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Manipulation of the hair is one of the lesser theorized technologies through which Black diasporic subjects have carved space for their existence, expressed aspirations, and posed dissent against a social world reliant upon their dehumanization. In response to this forum's call to elevate mediated epistemologies about Black women, we offer focused consideration of Black hair as a technology of collective expansion that resists essentialism and begins to theorize a digital, post-natural turn. The practices tied to Black hair, from the development of styling tools and products (physical technologies) to technologies of touch via digital practices (i.e., the digits or fingers) such as greasing, braiding, washing, combing, and otherwise working hair, are central to how Black women create digital (here meaning: online) content and navigate scrutinization. We consider the complications of these technological and digital practices by considering the simultaneous neoliberal and liberatory undergirding of the Digital Natural Black Hair Movement and a very recent tech-forward turn toward what we call the "post-natural" that eschews the implicit essentialism of earlier natural hair moments. Taking the "sacred" foray into the haircare industry by megastar Beyoncé as a case study, we outline facets (and aspirations) of the post-natural digital re-branding of Black hair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, besides the headdresses of Kyrgyz women/girls with a long history, age classes, hair weaves, features and beliefs related to them have been tried to be mentioned. Turks living in a wide geography have made a great contribution to world civilization since the earliest ages of history. One of them is the Kyrgyz Turks. For a long time, girls/women have had an important place in the Kyrgyz family structure and society. Although the Kyrgyz emphasized the importance of the male child, which is necessary for the continuation of the lineage, they did not distinguish the girls/women, whom they called "evin kutu", from the men, didn't look them down, saw them as guests and treated them special as they would marry in the future and become members of another house. For this reason, the Kyrgyz dressed their girls/women, who classified them as "biykeç", "beşkökül", "koluktu", "kelin", "zayip", "baybiçe" according to their age, and kept them in chests to wear when they got married. The headdresses of girls/women come first among the clothes that have emerged with the influence of life and lifestyle, even if a little, with the influence of religious rules. One of the important reflections of the culture, the national titles of Kyrgyz girls/women have a long history and have varied widely since ancient times. Headdresses such as the "takıya topu" worn by the girls when they were little, the "tebetey" that they wore when they grew up, the "şökülö" that the married girl wore from her father's house, and the "eleçek", the marriage symbol, gave a message to the society with their ornaments and the way they were made. At the same time, the titles of girls/women, like other elements of material culture, were closely tied to the ideological views and perspectives of the society. Many ways of thinking based on archaic beliefs and cults are hidden in the way the headdresses are made and decorated, and the differences in the braiding of the hair. In addition, religious views/beliefs have also influenced the development of these titles. For example, feathers attached to hats have a sacred meaning. Because the feathers, wings and nails of some birds are known as talismans by the Kyrgyz and have protective power. An example of this is that women hide their hair and cover their heads after marriage. The Kyrgyz did not consider the headdresses of girls/women separately from their hair. For this reason, they did everything they could to ensure that their daughters' hair grew healthy when they were young, and they also did whatever was necessary to protect them from evil spirits and the evil eye. Among the Kyrgyz, there are many rules that need to be followed to prevent the evil spirits from haunting the hair of girls/women and not to be touched by the evil eye. Therefore, Kyrgyz people have followed a set of rules against titles in their traditional lives. For example, the titles are not left on the ground, they are not sat on and they are not printed. According to the Kyrgyz, the title means head. They have always hung it up, kept it clean and believed to be holy. The hair ornaments of Kyrgyz girls/women stood out with their diversity. Hair caps and similar ornaments not only protected women from evil, but also ensured that their hair was kept clean during migration. The shaping of the national characteristics of the headdresses of Kyrgyz girls/women is closely related to the ethnic history of the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses that in The Leopard, the characters are freed from the camera, and so is the narrative in which they play their roles. The camera is interested in finding and inhabiting endroits, chambers, clearings, fields, courtyards, ballrooms. Once it has found a pretty space, it makes Heimlich all that is before the lens.

Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie brought to the forefront the natural hair movement as a form of resistance to Western aesthetics. However, this conversation overlooks the labor that goes into creating Africentric hairstyles. In this essay, I examine what hair signifies for immigrant hairstylists in order to articulate a cosmopolitan experience from the perspective of the racialized, gendered, and undocumented migrant worker. To understand how these migrants find belonging in the world, I argue against the abstraction of space, a predominant tendency in invocations of cosmopolitanism and its related strand, Afropolitanism. With that in mind, I look at the hair salon, a highly gendered and stratified space that reveals not only how the female workers are placed in a restrictive position, but also how they shape the space that they occupy through their service of braiding hair. I juxtapose this service and cultural act alongside Achille Mbembe's concept of interweaving worlds to show that the female migrant workers interweave divergent perspectives despite the disharmonious encounters produced by the invisible racial, ethnic, and class boundaries of the hair salon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Braiding Borders, a site-specific performance in which women from both Mexico and the US braided their hair together across the US-Mexico border, challenged exclusionary geopolitical demarcations and physical and rhetorical violence against female, immigrant, and Latinx bodies. As a collective, performative mobilization of bodies, it dismantled and reinvented mobilities of belonging and body politics of dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Subgaleal hematoma (SGH) is generally documented within the neonatal period and is rarely reported as a result of trauma or hair braiding in children. While rare, complications of SGH can result in ophthalmoplegia, proptosis, visual deficit, and corneal ulceration secondary to hematoma extension into the orbit. Although conservative treatment is preferential, expanding SGH should be aspirated to reduce complications associated with further expansion. Case Description: A 12-year-old African-American female with no recent history of trauma presented with a chief complaint of headache along with a 2-day history of enlarging 2-3 cm ballotable bilateral frontal mass. Hematological workup was negative. The patient's family confirmed a long history of hair braiding. The patient was initially prescribed a period of observation but returned 1-week later with enlarging SGH, necessitating surgical aspiration. Conclusion: SGH is rare past the neonatal period, but can be found in pediatric and adolescent patients secondary to trauma or hair pulling. Standard workup includes evaluation of the patient's hematological profile for bleeding or coagulation deficits, as well as evaluation for child abuse. Although most cases of SGH resolve spontaneously over the course of several weeks, close follow-up is recommended. The authors present a case of a 12-year-old female presenting with enlarging subgaleal hemorrhages who underwent surgical aspiration and drainage without recurrence. A literature review was also conducted with 32 pediatric cases identified, 20 of which were related to hair pulling, combing, or braiding. We review the clinical course, imaging characteristics, surgical management, as well as a review of the literature involving subgaleal hemorrhage in pediatric patients and hair pulling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ostensibly bizarre crime of braid-cutting invited occasional alienist inferences from the late 1850s onwards, until it entered mid-1880s police profiles and forensic-psychiatric taxonomies as a corollary of perversion, specifically sadism and fetishism. Cases were rare, but were reported as late as the mid-1930s and enduringly cited as encompassing a staple variety of fetishism. This note briefly reconstructs entries in German, French and English forensic psychiatry, sexual psychopathology and psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the influence of hairstyles on culture and society and mentions the traditions of hair braiding. Topics include hair-styling as a form of expression, the evolution of hairstyles, and the influence of cultural exchange. Pencil drawings of hairstyles and profiles of contributors for the issue including Ann Lawless, Chric Smith, and Shaunasea Brown is provided.

Scald injuries caused by hair braiding have become increasingly common in our pediatric burn center's African-American population. This injury mechanism has received little attention in the medical literature. To guide prevention, the present study aims to characterize this novel mechanism of injury and identify patterns underlying its frequency. A retrospective cohort analysis was performed on all cases of scald injury due to hair braiding in African-American girls treated at our burn center from 2000 to 2016. Data were gathered from the patient's medical records to determine demographics, details of the injury, and treatment rendered. Patterns of injury frequency were identified and statistically analyzed. Thirty-four patients suffered scald injuries associated with hair braiding. The mean patient age was 8.4 years (SD ± 5 years). The majority of injuries (90%) occurred in the home. The frequency of injuries significantly increased starting in the year 2012, rising from less than 3% to more than 10% of evaluated injuries in African-American girls (P = .0015). Injuries were significantly more frequent in summer months. Injuries resulted in considerable usage of medical resources, including ambulance transport, hospital admission, clinic visits, prolonged wound care, and surgery. Complications developed in 41% of injured children; the most frequent complication was scarring. Pediatric scald injuries caused by braiding practices are morbid, have recently become increasingly frequent, tend to occur in the summer, and may be related to a new do-it-yourself style trend among African-American girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first part of this series, an analytical model was proposed for predicting the tensile modulus of tubular braids using energy method. The aim of this study is to perform experimental effort to evaluate the previous generated model. For this purpose, two types of yarns namely monofilament and multifilament yarns were used to produce tubular braids. The bending rigidity and tensile modulus of yarns were obtained in order to be used in the mentioned model. Also, the geometrical parameters of braids, i.e. braid angle, length of the unit-cell, and length of the yarns in the unit-cell were measured. Using the proposed model, the tensile modulus of braids was calculated. On the other hand, the tensile modulus of provided samples was measured by means of INSTRON tensile tester and compared with theoretical values. The results showed that the proposed model in Part I of this series is capable of predicting tensile modulus of braids with different structure, adequately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African hair braiding on Bree Street offers a glimpse into how immigration, black female sexuality and shifts in urban retail economies provide important economic and cultural resources to urban residents and users. As both ontology and epistemology, black hair braiding practices recalibrate local economies, spaces, and aesthetic codes, and thus co-constitute emergent urban identities and a way of knowing the city. The intimate, networked, and fractal nature of black hair braiding spaces disrupts the rigid colonial spatial orders of the city and its architecture. As an epistemology, braiding disrupts the grand narrative of Johannesburg in ‘crisis’, while also disrupting the colonizing and gendered structure of urban studies itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the handicraft of braiding, a variety of textile work in which loops of silk were placed on the fingers and interwoven to make strings containing patterns, motifs or alphabetic characters, usually formed into posies. The practice often involved the collaboration of multiple participants and is documented extensively in thirteen seventeenth-century manuscripts, which present written directions, usually alongside worked examples. Largely overlooked in recent studies of women's handiwork, braiding and braids appear to have been pervasive in early modern culture: they are invoked directly and indirectly in a variety of contemporary texts which emphasize that they possessed social, cultural and political meaning. This article argues that braiding constitutes a complex model of expression and social production, which sets alphabetic content alongside the rich significance of form, pattern, material and collaborative bodily practice. Drawing out connections between braiding and varieties of poetic composition in a range of other writings, I emphasize that braids blur distinctions between textual and textile literacies and indicate a need to rethink the relationship of the needle and the pen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]