Charge

Abstract

A ponytail icon does not create consensus, but allows its wearers a multitude of symbolic options with which to join and recreate social life. 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 understood in the same way in all contexts. Symbolic codes operate and intersect to make the ponytail publicly meaningful and, at the same time, to allow different points of view. 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. Therefore, this book highlights our ability to adapt to diverse situations and our need for a multidimensional tactic to grasp the material meanings of the ponytail.

In this book, I have explored when and how the ponytail is visible in the Norwegian press. Through this process, we can map the cultural landscapes that journalists and interviewees instill in the ponytail, which make it an icon. What is more, this process shows how icons are made and how an object like the ponytail comes to life or is imbued with a half-life that gives it performative power, an agency to shape social life. Narratives are fused in ongoing interpretations and observations, and with abstractions like myth and folklore to make the ponytail a medium that arises from and descends upon the lived realities, social powers, and ideologies that we parody, imitate, and perform with utmost honesty. The ponytail shows us, makes us feel, and is used to explain social motives, movements, and ways of life for the modern (sports)woman.

In answering to a number of social facts and ways of life, the ponytail is a phenomenon I call “total” (Mauss, [1950] 1966, pp. 36–36). Included in such total phenomena are the gender inequalities and social power relationships that critical theorists document, yet the ponytail’s polyvocality, its materializing of several symbolic layers, makes it much more powerful than a never-ending, distorted identity project to fulfill or reject patriarchy (Connell, 1987, 2005; West & Zimmerman, 1987, 2009) or neoliberalism (Arruzza et al., 2019; Fraser, 2013; Gill, 2016; McRobbie, 2009). The ponytail’s symbolic layering is not reducible to social power via a false consciousness (Bourdieu, 1984, 1990), to a materialization of discursive ideology (Foucault, 1980), or to the rationality of a modernity emptied of meaning (Foucault, 1977). Rather, the ponytail’s symbolic capacity gives it a half-life, within the plausible limits of our cultures, that can be used meaningfully in diverse feminist and antifeminist ways to criticize and maneuver the social facts of gender.

In the critical theory literature about women’s sports, long hair and ponytails are explicated as reproducing a (white) femininity that undermines women’s agency and diversity across the West.¹ Supposedly empowered women athletes are really objects of a neoliberal economy that constructs “empowered agents, yet fails to dislodge the devaluing and commodification of women’s physical pursuits” (Toffoletti et al., 2018, p. 8). Indeed, the women discussed in this book—the empowered Mia Hamm in the flesh or as a Barbie doll, as well as Grete Waitz and her “caterpillar train” of 48,500 women running the streets on Oslo—are commodities to be consumed while turning a blind eye to structural inequality. There is much truth to this critique, which warrants calling for empirical proof. Indeed, we find proof, and much more.

Gender as a social power relation alone, whether inscribed in texts, images, or bodies, does not exhaust culture and our capacity to feel and reflect on its injustices. Rather, we use gender, its axiomatic truths, and glaring falsities—feminist codes and narratives, too—to sense and criticize, to construct and deconstruct social actions.² We cause these codes and symbolic layers to intersect in ways that naturalize and denaturalize deep existential questions and lived gendered inequalities.

The examples in this book show how journalists and interviewees portray specific worldviews, some with which we might disagree and some salute. Starting with the codes and symbolic layers empirically observable underneath the ponytail’s aesthetic surface (Alexander, 2007; Bartmanski & Alexander, 2012), I transferred explanatory control from the commanding social powers and ideologies of our time to the symbol systems that we use to create, sense, and criticize social power and ideologies (Geertz, 1973b). Thus, the way in which the ponytail shapes social life is revealed.

