad—as a natural bearer of democratic values.

In another example, the bunad guerilla was born in 2019, as Høyre, the Norwegian liberal right-wing party, promoted its neoliberal downsizing of the Norwegian welfare state, suggesting, among other things, closing down or moving local hospitals into bigger, more efficient facilities.18 Women in traditional Norwegian dress, colored and embroidered according to local community traditions, arose, fists raised, to protest the destruction of safe, local, well-functioning birthing options. These bunad-clad women, some with ponytails, protested the impracticalities of both the welfare state and neoliberalism. They were women, seemingly by biology, psychology, and culture, who in various ways stood up against the inability of the state and capitalism to meet the real life demands of the modern woman.

In Norway, gender equality is a sacred ideal, enmeshed in the state and civil sphere. Rasmussen and the bundad-guerilla are not odd cases, but examples imitated by other women, wearing bundad or otherwise. We already know, through the story of Joan of Arc, that the embodied democratic ideal can be short-haired. We now know they can be long-haired and ponytailed as well. There is plenty of evidence in the public sphere that the ponytail can convey an undercurrent of feminist awareness; furthermore, it is reasonable to argue that this awareness draws meaningful energy from a set of deep cultural structures. The ponytail can materialize a solidarity that regenerates desires for a democratic resolve by the force of a naturalized womanhood. The authority of this performed archetype is one of wisdom and spirit that cherishes, sustains, and fosters growth, justice, and rebirth in the form of transformation or progress: biological-cum-cultural in all social places of transformation and rebirth (Jung, [1972] 2003, p. 15). In a poetics of the civil ponytail, the 1980s women who entered the workforce in great numbers were on the move. They were brave and “strong-willed like the statue of liberty.” They kept their ponytails regardless of “tailwind or headwind” to “gallop in new ways” (Aftenposten, April 20, 1988a, p. 12), proudly. They denaturalized inequality and naturalized equality through imitations embodying egalitarianism.

Moving with Practicality

The practicalities of the dual-career household and its many “tailwinds and headwinds” force a reevaluation of our plausible limits and prospects of modern living. Such interpretive work can kindle social movements that stir deep antipathies and sympathies, producing personal reactions that weave biographies out of public culture (Kurakin, 2019; Mast, 2019; Obeyesekere, 1981).

At the advent of the twenty-first century, women’s confidence had become fashionably sexy. Cooking, too, we are told, “if you just make a meal out of whatever is in the fridge.” The ponytail is hot, “but just for women. Women who attend the sport activities of their sons are sexy. A man that is able to converse with a three-year-old is sexy, too” (VG, August 29, 1995). Women are on the move, and dinners need to be served quickly, before or in the aftermath of the family’s second shift, as the modern woman rushes off to exercise or taxi her young ones back and forth to the soccer pitch. The material swing of the ponytail swiftly moves through time and space to attain a half-life filled with movement. The diversity of its movements portrays a uniform variety of identities that imbue and are imbued by a myth of the epic battle for equilibrium in social-cum-personal equality.

The run-of-the-mill, long-haired woman travels the many “rush hours of a family with kids.” Practically minded, she wears a practical ponytail. She may not be a pioneer like the pilot Fagerhøy, exuding public bravery, but she feels at home managing the humdrum rush hours of everyday life that “extend from bathroom preparations to breakfast consume. Then off into the rush traffic to rest at work for a while,” working up the energy to return to a second shift that ends not a second before the lights are out. When the kids are down, the parents are down. Amid the gridlocks and rushes, women consider whether “this is a day for skirts, or a day for pants and a ponytail with a yellow or a red ribbon?” (Aftenposten, June 22, 1988b).

By far, sports are not the only context of strenuous physical activity; there is also family life. In the fashion magazine Allers the red-haired Beate is given advice for a “fun make-over.” When it comes to hairstyles, Beate is open to just about everything, but considering her very active lifestyle, “she has to be able to put it [her hair] in a ponytail” (Allers, October 2, 2017). No doubt Beate is one of those woman moving quickly through Norwegian work and family rush hours.

With all this ordinary daily stress and the compulsion to be active and keep kids active and healthy, what is the value added by all these ponytailed girls and women? That depends on your outlook. Put differently, an article in the newspaper Bergens Tidene asks: What is the value of all these sour socks?

Mom’s car is loaded with children, back and forth to practice. The only thing she is left with is a load of sweaty clothes. Even so, Sylvi Ebbesvik thinks that she is going to miss all those clammy socks. Every week she does about fifteen loads in the washer. Sour football socks, soaked handball jerseys, and dirty shorts. ‘I have no idea about how many hours I spend on the sports of my four children. I have no interest in knowing.’

Sylvi is always at the ready.

When Helen broke her leg at a tournament in Sweden, both she and I were happy that Mom was around to give some comfort and care. We have a big car, so we are often encouraged to come along. ‘I do not mind,’ Sylvie says while putting a wild lock back in the ponytail of her game-ready daughter, Maylinn. Sylvie knows what she is doing; she used to be an athlete herself. (Bergens Tidene, October 4, 2000, p. 25)

In Norway and many other Western nations, the purported benefits of being physically active and the gains made by girls and women entering sports is the value added by ponytails and sour socks. Fathers and mothers with the privileged opportunity to support their children’s leisure activities do so with the idea that this is socially and physically healthy.19 The Norwegian government supports this idea, as long as competition does not undermine sports’ healthy mission.20 As discussed in preceding chapters, a healthy girl or woman is one who enjoys the energy of freedom of movement and the consequent power to create and participate in democratic renewal. This power may be found in the ordinary woman’s humdrum navigation of mundane rush hours, or in the remarkable movements of the pioneer who breaks new barriers and helps us make political sense of equality.

