Hair trigger: why Hong Kong schools are against schoolboys having long hair
- Culture is not static. With this understanding, it’s clear how arguments by prison and education authorities that long hair is not masculine work as a form of social control
Then chief justice Geoffrey Ma Tao-li, who wrote the judgment, noted that the department had failed to explain the basis for its argument that it was only following a social norm. He also said that if the aim was to give less prominence to individuality, it was unclear why female prisoners were allowed this expression of individuality.
Secretary for Education Christine Choi Yuk-lin said last week that “relevant rules were established according to schools’ own culture and value for education”.
Philosopher Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble that gender or sex – she sees the two as indistinguishable – are not inherent qualities but constituted only through repeated performance. The insistence on short hair as a signifier of masculinity is an example of an arbitrary standard being applied to hold the two sexes apart, lest – heaven forbid – the two categories collapse.
This explains the resistance to allowing boys to wear their hair long. A teacher told Lam the school would be “overwhelmed” with complaints if male students were allowed to have long hair. Tang Fei, a lawmaker and school principal, said that if the Equal Opportunities Commission upheld Lam’s complaint, it would bring a “major shock to the school sector”.
What next? Boys wanting to wear skirts? Girls wanting to wear trousers to school? Why not, though?
‘In China there’s no such freedom’: skirt-wearing boy triggers gender debate
Hyperbolic reactions to transgressions of gender norms are not new. In the West, when women advocated for the right to wear trousers in the Victorian era, they were harassed, ridiculed and accused of upending the social order. Today, women in trousers are a common sight and societies manage to function regardless.
In Discipline and Punish, philosopher Michel Foucault theorised that modern forms of social control are modelled on the panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s 18th century design for prisons, which allowed guards to constantly watch prisoners from a tower without being seen. Ultimately, prisoners would internalise the surveillance and they would behave regardless of whether they were actually watched.
Foucault asks, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” Hong Kong schools and the wider society must reflect on whether educational institutions should function as paler copies of prisons or if they can envisage a different model.
Charmaine Carvalho is a senior production editor at the Post and a member of Lunar, an initiative that highlights key issues related to women and gender equality in Asia