08/30/2026
In a fit of rage at what I perceived as the egregious mistreatment of my favorite character, I refused to participate in the tv phenomenon of GAME OF THRONES. Catelyn Stark–whose final thoughts, it must be said, are of her hair–was a matriarch done dirty by tv writers who preferred their women sexier, bitchier, and in a lot more peril. That did not prevent me from religiously logging on to LARB each week to read Sarah Mesle’s brilliant reviews, which often delved into the ‘hair studies’ on which she has now, officially, written the book. Mesle was absolutely transcendent in her readings of Daenerys’s braids, Cersei’s gleaming then shorn golden locks, and Sansa’s aspirational red tresses. That work, paired with her academic training as a specialist in 19th-century American literature, comes to glorious fruition in TANGLED. Over 7 delicious chapters, Mesle takes a tour of the past half-century of white women’s hair. Hair, she argues, has always been a nexus of gendered and racialized power, shot through with intimacy and performance, tangled up in violence and desire.
Every page of TANGLED is rich and rewarding, simultaneously readable and dense with historical context and critical inquiry. Self-serious readers (of the male academic variety) might bristle at the thought of Michel Foucault and Angela Davis sharing the page with Julia Roberts and JoJo Siwa, but Mesle asserts that they are part of the same conversation about the ways we discipline, punish, and ponytail, to borrow her magnificent phrase. I could read Mesle’s thoughts on the deceptive ‘naturalness’ of white women’s hair and its ability to wield the violent power of white supremacy under the guise of innocent femininity ALL DAY, and I frequently found myself rereading entire chapters of this book because the readings were so tight. (Seriously: Mesle offers a gloss of BallerinaFarm’s ponytail that was so razor sharp I had to pull my car to the side of the road to re-listen.) Mesle untangles the various sociopolitical accretions of white women’s hair with a deft hand: TANGLED is exactly the kind of cultural and political critique that can be read in the classroom, for book club, or by the pool.
