Eleanor Tennyson - The Hairy Manifesto
Eleanor Tennyson has produced a manifesto that calls for an end to body hair removal. Tennyson is a poet and performance artist based in the U.K and is an advocator for “hairy facism”.
The Hairy Manifesto (HM) declares that society in its current state is hairless. Founded on the premise that we are not passive consumers but the agents of our own engagement with what late capitalist consumer culture offers us as a way of “belonging". The Hairy Manifesto chooses never to belong, to belong. Tennyson explores the dialogic relationship between bodies / body and the economy; chalking out the notion that there is not a body, but there are many other bodies. The sheer nature of our visual culture means that we are constantly gazing at other bodies and comparing, enforcing, envying and emulating. This HM explores what will happen to society if/ when we embody the physical and theoretical repertoires of hairiness: what lies beyond is endless ringlets of magic.
The HM is divided into three essays:
Exploring ‘time’ as a force that is exploited by aesthetic labour: the world will change when we end our own exploitation.
Exploding on a notion of gender equality that if the human species are going to be truly equal, they must look alike.
Deforestation — the manifesto argues that the removal of the Amazon rainforest and the removal of human body hair are metonymic parallel processes by which natural “covers” are removed or managed in terms of width, boundary, and other geo-spatial properties.
From the Amazon rainforest to the genitals of modern beings, the ability to control nature is socially rewarded. Rewarded because it gives profit, belonging, and a sensation of control. The Hairy Manifesto is a viewpoint for the world, located inside the follicle. The HM pushes for all forms of growth to which the destination is perfectly unknown. The Manifesto acknowledges our mutual imperfection as a form of perfection.
The Hairy Manifesto is anti-correctional. The Manifesto is gentle. The Hairy Manifesto is drafted out of love.
