Bearded Ladies Then & Now

This past weekend, Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst won the 2014 Eurovision song contest with the song, “Rise Like a Phoenix.” Her initial performance at Eurovision sparked some mean-spirited commentary, not just because Conchita Wurst is the drag alter-ego of Tom Neuwirth (whose stage name “Wurst” means, not so subtly, “sausage” in German), but notably because Conchita performs in women’s clothes, with long hair, long eye lashes, plenty of make up and a full beard.

Of course, as someone writing about beards, bearding, and facial hair, I could not be more pleased by Wurst’s gender-bending performance and the fact that in spite of/because of her appearance, Conchita won. The importance of Eurovision as a song contest or a European unification event is debatable, though its political commentary this year, given the tensions surrounding the Russian presence in Ukraine and annexation of the Crimea, was undeniable. Still, it’s a big event with millions of people watching, so it gets significant exposure.

Front and center in these debates were the anti-gay laws recently passed in Russia. One of Wurst’s most virulent detractors was Vitaly Milonov, who was instrumental in writing the law against “homosexual propaganda” in Russia, and who petitioned for removing Wurst from the competition, citing that she was turning Eurovision into a “hotbed of sodomy.”

Luckily, Conchita herself takes a more relaxed view of the controversy. In response to a reporter who asked her reaction to the claims she was a “pervert” should leave the content she said, “I have very thick skin. It never ceases to amaze me just how much fuss is made over a little facial hair.”

A "little" facial hair or a lot, it created a lot of fuss.

A little facial hair, however, can mean oh so much, as I have already discussed here. To recap, facial hair and beards especially have been essential constructions of Western masculinity for hundreds of years. According to Renaissance historian Will Fisher, “facial hair was… ideologically central in the construction of masculinity.” To be male and adult in the Renaissance, Fisher argues, is to be bearded. In the eighteenth century, the beard becomes unfashionable—yet it is still made to matter.

The act of shaving became, in various places in Europe in the eighteenth century, crucial to the construction of Western civilized masculinity. Modern categories of race began to be theorized by eighteenth-century natural historians who linked male heat and semen with the growth of facial hair, further associating beards with mature, civilized masculinity.

A Russian Beard-tax token from the time of
Peter the Great, who wished to discourage the growth of beards,
which he deemed un-civilized.

The case of bearded women, then, was problematic, as they immediately put into question the notion of gender categories and suggested a problem with the established continuum of smooth and bearded faces. Jacques-Antoine Dulaure’s Pogonologia: or a Philosophical and Historical Essay on Beards, was translated from the French and published in England in 1786. The essay contains its own chapter of bearded women.

 

Portrait of Barbara Urselin,
17th-century German bearded lady playing a harpsichord.

According to Dulaure, “a Woman with a beard on her chin is one of those extraordinary deviations with which nature presents us every day.” He cites various historical examples of bearded women who were quite contented with their beards, including “a female dancer [in Venice who] astonish[ed] the spectators, as much by her talents, as by her chin covered with a black, bushy beard.” Surely this entertainer is the spiritual ancestor of Conchita Wurst!

Another proud beard-sporting woman cited by Dulaure was the “governess of the Netherlands… she had a very long, stiff beard, which she prided herself on; and being persuaded that it contributed to give her an air of majesty, she took great care not to lose a hair of it. This Margaret was a very great woman.”

While these women are perhaps deviations from Nature, Dulaure also notes that many ladies grow errant hairs on their faces and must pluck them. Similarly, Sarah Scott’s A Journey Through Every Stage of Life includes a cross-dressing character, Leonora, who finds herself under scrutiny by older women for not being hairy enough in her men’s attire.

Scott writes, “the Widows indeed, and some of the more experienced Matrons, looked with a Mixture of Scorn upon her [Leonora], and the antient [sic] Ladies especially, to whose Chins Age had given an Ornament that even Leonora’s Manhood could not boast.”

Even Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders remarks that, when considering cross-dressing as a disguise for stealing in, she is “a little too smooth-faced for a man.” The notion, then, of women more generally having whiskers is not unheard of in the texts of the time period.

In our own time and place, maintaining control over body hair is de rigueur. Even men refer to “man-scaping” and rebel from the constraints of socially-expected grooming habits during “No-Shave November.” Women who refuse to properly control their body hair are castigated or shamed. One has only to think of Julia Roberts being attacked in the media for showing a hairy armpit to see the backlash against female body hair. Though Conchita Wurst is a man performing in drag, her performance reminds us of how uncomfortable we are with people who break gender categories in such spectacular ways.

In the Pogonologia, Dulaure concludes his section on bearded women with a pronouncement that no doubt many contemporary folks would agree with:

“It is as ridiculous for a man to look like a woman, as for a woman to look like a man.”

Perhaps the discomfort some people feel upon seeing Wurst is that she embodies both sides of this

conundrum: she is a man who looks like a woman, and a woman who looks like a man. Her role as an entertainer gives her, to an extent, some liberty with her appearance. She, like the bearded ballerina before her, is an entertainer; her gender performance is part of a greater theatrical performance. Through her performance and her star-appeal, however, maybe she can draw our attention to the performative nature of all gender and the unruly body that contributes to and simultaneously undermines this performance.