In the late 1980s, Aftenposten (June 27, 1988c) described Iona Brown, lead violinist in the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, as follows: “With eminent play, electrifying leadership, a ponytail with a ribbon, cascading dresses, and a touch of English boarding school, [Brown] plays Mozart three days to the end. She is about to make a career in the U.S.A. The career that so many dream of, but seldom live.”

Later that same year, this ponytailed virtuoso is back in the news, now at the Mozarteum (Mozartiana) in Salzburg.

The ambiance is intense, focused. On the stage are the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and Iona Brown, on their until now most important tour. Salzbourg on a dark November evening. Only the lights over the podium are lit in the Mozartium, a revelation of a concert hall in ivory, yellow and gold. Shiny mirrors and gleaming chandeliers. About twenty tired strings [strykere], some in concert uniform, others in ruffled sweaters and sneakers. In the middle of the half circle, Iona Brown, the world-renowned orchestra leader. Energetically throwing her ponytail. Dynamic strokes on her Stradivarius [violin]. Her eyes are dark, she is dark underneath her eyes, so fatigued, her whole body is sore. They are in Mozart’s city of birth. Music lover’s mecca. (Aftenposten, December 17, 1988d, p. 13)

The orchestra has practiced for days on end, and when the show begins, “Iona Brown plays as if she summons the devil into the rock [Per Gynt conjured the devil into a nut]. She lures the fairytale prince from his hiding.” The audience is appreciative, but there is no wild applause, Brown confesses. Her colleagues nod. “They value her because of her emotional and engaging music—and that she never, ever, takes the easy road.”

Some days later, the Norwegian orchestra must wait to enter and prepare for their concert, as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra occupies the stage. Iona Brown, too, is barred from the dressing room: “King Karajan is resting.” Herbert von Karajan, one of the greatest conductors of the twentieth century, is napping in the dressing room. “Iona Brown stands with her red dress in her arms, waiting. For half an hour, she waits to dress and for Karajan to leave the room, drowsy” (Aftenposten, December 17, 1988d, p. 13).

That night, the concert is a great success. This time an avalanche of applause washes over the orchestra. A new “king” is born, one who is never drowsy and never rests. One who has the magnetizing power to conjure the devil, attract the prince, and unleash an avalanche. This new king is a ponytailed woman who moves through rhythms of progress and in the romantic genre of the hero, straight into the very heart of the music mecca itself.

Institutional settings also shape the meaning of hair.21 Sport and music events, for example, call for different self-expressions and interpretations than experiences at a restaurant or the hospital. In the case of the musician, this virtuoso violinist, her expressive performance sparked an animated interpretation of her “musical self,” her “musical community,” and social life (McCormick, 2009, 2017). A ponytail, racing through fashion, youthful play, “gendered progress,” and music venues, prompts the intersection of gender with all these operative contexts. Brown’s ponytail, interpreted by the journalist, is charged with broad social meanings concerning gender (remember, men have ponytails too) and musical performance.

Brown’s perseverance is twofold. Her ponytail, center stage at the Mozarteum, resolutely waves a polite but spirited effort against patriarchs and old kings, a war waged with a violin as weapon that can trigger an avalanche of change. If the journalist is successful, a civil imitation spreads through our psychological identification with Brown, setting off magnetic vibrations. These pulses are made as the aesthetic surface of Brown’s swinging ponytail, her violin, and red dress fuse and allow us to see her spirited toil and fight against the social facts of a dying monarchy as beautiful, morally prestigious, even useful and rational. The ponytail becomes an admired object, and its imitations magnetize through the gestures that accompany the imitator who achieves its respect.22 This prestigious imitation is about hierarchies and hegemonies that in democratic cultures are open to criticism and the democratic spirits of their time.23

Whether Brown’s myth-like and transformative power is deemed feminist or not, it is hard to disregard that its dramatic force is propelled by a deeply felt egalitarian undercurrent. Ahmed (2017, p. 3) described feminist actions and imitations with similar imagery, as “ripples in water, a small wave, possibly created by agitation from weather; here, there, each movement making another possible, another ripple, outward, reaching.” Despite the many feminist waves to ride and feminist narratives to consider, the agitation made by the old kings of injustice and the surge of a spirit of civil repair—frightening as these might be to some—makes the ponytail a deeply felt materiality in the public sphere. In a music hall event, the ripples of everyday democratic ambitions and social progress take on a dramatic and reinforced baseline.

