Hair Discipline in Singapore: Aesthetics, Morality, and Gender

Abstract

<p>In the 1970s and 1980s, several Asian governments, including those of Hong Kong, Malaysia, South Korea, and Taiwan, enacted varying measures to proscribe long hair on men. Singapore’s government was no exception in this regard, barring even longhaired global male celebrities from entry. Adopting a social semiotic perspective, this article traces the vicissitudes of the male hairscape in Singapore from the colonial period to contemporary times, with a view to uncovering its differential indexical meanings. It argues that the stigmatization of long hair was part of a moral-aesthetic regimen of hair hygiene that fashioned shorthaired men as poster boys of a young, disciplined, and aspirational nation, while longhaired men were discursively constructed as a bad influence and the archnemesis of a desired work culture and social life. Men’s hair, then, was not an innocuous sign with an organic meaning, but a loaded signifier for a cultural ethos tied to shifting social imperatives.</p>