Recently, I shaved my head for the second time in my life. I love my bald head and I don’t care if anyone else likes it, I just hope it challenges societal norms. Maybe it will encourage people to think beyond their ingrained assumptions about bald women. Assumptions they don’t usually hold about bald men. Assumptions they feel necessary to share with me:

1. The only possible reason to go bald as a woman is that I’m undergoing chemo. I’m not.

2. Or I must hate men. I don’t.

3. Or I’m lesbian. I’m not, but that doesn’t mean I’m straight because I’m not. I’m queer.

4. Or how did I ever get a husband? Um, love.

5. Or even though I’m bald, I’m still pretty. Stop commenting on my appearance. My worth is not determined by it.

Maybe it will also encourage people to move towards tolerance, acceptance, and love.

I dig this quote from the New York Times article Buzzed: The Politics of Hair : “...because we focus so much attention on the head, especially on the female head, and because this attention is gendered, and because, more than anything, this attention is visible, absent hair on a woman’s head can be read as disruptive to the politics of the male gaze. Looking at a woman’s face, at her hair, has conventionally been an exercise of desire, and of an assertion of male power. Disrupting this convention, disrupting this gaze, allows us to see a different set of possibilities for the female head. The shaved head ‘speaks’ in a different way.”

Check out the full article for more. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/fashion/buzzed-politics-of-hair-emma-gonzalez-rosemcgowan.html

CHECK OUT THE HAWAII BOOK & MUSIC FESTIVAL! I’LL BE REPPIN’ YA LIT & MENTAL HEALTH ON 4 PANELS.

SCHEDULE FOR SONIA PATEL:

Saturday, May 4

Sunday, May 5

1:00pm

I AM MORE THAN MY HAIR.