Thirty-year-old Jun Elin Wiik from Oslo’s eastside, Ammerud, provides yet another ponytailed success story. She is the first Norwegian woman in 25 years to earn a master’s degree (hovedfag) in theoretical astrophysics. In 1993, she became a

French docteur ès sciences. An astronomical accomplishment; studying the temperatures on the sun’s corona for years. Theoretical physics is not just an immensely time-consuming discipline, but also one of the most difficult. The young woman with a bouncy ponytail and informal jeans nevertheless seams undaunted after light-years of studies, leaning over thick books and patiently standing behind telescopes while she is trying to give us a very, very popularized version of what this is all about. ‘When I meet people outside my milieu and they hear about what I do, they usually reply quickly “Ah, OK,” and then move frenetically on to another topic, like cars and such.’ (Aftenposten, May 22, 1993, p. 24)

After defending her thesis in Paris, Wiik moved on too, with a stipend, to the Netherlands to work for the European Space Agency on a new project that Norway also participates in. A reporter asked, “How is it being a woman in what must surely be a male-dominated clique of Kepler’s and Copernicus’ heirs?”

‘“Here in France, women are in fact more accepted than at home [in Norway], at least where I am,’ confirms the docteur with sparks flying from her eyes” (Aftenposten, May 22, 1993, p. 24).

For anyone knowledgeable about the seemingly motionless work of the researcher, the subtle intersection of the symbolic layers of the ordinary girl in informal jeans with those of the active, moving girl with a bouncy ponytail might appear obvious. However, this meaning-making process also links codes of everyday life to the abstract moralities of Wiik’s accomplishments. Her social drive to be the first woman in 25 years to earn an advanced degree in theoretical astrophysics must surely have clashed with gender barriers. Her achievement ignites a spark in her eyes, glaringly visible to those present and to those who read the journalist’s account of how her performance oscillates between the poles of immobile traditions and moving breakthroughs to magnetize our lived myths. It is not for everyone, yet quite impressive when achieved with gusto and a sigh of relief blowing those wild bangs that escape the practical ponytail that holds her hair together.

Culture may blow health and life into hair, meaningful practicalities may induce a ponytail to swing, and social progress may cause it to wave, but unlike other animals, humans cannot make the hair on their heads stand on end. Human hair lacks “feelers,” or vibrissae, and strong enough muscles, or arrector pili, to accomplish this feat. According to Morris (1987, p. 26), a cat’s whiskers are tactile, and many animals can bristle with rage. The best we can do are goosebumps. Nevertheless, as the accounts in this book demonstrate, humans can be moved by hair and its movement. The ponytail materializes a cultural kinetics whose discursive forms we can sense in its aesthetic surface. Meaning-making processes imbue the ponytail with a fusion of observed social life and experienced material, social, and individual movements. Our feelings regarding the tightly secured ponytail’s swing can therefore be poetically recaptured; so can the anticipation of its release.

Gender barrier breaker Ann-Kristin Olsen served as Norway’s first female police inspector, then first female police chief, and then first female governor of Longyearbyen, Spitsbergen. In an Aftenposten interview, she was asked to characterize the average Spitsbergen resident.

They are explosive, temperamental, kind of like the Nordlending [those living in northern Norway]. Right-from-the-gut type of honesty. One of my first days out shopping for shoes, the clerk evaluated my choice and told me that ‘those shoes are not bad, even for someone with such big feet.’

Those big feet have carried her through challenge after challenge. But what did she want to be growing up?

[Olsen] releases her ponytail and tells us with a smile that can melt an iceberg: ‘I wanted to study art and psychology and become an important critic. So I traveled to California, with all my ambitions.’ However, it was law that eventually was her place in the world. (Aftenposten, December 24, 1995, p. 17)

Olsen’s hair seamlessly weaves together biography, social expectations, health, and practicalities. The release of her hair symbolically and materially displays the two sides of her natural, untampered self: bound and unbound, like the ponytail itself. Her hair release not only allows her to join in social life in another way than her ponytail, it changes the context and the audience. The ponytail’s iconic charge is drawn not only from its progressive power, fashionable spirit, and youthful customs, but also from what the ponytail is not, where it seemingly comes from, and where it may soon return. This is its performative half-life.

Atop Olsen’s head, well-balanced by her physically strong and progressively resilient body, swings a ponytail, that when released also spurs “a smile that can melt an iceberg.” Her visage should serve to meet the rugged, icy nature of Spitsbergen and its forthright, candid inhabitants. In other words, the ponytail is reducible to neither the visual or immediately sensory, nor the verbal. This icon materializes a symphony of deeply contradictory anticipations. While the ponytail binds hair to free movement, its release frees hair to enable and bind the actions of the wearer and of those who watch, like Medusa’s hair. The movement of putting long hair into a ponytail is a meaningful practicality with a feminist undercurrent that implies “I’m busy, I’m working, and need my hair OFF my face.” At the same time, its release assures us that the woman archetype can, at any time, break out and release another true and natural self.24 Moving with practicality, the “modern woman” oscillates to generate the forces that root practical and social movements in the movements of her hair.

Constrictions and Expansions in Ideological Boundaries

We are swimming in meaning now: long hair bound and released on the heads of pioneers and everyday heroes. If we think of the ponytail simply as conventional, and ignore its symbolic structuring, its proliferation across society will seem random (Spillman, 2020). But when we reveal its mythic structure, we see that this object “haunts consciousnesses” even though it “fluctuates so much and is so contradictory that its unity is not first discerned” (Beauvoir, [1949] 2011, p. 166).

