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Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women's Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity
A witty, razor-sharp cultural critique of white women’s hair—and the politics it quietly carries
In Tangled, acclaimed cultural critic Sarah Mesle unpacks the surprising power of white women’s hair in shaping American identity, politics, and pop culture. From rom-coms to TikToks, blowouts to legislation, Mesle explores how hair—often dismissed as trivial—has been a stealth vehicle for transmitting whiteness, privilege, and conservative values.
White women’s hair evokes pleasure, pride, anxiety, and envy. But unlike women of color, who navigate hair as a deeply political terrain, white women often treat their styles as purely aesthetic. Mesle argues that this perceived innocence is precisely what makes white women’s hair so potent—and so dangerous.
Through 7 iconic hair moments spanning the Reagan era to Trump’s rise, Tangled blends personal essay with cultural analysis, revealing how hair has mirrored—and fueled—the rollback of feminist progress. With wit, depth, and originality, Mesle invites readers to rethink what hair has done in America—and what it could do differently.
Smart, funny, and fiercely insightful, Tangled is essential reading for anyone interested in feminism, race, media, and the hidden politics of beauty.
In Tangled, acclaimed cultural critic Sarah Mesle unpacks the surprising power of white women’s hair in shaping American identity, politics, and pop culture. From rom-coms to TikToks, blowouts to legislation, Mesle explores how hair—often dismissed as trivial—has been a stealth vehicle for transmitting whiteness, privilege, and conservative values.
White women’s hair evokes pleasure, pride, anxiety, and envy. But unlike women of color, who navigate hair as a deeply political terrain, white women often treat their styles as purely aesthetic. Mesle argues that this perceived innocence is precisely what makes white women’s hair so potent—and so dangerous.
Through 7 iconic hair moments spanning the Reagan era to Trump’s rise, Tangled blends personal essay with cultural analysis, revealing how hair has mirrored—and fueled—the rollback of feminist progress. With wit, depth, and originality, Mesle invites readers to rethink what hair has done in America—and what it could do differently.
Smart, funny, and fiercely insightful, Tangled is essential reading for anyone interested in feminism, race, media, and the hidden politics of beauty.
296 pages, Hardcover
Published August 25, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 7, 2026
Sarah Mesle is a teaching professor of writing at the University of Southern California with a PhD in English from Northwestern University. Tangled is her second nonfiction book and her first aimed primarily at a mass-market audience.
As the subtitle suggests, Tangled is a series of essays analyzing seven supposedly seminal moments in White women's hair, ranging from Bo Derek's cornrows and Mary Lou Retton's bob to Jennifer Aniston's Friends-era "The Rachel," Britney Spears hair history, and, bafflingly, Gwyneth Paltrow's body hair (though I generally find Ms. Paltrow baffling). Mesle also wanders through a much broader assortment of pop-cultural examples along the way. The result is part cultural criticism, part memoir, and very heavily filtered through Mesle's own experiences and opinions.
Some of the basic premise works. Women in the public eye obviously use appearance, including hair, to convey an image, whether that image is being shaped by the woman herself, stylists, political advisers, record labels, or other people around her. Britney Spears is an especially obvious example given how carefully her image changed over the course of her career and the significance subsequently assigned to her impulsively shaving her head in 2007. But for many of Mesle's examples, my reaction was simply: it really isn't that deep.
Mesle has a tendency to overthink almost everything she encounters. Farrah Fawcett's famous feathered hair, Mary Lou Retton's short haircut, generations of similarly short-haired female gymnasts, Anne Shirley's red braids, and Jennifer Aniston's "Rachel" haircut all receive layers of interpretation about gender, race, class, politics, femininity, and power. Some of those interpretations are interesting; others seemed to require far more symbolic weight than the underlying example could reasonably support.
The Anne of Green Gables material was particularly odd to me. Anne is a fictional Canadian character created by L. M. Montgomery in 1908, but she appears to be included largely because the character and adaptations of the novel were personally meaningful to Mesle when she was young. Similarly, the discussion of Friends becomes partly an account of Mesle's own changing relationship with the show over the years. These sections clarified what Tangled really is: not so much a social history of women's hair as a collection of personal essays about how one academic has interpreted pieces of popular culture throughout her own life.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I wanted more research, counterargument, and acknowledgment that the same cultural object can mean different things to different people, or occasionally mean very little at all. At times the book seems to start with the assumption that every hairstyle must encode something consequential and then work backward to determine what that something is.
Overall, this was a middle-of-the-road read for me. The premise is interesting, and some of Mesle's observations are genuinely thought-provoking, but the book is much more subjective and autobiographical than I expected and frequently feels like an unusually elaborate exercise in overanalysis.