To answer the question “What makes the ponytail iconic?” I undertook a Durkheimian study to underline the enduring power of codes, myths, and narratives in modernity (Alexander, 2021). We are indeed restricted by social facts—legal rules, pragmatic necessities, the economy, collective movements, and expectations (Durkheim, [1901] 2014)—yet, we are active meaning makers who maneuver and shape these material and non-material constraints (Durkheim, [1912] 1995). In complex, fragmented modernity, meaning is not consensual, ritualistic, and totemic in the strict Durkheimian sense, but relies on our performances (Alexander, 2004) to weave cultural structures into actions and objects (Alexander, 2008, 2010). In certain instances, the ponytail enters our messy, complex, and fragmented mundanity with an iconic power that condenses the everyday symbolic clutter into a generative grammar with its own performative power. Borrowing from Mauss’s notion of a “total” phenomenon ([1950] 1966, pp. 36–36), I illustrated how the ponytail can be used in illuminate diverse situations, positionalities, and social facts, but also answers them. The ponytail is iconic as it offers a semiotic compass to navigate the meaningful poles of our many material and non-material facts.

To reach this conclusion, an important factor is the cultural structure and modality of myth, which show how the ponytail’s condensed grammar relies on a mundane messiness and diversity reflecting cluttered “real life” (E. Leach, 1969; Lévi-Strauss, 1966, 1967). Imitations of the ponytail, too, operate through a looping relationship in which fashion “attaches” to bodies to recreate—with less precision and greater diversity—the routine life, gestures, and customs they remodel (Mauss, [1934] 1973; Tarde, 1903). In rhythms of custom-fashion-custom imitations, and routine-myth-routine motivations, we distance the richness of our fragmented realities, and holding them at our disposal, weave their condensed form into imitations and objects that reshape these realities.

This forming of worldviews can be conscious or unconscious, but is neither true nor false, neither a lie nor a confession. Rather, the shaping of the ponytail into an icon and a mediator with a half-life can naturalize a compromise in the midst of irreconcilable options (Barthes, [1957] 2009, p. 154). Counterintuitively perhaps in modernity, this myth-like process creates a ponytail icon that is polyvocal, transformative, and performative. Symbolic layering gives the ponytail its power to maneuver and shape social life, but also to have a half-life that oscillates between customs and fashions, existential fears and hopes, injustice and justice, social facts and symbolic capacities.

Some readers may be suspicious of an analysis of gender transformation that relies on theories of semiotics, myths, and imitations. Scholars of gender have long sought to dismantle the cultural power of religious and cultural conservatives who reference traditions and myths as they obsess about status distinctions. In many ways, critical theorists argue that the reduction of discourse to semiotic systems and phenomenological worlds masks society’s more important economic realities and social facts, and that structures of meaning and archetypes provide nothing other than a naturalizing core of “functional stasis” to annihilate diversity (Bourdieu, 1990; Butler, 1990; Fraser, 2013; McRobbie, 2009). To the contrary, this book shows how meaning structures like feminist codes and narratives hold the power to denaturalize axiomatic gender truths and barriers and, thus, naturalize transformation and social change. Far from masking economic realities and social facts, semiotic systems are tools to maneuver and shape affective interactions with constraints—an interpretative achievement sought by ideologues, conservatives, and progressives alike (Alexander, 2006; Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006; Larsen, 2016). A ponytailed transformation—from the binding to the release of long hair, from the constraining to the emancipation of women—is one in which public and personal culture fuse in hair (E. R. Leach, 1958; Obeyesekere, 1981; Synnott, 1987).

As the ponytail oscillates between our historically dynamic and culturally varied social facts, it stretches far into a symbolic depth to materialize vitality and movement as a natural way of being. Biological hair itself grows, moves, disappears, and is easily shaped. The codes and symbolic layers that shape the ponytail go together with this and other body movements to make movement itself—progress, too, at times—part of this hairdo’s symbolic grammar. Change is embodied and naturalized while stasis is denaturalized within a symbol system of binaries that is also a framework for opposition and diversity. The binary codes of the ponytail icon do not imply consensus, “but the possibility of making understandable claims from very different points of view” (Spillman, 2020, p. 40).