Actually, this noise is comforting and makes the myth’s symbolism deeply felt through the everyday chaos of our natural and social landscapes (Leach, 1969; Lévi-Strauss, 1967). It roots myth in the conventional ponytail and charges it—as a total social fact—with a half-life that can maneuver our moral, natural, and economic realities (Mauss, [1950] 1966). Like myth, the ponytail does not have a life of its own, but must be performed: condensed and placed into current social life in ways that draw some in and push others away from its truths (Alexander, 2004; Luengo & García-Marín, 2020; Sonnevend, 2016, 2020). As the ponytail haunts our consciousness through the totality of its movements and meanings, it easily becomes a practical means to maneuver gender power.

By the early 1990s, many gender barriers had been broken, yet many others had been revealed. The women, a young reporter announced, who promoted the youth culture that shunned all over 30 are now almost 50, “but they have not parked in a museum. They are still part of a trend-setting generation. And are again wanted by the fashion and model industry.” Forty-nine-year-old Kristij Krüger is one of those women “born into rebellion” who “refuse to stay invisible.” She is at once “girly and mature. Her dark hair that was waist long when she was a top model, is put up in a short ponytail. Her skin is smooth and her eyes are just as expressive as they were in her days as a top model. She looks a little bit less shallow, perhaps, her gleam is stronger.” Krüger, who now makes a good living, fought many battles on the women’s liberation front at a time when models were deemed to be complete idiots (VG, September 26, 1993, pp. 29–31).

Economic success is an easy way to story achievements in modernity.25 Unsurprisingly, economic success also influences how we understand the practicality of the ponytail. Under the headline, “Double Shift-working X-supermodel,” Dagbladet reports on Vendela Kirsebom Thommessen’s take on motherhood, her career, her book, and her future plans that do not include putting her career on hold (Fig. 1).

Her book is ready and she is planning her very own Vendela-collection with products for both mother and child. Her book is about how women can deal with the difficult combination of being a mother and a career woman. ‘We should be sexy, skilled in homemaking, good mothers, good wives, and have a great career, too. The pressure is huge. I struggle every day,’ Vendela declares, before adding that the book will also be about how to get in shape after pregnancy, and that the book is going to be funny. ‘My career is important to me, even though the kids comes first. I try to work in the evenings, that is, if I do not collapse in the bed of one of the kids. I would really like to continue my career at the same time as spending time with my kids, and thus a nine-to-four-job is no good. Now I can make my own schedule,’ she says. The 34-year-old is sitting in her favorite café at Vindern, Oslo, and knows the chef and the waiter. Her hair is in a ponytail and her world-famous face is free from makeup. Last year Vendela Kirsebom Thommessen earned 23 million Swedish kroners which places her on top of the high-earners list. She is soon about to pick up her mother flying in from Sweden. Vandela also takes care of Julie who did not feel like going to the kindergarten today. Then there is the fact that her fridge stopped working. ‘The home is a mess,’ she admits. (Dagbladet, April 11, 2001, p. 26)

Fig. 1
A photograph of the side view of a businesswoman speaking on a mobile phone.

The practical businesswoman. (Picture credit: jacoblund via Getty Images)

Full size image

Part of the appeal of some of these gendered success stories resides in the idea of strong and powerful women who owe their success to the progressive work of earlier generations. Proponents of second-wave feminism often label this story as post-feminist (McRobbie, 2009). There is no longer the same need, or any need at all, for feminist reform or state support as women can now support themselves in “pursuing self-transformation via consumption, self-help, and the continual ‘making over’ of the self.” (Pickren, 2018, p. 577; see also Rutherford, 2018; Tyler, 2013). For example, journalist Ingeborg Heldal, a program host for the Norwegian broadcaster NRK, depicts a post-feminist narrative that takes a clear stand against “the old” second-wave feminism of her mother’s generation.26

She is 178 centimeters slim and with a black-colored hair in a ponytail. ‘My mom tells me I am pushing the women’s movement back 150 years. I think most girls are feminist, in some way, but I think the wrong persons represent feminism. I cannot identify with the feminists participating in debates. They are too extreme. I am much more for a sexy feminism. Girl Power!’ She punches a hole in the air with her fist. ‘We must have equal pay, and I am not that naïve that I do see how important the women’s movement has been, but that should not turn gender roles into something negative,’ Heldal says. (VG, June 25, 2000, p. 19)

Filippa Kihlborg, director of the fashion fairytale Filippa K womenswear company, started out in 1993 and made 1.7 million Swedish kroners that first year. The 1996–1997 season had revenues of over 60 million.

[Filippa wears] black cotton jeans, simple short-sleeved top and New Balance shoes. Her light [blond] hair is put in a small ponytail. No makeup. In the room next to us, her three-and-a-half-year-old is chattering. Her company is an adventure. ‘It is growing. Everything is growing fast. Extremely fast. Nevertheless, even though fashion is a lifestyle, we still maintain control and an overview.’

And kids, the journalist states.

‘I would never put family to the side because of fashion success,’ Kihlborg answers. ‘All the girls at Filipa K value family and children, very highly. We are not fashion-idiots trapped for life in a materialist grinder.’