Further reading:
Red: A History of the Redhead by Jacky Colliss Harvey
Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Decade by Nora Princiotti
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert
My statistics:
Book 172 for 2026
Book 2478 cumulatively
As the subtitle suggests, Tangled is a series of essays analyzing seven supposedly seminal moments in White women's hair, ranging from Bo Derek's cornrows and Mary Lou Retton's bob to Jennifer Aniston's Friends-era "The Rachel," Britney Spears hair history, and, bafflingly, Gwyneth Paltrow's body hair (though I generally find Ms. Paltrow baffling). Mesle also wanders through a much broader assortment of pop-cultural examples along the way. The result is part cultural criticism, part memoir, and very heavily filtered through Mesle's own experiences and opinions.
Some of the basic premise works. Women in the public eye obviously use appearance, including hair, to convey an image, whether that image is being shaped by the woman herself, stylists, political advisers, record labels, or other people around her. Britney Spears is an especially obvious example given how carefully her image changed over the course of her career and the significance subsequently assigned to her impulsively shaving her head in 2007. But for many of Mesle's examples, my reaction was simply: it really isn't that deep.
Mesle has a tendency to overthink almost everything she encounters. Farrah Fawcett's famous feathered hair, Mary Lou Retton's short haircut, generations of similarly short-haired female gymnasts, Anne Shirley's red braids, and Jennifer Aniston's "Rachel" haircut all receive layers of interpretation about gender, race, class, politics, femininity, and power. Some of those interpretations are interesting; others seemed to require far more symbolic weight than the underlying example could reasonably support.
The Anne of Green Gables material was particularly odd to me. Anne is a fictional Canadian character created by L. M. Montgomery in 1908, but she appears to be included largely because the character and adaptations of the novel were personally meaningful to Mesle when she was young. Similarly, the discussion of Friends becomes partly an account of Mesle's own changing relationship with the show over the years. These sections clarified what Tangled really is: not so much a social history of women's hair as a collection of personal essays about how one academic has interpreted pieces of popular culture throughout her own life.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I wanted more research, counterargument, and acknowledgment that the same cultural object can mean different things to different people, or occasionally mean very little at all. At times the book seems to start with the assumption that every hairstyle must encode something consequential and then work backward to determine what that something is.
Overall, this was a middle-of-the-road read for me. The premise is interesting, and some of Mesle's observations are genuinely thought-provoking, but the book is much more subjective and autobiographical than I expected and frequently feels like an unusually elaborate exercise in overanalysis.
Further reading:
Red: A History of the Redhead by Jacky Colliss Harvey
Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop's Shiniest Decade by Nora Princiotti
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert
My statistics:
Book 172 for 2026
Book 2478 cumulatively
September 17, 2026
I listened to the audiobook version of this. What a thoughtful, thorough exploration of this cultural symbol! It was fun to listen to her evaluation of various styles and deeper meanings for each cultural moment of women’s hair in the past century—fun as well as challenging. Through this exploration of white feminine identity, its amorphous opposition to and relationship the “Other” are laid bare, inviting the reader to grapple with their own internalized relationship to white patriarchy. Though it challenges, it does so in a way that allows room for the reader to grapple with it, rather than in a finger-wagging way: a balm for this old academic’s soul. In this manner, the book is extremely effective at enabling the reader to view this niche of history, see how its scope broadens to larger sociopolitical venues, and examine their part in it. And I really appreciated that body hair was included in this, too!
Review of advance copy
Thank you to libro.fm and the publisher for the educator ALC!
4.5 I love these types of essays, a mix of hyper specific cultural criticism and memoir, wherein the author explores their place in a cultural moment. In this case the author explored seven moments in white woman’s hair in the last 30 years or so (for example Britney’s buzz cut, Julia Robert’s hair in Pretty Woman, The Rachel, etc.) and examined what they had to say about race, feminism, politics, and more at that time. It took me a while to get a hang of what the book was doing, but once I did I had a fun and thought provoking time. I would gladly read more like this from the author and would especially recommend it for readers who loved Trick Mirror by Gia Tolentino.
4.5 I love these types of essays, a mix of hyper specific cultural criticism and memoir, wherein the author explores their place in a cultural moment. In this case the author explored seven moments in white woman’s hair in the last 30 years or so (for example Britney’s buzz cut, Julia Robert’s hair in Pretty Woman, The Rachel, etc.) and examined what they had to say about race, feminism, politics, and more at that time. It took me a while to get a hang of what the book was doing, but once I did I had a fun and thought provoking time. I would gladly read more like this from the author and would especially recommend it for readers who loved Trick Mirror by Gia Tolentino.
Read
August 27, 2026I think this was a little disorganized and could have been either outlined more distinctly or been a proper history. It was interesting though
Did Not Finish
September 3, 2026I need to stop trying to listen to non fiction when I really just want to hear a story
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews