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Finalist, 2025 PROSE Awards: Media and Cultural Studies
How Black women celebrate their natural hair and uproot racialized beauty standards
Hair is not simply a biological feature; it’s a canvas for expression. Hair can be cut, colored, dyed, covered, gelled, waxed, plucked, lasered, dreadlocked, braided, and relaxed. Yet, its significance extends beyond mere aesthetics. Hair can carry profound moral, spiritual, and cultural connotations, serving as a reflection of one’s beliefs, heritage, and even political stance. In Natural, Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson delves into the complex world surrounding Black women’s hair, and offers a firsthand look into the kitchens, beauty shops, conventions, and blogs that make up the twenty-first century natural hair movement, the latest evolution in Black beauty politics.
Johnson shares her own hair story and amplifies the voices of women across the globe who, after years of chemically relaxing their hair, return to a “natural” style. Johnson describes how many women initially transition to natural hair out of curiosity or as a wellness practice but come to view their choice as political upon confronting personal insecurities and social stigma, both within and outside of the Black community. She also investigates “natural hair entrepreneurs,” who use their knowledge to create lucrative and socially transformative haircare ventures.
Distinct from a politics of respectability or Afrocentricity, Johnson’s argument is that today’s natural hair movement advances a politics of authenticity. She offers “going natural” as a practice of self-love and acceptance; a critique of exclusionary economic arrangements and an exploitative beauty industry; and an act of anti-racist political resistance.
Natural powerfully illustrates how the natural hair movement is part of a larger social change among Black women to assert their own purchasing power, standards of beauty, and bodily autonomy.
"Natural takes readers on a journey across four continents to examine Black women’s hair care. Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson offers fresh insights on topics such as Black femininity, texturism, and the technologies of resistance. This book is a blueprint for studying the natural hair movement in the age of social media."
"Johnson says something new and unprecedented about the ‘natural hair movement.’ Love and nuance colors every page of her book, and we need both to appreciate the beautiful hard-won truths of Black women’s pursuit and engagement with their own ‘natural’ hair. I implore you to read this book!"
"From Atlanta to Johannesburg Black women are constructing a new body politics as they create and sell products, share techniques, flaunt their locs, and debate who belongs in the natural hair movement. Natural explores the meaning and politics of natural hair in the twenty-first century. This nuanced study of the politics of Black women's hair makes important contributions to studies of race, gender and embodiment."
"Natural is an achievement, a cartography, and a love letter to contemporary Black beauty culture. This needed book crosses theoretical, disciplinary, and national borders to stitch together a diasporic, intersectional, and layered archive of the contemporary natural hair movement. In charting this movement, Johnson helps us understand ‘going natural’ in relation to longer struggles for racial justice, Black liberation, bodily autonomy, and ‘Black lives mattering.’ This book is a needed intervention that will be cited for years to come."
"Natural is a magnificent text. Johnson presents a remarkably insightful discussion of the natural hair movement through analyses that center embodiment, texturism, neoliberalism, entrepreneurship, and the green movement. By recognizing the natural hair movement as one that challenges mainstream conceptualizations of social movements, Natural will impress a broad audience."
"Natural presents a timely and multifaceted discussion of natural hair culture and politics that speaks to scholars and students of social movements, gender, beauty culture, and embodiment... Most illuminating is [Johnson's] engagement with women in their sixties who help detangle the distinction between earlier and contemporary moments in Black hair politics."