While Filipa gives off a surface impression of simplicity and normalcy, this new Swedish fashion queen radiates pride and strength. (Bergens Tidene, May 3, 1998)

Filippa seems, in many ways, to represent a modern self-made femininity; she is bright and beautiful, a leader and nurturer, autonomous and still connected to her family.27 The modern obsession with growth is balanced by a criticism of the “materialist grinder” that can, if you are not careful, turn natural childbearing women into capitalist femmes fatales who leave behind their natural, no-make-up, simplicity and the normalcy of long-haired expectations. Paradoxically, this consciousness that Kihlborg represents is enabled by a privileged control and overview in a company and family that is growing and growing. Undoubtedly she faces struggles and her house, just like Thommessen’s, is probably sometimes a mess. By no means do the economically privileged perform anything else than other hard-working, natural women.

However, the post-feminist narrative clearly is not equally available to everyone and can be utterly unhealthy to those who overly conform to its ideals of self-regulated health (Arruzza et al., 2019; Crawford, 1980, 2006). Not everyone can skip a day of work just because their daughter does not feel like going to kindergarten, and most of us do not have chefs and waiters at upscale, chic places that call us by name, like Vendela Kirsebom Thommessen. Not everyone has a lifestyle or the resources to keep their 50-year-old complexion as smooth as when they were 30, like Krüger. While “state feminism” may be more boring than the glossy covers of post-feminist magazines, not all women in Norway’s highly gender-segregated employment market can afford to be neoliberally exciting. Nevertheless, they carry out some of the most demanding, least valued jobs of our society. Their work supports the healthcare system, steadily downsized by new public management (Ingstad, 2010). We applaud them for fighting COVID-19, but fail as a society to economically reward them (Sonnevend, 2020). As we trace the ponytail’s intersection with feminist narratives, we see and feel this hypocrisy that celebrates past feminist accomplishments while refusing to take its many lessons to heart. Through interpretations by journalists and their interviewees, the ponytail is imbued with post-feminist intents and senses, as well as social-democratic gusto, a process of symbolic layering that both constricts and expands the ideological boundaries of our lives.

Changing gender norms also constrict and expand how we think about women’s public success. Ask, for instance, Beathe Hals, the Norwegian top chef and first woman champion in the gender-mixed chefs’ competition, who “is a humble champion with smiling artistry and a tight ponytail.” Like in other Norwegian journalistic reports, Hals was asked about gender barriers in her work life and why women seldom reach the elite level of chef artistry.

Women do not show up. There is a tenacious myth that only men are master chefs. Girls must dare to take the field and not be afraid to compete with the boys. There are many girl chefs out there, but it is only the boys that show off. (Aftenposten, October 10, 1998, p. 37)

The ponytail opens an existential realm with the power to simultaneously constrain and diversify the practicalities of the modern woman. In this complex landscape, we apply our critical interpretive capacities.28 Elly Joys, age 29, for example, is a market director for the record label PolyGram, in Norway, who “wears a ponytail, tights and a long, knitted sweater over her jeans shirt.” Asked if she feels she has to dress in clothes that are “not really you” because she works in a male-dominated occupation, Joys says the business is relaxed, dress-wise anyway, and that she is “a chameleon.” But as she needs to keep her distance from the groupie identity, “fishnet stockings under a miniskirt is just out of the question,” she says (Dagbladet, March 12, 1996, p. 8).

The ponytail does not eliminate workplace boundaries and negotiations that require maneuvering double standards of tolerance and shaming.29 Are hyper-feminine women less credible as leaders? the reporter asks.

“It should not be that way,” Joys replies. “Intelligence does not drop as adornments go up. To me, they [hyper-feminine women] have less credibility simply because they exude something that I am not familiar with” (Dagbladet, March 12, 1996, p. 8). The sexualized stereotype of the groupie is nothing the ponytailed Joys wants to be linked with as she maneuvers a male-dominated profession.

Despite feminist waves breaking, even clashing in the natural and social landscapes of Norway, the ponytail stays afloat. Joys shows us that it transcends varied femininities and, along with Hals, demonstrates that the icon can persevere amid the winds of male bravado—despite the commodification of girl power and its post-feminist enactment by the likes of broadcaster Ingeborg Heldal, and despite social life becoming individualized and personhood considered an individualized achievement of choice-making.30 Skillfully maneuvered by Filippa Kihlborg, a non-commodified, lived girl power and ideas about democratic femininities also exist alongside those that are economically hierarchized. Feminist literature can help us evaluate these various femininities that are not always explicitly feminist. The men and women described in this book are not all loudly declaring their stance or being feminist killjoys (Ahmed, 2017). They are living lives in feminist-influenced times in which they deliberate conscious and unconscious ideas of justice, some of which are boldly second-wave feminist.

With a twist of imagination, we follow millennial youth at the annual March 8 procession commemorating International Women’s Day.