Fig. 1

The codes and symbolic layers of the ponytailed experience

Hair is personal and public, both a symbol and an object that allows us to work the binaries of our shared culture. ³ As a material object, the ponytail’s aesthetic surface provides an experience (via the senses) of the moral associations, collective beliefs, and socially shaped emotions generated by three cultural structures: ponytailed expectations, health, and practicality. These codes allow men and women to interpret and perform “the modern woman” as meeting a heteronormative, long-haired custom, as exercising well-being in freedom and creativity, and as dealing with routine life in a continuous movement of naturalized progression and denaturalized gender barriers. Notably, we can re-interpret these three codes through a set of symbolic layers that tilt the modern woman in different “ideological” directions. The deep existential codes of expectations, health, and practicality are actively swayed by actors who demonstrate the joys and pains of altruistic or commercialized ideas of the practical, gendered self; of a freedom accomplished through democratic participation and lost in a noncommittal participation; of neoliberal success or socialist progress as the best strategy to meet ponytailed expectations (Fig. 1). Sometimes these layers of meaning snap into alignment to create a charged ponytail that, with its coded options, allows the cultural creation of individuality and exemplars with hierarchal and democratic aims. They can discriminate and draw boundaries, too, among ponytailed communities. Symbolic layering allows us to use the ponytail as a mediator as we, with deep affect, discuss the dark and bright, just and unjust, inclusive and exclusive sides of social life; who makes the better ponytailed role model; and how far a fashionable horsetail can be tweaked before it becomes dangerous. Via the senses, the ponytail can reveal when freedom goes astray and the many ways that gender equality can be achieved and challenged.

The invisible depth of cultural structures and the visible surface of the ponytail are analytically separate, yet empirically intertwined (Alexander, 2020). We sense, sometimes too late, that the seemingly ordinary ponytailed good girl next door is deceptively a femme fatale. In subtle ways, the ponytailed woman signals that she is subdued by social powers and the ideologies of her own and others’ destruction, but can also break free like a thoroughbred roaming the mountains or a frisky foal at play. The half-life of the ponytail reveals that its wearer balances tradition and modernity, her ontological frames creating the warmth of solidarity and the cold of conflict.

This sensuous engaging with the cultural pragmatics of modernity should not cloud our critical sense to counter social inequality, the naturalizing of injustice, or reproduction that annihilates diversity. Yes, in the accounts explored here the ponytail is white heteronormative, but in ways that enable its wearer and societies to root the sacral elements of gendered expectations, biological health, and pragmatic necessities in a body that also enters and shapes social justice. It shapes collective movements, lines of sporting women who caterpillar through the streets. It bends and remakes legal rules about appropriate hairstyles and identities in the military and what body practices and identities boy and girl hockey players can carry out. In the Norwegian public sphere, long-haired femininities that are the creations of a male gaze—like Barbie and Lara Croft—do not outnumber the women who march on March 8 or those who challenge the potential threat of being unconscious dolls. Indeed, gender progress is found among Liberal Right women politicians, celebrities seeking a sexier feminism, and high-earning women entrepreneurs who put children and families first. Progress, not to say the continued push for progress, also arises among celebrities who leave behind material gains to speak out for human rights, among Social Democratic youths and adults seeking to expand the limits of the civil sphere and welfare state, and among woman athletes who combine social advocacy even as they fly down the slopes breaking barrier after barrier. The ponytail fashion is a gendered display, imbued with beliefs about women’s health, that generates a myth-like femininity that fuses an energetic spirit in the embodiment of progress and emancipation. In public and private, its pragmatic value and utility accumulate in a social world of democratic hope for equality, allowing the modern woman-on-the-move to maneuver work and family life with speed and gusto. In these instances, the three symbolic layers of an altruistic versus a commercialized approach to gendered expectations, of a healthy democratic participation versus non-participation, and of neoliberal growth versus socialist reform shape different material-cum-democratic hopes and paths for the ponytailed woman.

While I set out to study the ponytailed woman athlete in Norway, any understanding of her social significance would be flawed without accounting for the ponytailed women who surround sports, enter sports, and emerge from sports. The sports and gender literatures indicate that sportswomen can either reproduce or challenge the univocal meaning systems of myths and archetypes, that is, female athletes learn, sadly, that “the feminine presentation of self” is the best way to garner social acceptance (Daniels, 2009, p. 145), and young women identify with pursuits of appearance rather than sports (Weitz, 2004, p. 72). For many, this might be true, but for others this analysis shows that the ponytail’s multiple layers of meaning allow women and men, girls and boys, to feel and meet gendered expectations in many more ways. Despite the uniform hallmark of the woman athlete, actors can feel and use the ponytail to negotiate diverse ideologies and identities. A ponytailed experience is polyvocal (not just in the dual sense of reproducing or resisting one or two chosen ideologies), and sports are microcosms that provide an interpretive opportunity to aesthetically transform social life, immerse oneself in its reconfiguration, and return to it (Geertz, 1973a).

