Interdisciplinary Approaches to Consumer Culture

Introduction

Hair. Everyone has it. Everyone wants to change what he or she has, or does not have. Everyone can relate to each other over stories about hair. From musicals, to documentaries, to personal narratives, people have told stories about hair in all forms of communication. My students are fascinated by hair qualities and hairstyles. As with most other teenagers, all of their "attention focuses both on appearance (hairstyle) and social factors" ¹. Additionally, hair is a multibillion-dollar industry. More than 250,000 businesses in the United States are classified as beauty salons and employ over 845,000 people. ² These beauty salons, along with some 720,000 other businesses classified as other types of beauty-related businesses, compose an industry with over $40 billion in annual sales ³. In Pennsylvania alone, annual sales total $1.5 billion and job growth between 2000 and 2010 increased 22% ⁴. In America, non-natural African American hair care accounts for an estimated $1.8 billion to $15 billion in annual sales ⁵. Hispanic and "all other hair care" accounted for approximately $3.6 billion in hair care product sales in 2011 ⁶. This is why I selected "hair" as the unifying theme for this curriculum unit. The unit will explore the history and consumer culture of hair care and hair styling through literature.

The issues that we will be exploring in class are more serious than they first appear. My students are not the only ones who are concerned with hair. I have my own interests and curiosity about "good" hair. People of all ages, races, and economic backgrounds are keeping the industry alive and even growing during an economic recession. The importance that people place on hair is a matter of political and philosophical debate with everyone weighing in on the matter, from children in the classroom, to feminist theorists, to big industry. What constitutes "good" hair is a universal theme that is explored routinely in literature, and not just a transparent hook to engage my students with the reading and writing skills for the unit.

This curriculum unit will teach about comparing and contrasting universal themes in fiction and non-fiction texts that revolve around rites of passage and the consumer culture of hair. I will begin the unit with a brief discussion of consumerism among American teenagers and "ethnic" hair products and hairstyles, with a focus weighted toward black youth because of the demographic composition of my students and because African Americans make up an estimated 30% of the hair care industry ⁷. The beginning of the unit will focus on consumer culture that drives hair care and hairstyles using songs, video clips, art, pictures, and newspaper articles. All of these materials will aid in introducing the literary concepts of theme and universal theme while being unified through the themes of hair, rites of passage, violence, and social acceptance. The remainder of the unit will focus on analyzing themes in short stories and excerpts using compare and contrast methods. The end result for each student will be a compare-and-contrast essay analyzing the universal themes in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" and an excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I selected these particular texts because they each touch on a coming of age story that turns on hair, and they both address the theme of "Search for Self" for ninth grade.