March! Red socks, women emblems, bold grins on our way to school on a sunny March 8th in Trondheim. Three girls with an attitude, with springy ponytails in their necks. No tight band can restrain these strands of hair. Here are loose manes and free thoughts. We are 17 and our mothers’ daughters. A couple of teasing looks from our schoolmates are parried with a modern women’s posture. Does anyone think, in their wildest mind, that we are gender equal in this country? Not to say the world! Statistics, research, and politics are smashed down on the table. You go live with your 364 days, you men. This day is ours and we are budding as fast as the willow. Out of the classroom marches three pairs of boots. Into the ladies room. Up goes the cork in that wine bottle, and a pleasurable giggle too. Hooky. Go home. Write on banners. Go to town. Fighting fit women. Parole and banners. Hard housewives and soft men. Equal pay. International solidarity. We carry the legacy of our grandmothers on a pedestal. The world is bigger than our streets and equality is as young as we are. As we march, we playfully catch the man of our dreams out the corner of our eyes and laugh. We are girls and we like it. Freed from almost all. From vanity. From expectations, and prejudice; from ourselves and from others. Before the night is over, one has left the crime scene. Another has fled the country. The third has left her boyfriend. March. (Nordlys, March 10, 2001, p. 45)

Not everyone holds the banner high, but being present is political in positionality, and “existence as such becomes a form of political labor” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 113). “Creative women” who advance into new terrain, a male-dominated terrain, that is, steadily draw media attention.

  • Berit Svendsen, who has a leadership position at the multinational telecommunications company Telenor, participates in the committee that distributes the European Union’s funds for information technology research. In both roles, she is “guaranteed to turns heads with her contagious laugh and long, light blonde ponytail” (Aftenposten, April 7, 2002, p. 31). She is described as a real tech head, educated in hard math and physics.

  • Unni Eriksen, program host for Newton, the science television show for children on NRK, hopes she will be a visible example that “not only boys can do natural sciences! In chemistry, the ratio is about 50-50. But in a lot of the other natural sciences it is much worse, she says and worriedly shakes her dark ponytail” (Adresseavisen, September 13, 2002, p. 7).

  • Trained hairdresser Bente Otterstad, 19, from Rena chooses to put away her scissors and pick up an assault rifle. Among 500 applicants for a spot in the military police division trained at Sessvolmoen camp, she is one of 170 women who want to try out, which means demonstrating the ability to run, swim, do push-ups and pull-ups, and also display leadership abilities. After she makes the cut, a journalist asks if she thinks there is an additional pressure on girls in this boy’s world. “Not really,” she says. “We know we have made it without any form of quota. Some might think we are not strong enough. Fine, we do not run as fast as some boys, but those attitudes just provide extra motivation to show that we can handle the same situations as well as the boys. I get to show some other sides of myself, some sides that might not have been so visible before.” She throws herself on the well-made bed and loosens her ponytail, and says, “Mom is pretty shocked about how neat and tidy I have become” (Østlendingen, September 21, 2002, p. 10).

The media introduces these white majority women with ponytails to the public sphere as female role models for young women and girls. Although the women presented in this book all wear ponytails, few will disagree that the range of women personalities and occupations is diverse and diversifying. It seems somewhat deceitful, as a society, to first ask for women role models and then criticize women pioneers for not being a second-wave ideal feminist who opposes long-haired femininity.

It seems pressing to underscore that the ponytailed women of Norway, dating from 1945 to the early twenty-first century, are to a large extent majority white. This does not mean there are no other ponytailed women in the Norwegian public sphere, but they are harder to find and perhaps their bodies matter less in the construction of the civil core or normativity (Alexander, 2006; Butler, 1993). There might be many explanations for this observation, but when it comes down to the wire, diversity and diversification (among other practices of representation and recognition) are missing. However, processes of “diversification” and inclusion, Lund and Voyer (2019, p. 198) argued, are not politically neutral, but tend to reinforce dominant civil ideals that can extend and constrict the civil sphere “from the view that there is one superior way to enact values.” This counts for the practicality of the ponytail as well, and for how the Norwegian press depicts ethnic minorities in Norway, not to say how minority women see, feel, and story themselves.

For instance, Soudabeh Alishahi is a writer who fled Iran and its censorship. “When I started writing in Norway, without being censored, I could not believe it,” she said. In her writings, she included women characters without a hijab, which the Iranian censoring committee demanded be revised and deleted. In opposition, Alishahi and colleagues tried to fund an independent literary union. Two of her accomplices were shot, and many more, like Alishahi, were arrested and tortured.

Her life as a leftist thinker and writer was not safe in Iran, and she fled the country. In the Norwegian winter,

without a hijab, the snow settles in the dark hair that Alishahi has loosely assembled in a ponytail. The camera is directed at her just before the dark winter night swallows the day. ‘It is very nice not to wear a hijab. I think 95 percent of the youth in Iran hates waring a hijab. They do not use it at home and all the youth drink alcohol. Almost no Iranians in Norway use a hijab,’ Alishahi explains. (Klassekampen, December 7, 2002)

With white snow in her hair, ponytailed Alishahi relates both a symbolic and geographic journey. She (and the journalist) normalizes Iran to the Norwegian public, showing them she is not so different from the majority in Norway. The Iranian youth value free speech, do not wear a hijab, and drink alcohol, not unlike those teens that we encountered in Chap. 4 about ponytailed youth. Alishahi’s civil capacities are assessed according to her ability to perform adequately in a civil society defined by a majority core.31 The ponytail is iconic as it draws us into the heart of this particular Western world.