From critical sports sociology, we know very well how sports allow a deep play with gender inequalities and social hair. From this book, we also recognize sports as a deep play with gender equality through semiotic-cum-phenomenological hair. When multiple codes and layers of the ponytail snap into alignment and radiate its sacral dimensions, we sense a heroic narrative (e.g., Smith, 2005). The journalists and interviewees included here consciously and unconsciously seem to understand the feminist undercurrent of this dramatic narrative. I have empirically shown this. I have hermeneutically rebuilt a fourfold structure holding codes of customs and fashions, of constraints and freedom in health, and of naturalized progression that transcends mundane practicalities, and last, a code devoted to the experience of life’s many fluctuations, progresses, and setbacks: movement.⁴ The ways in which these codes and layers are felt are contingent on context, actions, and symbolic interactions, and sports is the context in which movements are best brought to the attention of our sensuous engagement with social and bodily movement.

In various ways, the symbolic codes and layers of the ponytail involve movements in dealing with social facts through fashion cycles, aging, and social progress. These existential dimensions are enmeshed in deep cultural images of creation, vitality, and rebirth, as indicated throughout this book’s analyses. Despite the many paradoxes in Norwegian society, narratives and myths about democratic progress and gender equality lie at the heart of public discourse and state management (Engelstad & Larsen, 2019; Holst, 2009; Mjøset, 2017). There, too, sports are criticized as the last bastion of male dominance (Broch & Skille, 2018; Matthews & Channon, 2020; Messner & Sabo, 1992; von der Lippe, 2010). In sports, we witness numerous healthy and practically oriented women who, sometimes with a ponytail, make it visually clear that they have entered new and often male-dominated terrain. The ponytail brings various forms of women’s movement into sports.

While I started the book exploring analogies between humans and animals, sport provides another site from which to inductively draw examples of women who with progressive, determined strides, and despite setback after setback and new barriers to equal participation, keep going. Sports, as aesthetic experiences (Gumbrecht, 2006), add their own movements and rhythms to accounts of women barrier-breakers. Sports embody movement and provide sites in which rhythms materialize in the female body and then re-enter the public sphere. Here kinetic and cultural energy can fuse. In sports, bodily rhythms and a romantic genre of the athlete’s journey intensify boundary-breaking and progress as social battles take the shape of sport battles (Broch, 2020). We can see and feel it. With hermeneutic power, journalists work to show us and make us sense it (Alexander, 2012). Sports are emblematic of movement.

In sports, the iconic ponytail materializes, dramatizes, and intensifies the codes mapped outside of sports. Sports adds its own movement of dancing and prancing ponytails to infuse the ponytail’s half-life with observable proof of cultural kinetic movements that challenge male athletic bastions and cultures of inequality elsewhere. Sometimes the movements imbued in the ponytail escape its materiality as fast as they appear, as we turn off the television or put away our smartphones. Sometimes sports leave their zig-zag rhythms in the snow and in our minds. The hard work, toil, and hustle of sports meaningfully remains in bodies to inspire some to take on new barriers and inequalities. Those who do are sometimes named heroes. And sometimes sport aesthetics moves to move us.