Considering the inequalities that surround journalists, it is tempting to suggest that their often positive depictions of the ponytail conspire to mask injustice. A critical reader might claim that I conspire with them. But my aim is to show what makes the ponytail iconic and how feminist undercurrents possibly charge and shape its many meanings. While feminists residing in various camps and riding different feminist waves may disagree on the actual and preferred content of the women’s movement, I study how the practicalities of the sometimes not so practical ponytail are shaped by and shape processes of gendered democratization and justice. In the Norwegian public sphere, it is a point of honor to place gender equality at the basis of democracy. Like all utopian scenarios, this mythic construction enthralls as much as it provokes annoyance at gender-blind idealism. However, idealism and criticism are nothing less than foundational to democracy. Norwegians might—with a hint of “racial superiority”—celebrate equality and self-righteousness one day and, in their own peculiar way, self-loathe and criticize themselves the next (Witoszek, 1998, p. 151).32

Therefore, myth is not a falsity that depletes social life of meaning; rather, myth places the richness of mundanity at a distance and holds it at its disposal. Myths are nourished by this tamed richness (Barthes, [1957] 2009a). Myth hides and comes to life in this richness. It finds a third way out. Myth becomes the compromise. “Driven to having either to unveil or liquidate the concept, myth will naturalize it” (Barthes, [1957] 2009a, p. 154). Thus, a ponytailed practicality naturalizes the presence of the long-haired young woman in male-dominated occupations, in maintaining a dual-career home, and in pioneering new gendered grounds. The ponytail can radiate progress and social movement as its wearers break through old traditions, sometimes in bold, unapologetic ways and sometimes in verbally quiet ways that are loud with the body politics of positionality.

We use feminist codes and narratives to interpret and fuse these symbolic layers of the women’s physical, organizational, and social movements. Some see ponytailed women as living in a post-feminist reality. Others take their place on the barricades, fists raised, ponytails waving, urging progress toward social justice. As a total social fact, the ponytail becomes an icon to feel, see, and enact meaningful oscillations between this complex totality of modernity (e.g., Mauss, [1950] 1966). Therefore, it is never apolitical, but evokes and materializes a set of civil virtues and social boundaries seen from the viewpoint of a core group (Alexander, 2006, 2008; Alexander et al., 2020).

The progress or standstill of gender progress is evaluated and felt according to majority Norwegian ways: through the ponytailed woman in that Twin Otter plane and other women entering male-dominated occupations; through the everyday hero oscillating between the public and private spheres; through the ponytailed women out hustling kings backstage at the Mozartium to create an avalanche on stage and in society. The ponytailed other can experience this success—sometimes measured in the economic gains of women entrepreneurs, sometimes in the social hustle of guerilla leaders on a teacher’s strike—if only she allows its white snow to settle in her dark hair (Figs. 2 and 3).

Fig. 2
A list of ponytailed practicality. 1. Naturalized progression. Denaturalized barriers. 2. Movement. Standstill. 3. Neoliberal growth. Socialist reform.

The codes and symbolic layers used to interpret and enact practical womanhood

Full size image
Fig. 3
Three spiky circles are labeled as follows. 1. Movement. Standstill. 2. Growth. Reform. 3. Progression. Barriers.

The codes and symbolic layers of the practical hair

Full size image

Notes

  1. 1.

    See also Lukes (1973) and Smith (2020).

  2. 2.

    Deep meanings are felt through successful performances (Alexander, 2004, 2017; Goffman, 1959; V. Turner, 1982) and objects that attract and repel (Barthes, [1957] 2009b; Goffman, 1976; Smith, 2008). Ideas of rationality itself are the results of meaning-making processes (Alexander, 1995, 2006; Larsen, 2016; Spillman, 2012).

  3. 3.

    First-wave feminism focused on overturning legal inequalities and increasing public visibility and power (nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). The second wave disclosed how cultures oppress women and exposed capitalism’s androcentrism (1960s and 1970s). The third wave continued with a heightened emphasis on emotions, individualism, and diversity (1990s and early 2000s). Since 2010, a fourth wave keeps the idea of diversified inequality, but embraces new social media for activism (Dean & Aune, 2015).

  4. 4.

    Arruzza et al. (2019); Fraser (2013); Gill (2016); Gill and Scharff (2013); McRobbie (2009).

  5. 5.

    Today, some critical scholars see women—especially young women—as ideal neoliberal subjects (Pickren, 2018, p. 577). Rutherford (2018) argued that the discipline of psychology has fused with neoliberalism to equal emancipation with consumerism and personal responsibilities in a post-feminist modernity.

  6. 6.

    It should be mentioned that critical scholars have pointed out that a double entanglement of positive and negative aspects is central to the false experience of freedom and a mental resolve that destroys women’s feminist awareness and action (Arruzza et al., 2019; Butler, 1990; Gill, 2016; Gill & Scharff, 2013; McRobbie, 2009).

  7. 7.

    In Norway, the state is a strong facilitator and locus of civil rights, autonomy, and debates about the moral society (Sciortino & Stack, 2019). Norwegian news media, if such a generalization serves a purpose, ranges from a variety of news desks, tabloid to leftist, that contrast sharply with the liberal media model of American media. The Nordic version is typified as a democratic corporatist media model (Allern & Pollack, 2019) that prefers consensual solutions and cooperation between its key stakeholders which are the state, media, communication industries, and the public (Syvertsen et al., 2014). Of course, increased digitization, deregulation, and neoliberal forces have reshaped Norwegian media, as well as their legitimacy as democratic agents that inform, educate, and entertain. Nonetheless, newspapers are still considered a collective good that preserves diversity in information by combining the liberal, social democratic values worthy of continued financial state support (Engelstad & Larsen, 2019; Larsen, 2010). Although the media receives state and private funds, it keeps its highly valued autonomy to criticize both the state and the market, with the state acting only as a helper in this “semi-autonomous civil public sphere” (Engelstad & Larsen, 2019, p. 45).