The ponytail is an object and a symbol of social and kinetic movement. As it waves in the wind, swings with a body in motion, or rests on a shoulder, it is an aesthetic object that allows bodily experiences with movement. We see this rendition of movement in the ponytail—an object resembling a horse’s tail—as it balances the stride or communicates with others. We sense it as women move within the expectations of gendered customs and fashions, with a fashionable bullwhip extending from their heads. In health too, the ponytail accentuates the child’s play, the teenager’s wobbly chase for identity, and the adult woman’s maintaining of the kinetic energy of her youth. In all its practicality, the ponytail sails behind the woman moving, through repeated setbacks, with hopes for social progress as she maneuvers the rush hours of the working family. The ponytail not only says more than a thousand words, it materializes and puts words into action. It moves and transforms as a biological and aesthetic object to symbolize motion and change as a part of a social life. As we enter and sustain our worldviews, tying up long hair at the top, midway or at the nape of the neck, the ponytail materializes and inspires movement (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

The codes and symbolic layers of the ponytailed experience of movement

This looping relationship or oscillation between codes is critical for understanding how bodies in general and sportswomen in particular establish “types” with which to “feel” and associate ideas and things across multiple personal and social realms.⁵ As women and girls—many of them, too—shape their bodies in new ways that become custom (yet not free of negotiations of inequalities), they in turn reshape societies (Butler, 1998). The body is a concrete site for engaging with the world and our existential positions within it (Butler, 1993; Champagne, forthcoming; Csordas, 1990; Shilling, 2003, 2004; Turner, 1995). All things within a meaningful ecology, all that attaches to it and all that it touches, share a “latent totemic nature” that is felt as soon as “circumstances permit or require it” (Durkheim, [1912] 1995, p. 152). In modernity, meaning-making about bodies is fragmented and differentiated, and Durkheim’s notion of spiritual unity and corporal diversity is perhaps better dealt with as spiritual diversity and corporal diversity (e.g. Stang, 2009). We no longer view the same world from different bodily positions, but as many possible and symbolically layered worlds from varied body positions. When, in all its practicality, the ponytail moves into male-dominated spheres, it tells of both the individual spirit and the spirits of our time. The iconic ponytail has become a performer with a half-life that can ignite anticipation and community in ways that recreate the democratic effort of females of all ages who are as spirited in their fight as their ponytail is whipping about. This force is generated in the affective feedback loops as multiple levels of social reality are in dialogue.

The ponytail’s iconic power does not exist as a cultural phenomenon until it is called into existence in public culture and personal lives through careful movement and attention. A human “horsetail” requires hair to be fixed in a specific way. Its creation must be called out by an audience, in the mirror or elsewhere. Only then can we feel the semiotic “charge” that the ponytail receives from numerous interpreted observations of women’s social and bodily movements and then retransmits to its surroundings. The ponytail presupposes the cultural fact that biological hair is already there and that it is long enough to be fixed in this particular way. It presupposes that we imbue its object—hair—with a particular movement through space, running, working, jumping, kinesthetic energy. When this is so, we see the ponytial swing from the head of the woman equestrian and from the horse below. It flies in the air from the head of a spirited athlete as it would from a frisky foal. We see it on the woman athlete as she disappears down the mountainside like a chiseled thoroughbred. It waves from underneath the helmet of a hockey player, a crystal clear sign that she is marching through the cultural and social landscapes of our institutions. Called into existence, the ponytailed sportswoman’s victories and criticisms are twofold; fusing movements (or lack thereof) in sports and society (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

The cultural charge of social and kinetic movements. (Picture credit: simonkr via Getty Images)

In this process, the bodily experience of movement is fused with cultural structures that also involve social movements, feminist narratives, and codes. To some, this fusion is situated in a post-feminist world. To others, the moving woman’s body, condensed in a ponytail and empowered by an existential layer of expectations, health, and practicality, remains in a world of injustice and democratic hope. We hear echoes from across the Western world: from the French paper Le Monde (June 30, 2018), the declaration that “women’s place in soccer is a democratic and a social issue”; from the UK’s Independent (June 9, 2019), the argument that the 2019 soccer World Cup brought “opportunity to investigate broader gender inequality in sport”; from the United States where CNN, Fox, and CNBC alike report gendered records and barriers and The New York Times (June 10, 2019) records with a sense of honor that “the best women’s soccer team in the world fights for equal pay.” The ponytail is an iconic embodiment of hard-won freedoms and those yet to be won. While this once customary hairstyle obeys practical concerns, its iconic custom commands a generation.⁶ Social injustice is marked with a waving ponytail.