  8. 8.

    Political life is a process of contests and alliances played out through performances (Alexander, 2011, 2015) and colored by dramatic narratives (Smith, 2008; Smith & Howe, 2015) about moral goods and evils.

  9. 9.

    After a first wave of feminist reform in formal rights and suffrage in the early twentieth century, a second wave of feminism formed in the early 1970s. Worldwide currents of radicalism empowered this surge as well as huge incomes from the oil industry that greatly expanded a welfare state that fused feminist movements and state power in ways crucial for equality (Hernes, 1987; Schiefloe, 2012). The welfare state’s explosive growth also bred new occupational opportunities for women as antidiscrimination and employment policies promoted gender equality in the public sector and in public committees (Engelstad & Larsen, 2019, pp. 53–54). Extensive expansions in family policies and social security, as well as a proliferation of kindergartens, schools, and retirement homes, provided work opportunities in occupations that came to be typically dominated by women (Birkelund & Petersen, 2012; Petersen et al., 2014; Vike, 2001).

  10. 10.

    In Norway, many of the most demanding and least rewarding jobs, like health care, are still dominated by women. About 10 percent more women than men study at the nation’s universities, and women make up 70 percent of the public sector workforce and dominate health and social work. The opposite is true for the private sector and construction, where men dominate by equally lopsided numbers (see SSB, 2020; Vike, 2001).

  11. 11.

    Alexander et al. (2019); A. Lund and Voyer (2019); S. Lund (2019); Skille and Broch (2019).

  12. 12.

    To do things with words involves performances and the use of performatives. Austin (1957, p. 133) argued, “The performative should be doing something as opposed to just saying something; and the performative is happy or unhappy as opposed to true or false.”

  13. 13.

    Giddens (1984, p. 284, in Larsen 2019, p. 34) speaks of a double hermeneutic process, and feminism as a great example, in which sociologists end up studying the societies that they have partly changed through public criticism.

  14. 14.

    Organizations and institutions are gendered spaces (Kvande, 2007).

  15. 15.

    The concept of doing gender is inspired by West and Zimmerman (1987).

  16. 16.

    Archetti (2003); Howell (1997).

  17. 17.

    Post-structural ideas (often tied to Foucault) have their strength in revealing how technologies, surveillance, and schooling direct moral self-regulation, but tells us little about “the human predicament of trying to live a life that one is somehow responsible for, but is in many respects out of one’s control” (Mattingly, 2012, p. 179).

  18. 18.

    https://bunadsgeriljaen.no/.

  19. 19.

    Anderson (2008); Dyck (2012); Johansen and Green (2017); Knoppers and Anthonissen (2003); Skille (2011); Strandbu et al. (2016).

  20. 20.

    Broch (2022); Helle-Valle (2008); Helsedirektoratet (2010).

  21. 21.

    Goffman (1959, 1986) argued that understandings of situations and frames are key to interpretations of meaningful micro-actions. Institutions, with specified goals and aims, shape meaning-making in more stable ways than what we can observe in everyday encounters (Broch, 2020; Spillman, 2012; Swidler, 2003). In studying hair, Obeyesekere (1981) argued that institutions, or the “operative context,” are key to understanding the meaning of hair.

  22. 22.

    Tarde (1903, p. 78).

  23. 23.

    Tarde (1903, pp. 229–233); Tocqueville (1945).

  24. 24.

    For another dramatic example of hair movements, see the 2019 Captain Marvel movie by Marvel Studios. First, as her superhero hood morphs off, her hair blows out and down in a dramatic release. Second, Marvel Studios enacts the symbolic relationship between identity and hair as Captain Marvel’s hair digitally ignites and rises in an aura as Carol Danver regains her true self and true hair (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LHxvxdRnYc).

  25. 25.

    Economic success and the idea that the accumulation of capital is available to everyone is one of our major forms to demonstrate achievement and designate rewards based on merits (Piketty, 2014, p. 334).

  26. 26.

    Gill (2016); McRobbie (2009); Scharff (2013).

  27. 27.

    Budgeon (2013).

  28. 28.

    Alexander (2006); Boltanski and Thévenot (2006); Jackson and Vares (2013).

  29. 29.

    Gendered boundary work and negotiations of gendered ideals is an active accomplishment of narration and action (Grundetjern, 2018; Jones, 2009). Often such maneuvering involves a double standard that in sexually liberal cultures often include declarations of tolerance and gender equality, as well as shaming and symbolic polluting of certain femininities (Fjær et al., 2015).

  30. 30.

    Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002); Giddens (1991); Pickren (2018); Rutherford (2018).

  31. 31.

    Civil capacities are “primordialized, and the ability to perform adequately in civil society is understood as restricted to those who possess the particular qualities of the core group” (Alexander, 2006, p. 460).

  32. 32.

    In Norway, narratives and self-presentations of conspicuous modesty and gender justice are prominent in shaping inclusion and exclusion dynamics (Broch & Skille, 2018; Daloz, 2007; Gullestad, 2001; Skille & Broch, 2019; Witoszek, 1998).