The men behind the chair at a Beiruti hair salon : a case study of Lebanese male hairdressers’ gender and professional identity construction.

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to examine the linguistic behavior of men in hairdressing. Using naturally occurring conversation, this research study focused on exploring the conversational strategies male hairdressers use when conversing with female clients at the hair salon. Of particular interest was whether the participants used language to enact professional roles more indexical of the environment in which they work, or to structure a gender identity that is more in line with hegemonic masculinity. The study also sheds light on the participants’ own understanding of being a man in hairdressing and their perception of the social and professional roles they perform in their interaction with clients. The corpus of this study consisted of 21 naturally-occurring conversations between the men in the hairdressing salon and their female clientele. The total recorded conversations were transcribed and served as the corpus of this study. Along with the transcribed conversations, semi-structured interviews were carried out with the three participants. Each interview lasted for almost forty minutes. The interviews were conducted to gain better understanding about the participants’ own perspective of their lived experiences in hairdressing. Findings from the analysis of the corpus propose that men in hairdressing speak in an affiliative kind of interaction, reflecting a people-oriented environment in the salon. The hairdressers led most of the conversations in the corpus. The strong rapport between the men in hairdressing and their clients is more clearly manifested in the way they respond to each other’s anecdotes, narratives, and gossip. The corpus strongly suggests that hairdressers connect with their clients when they share anecdotes, narratives or gossip.Gossip is the most frequent strategy in the corpus. In their interviews, hairdressers confidently admitted that men are better than women in the hairdressing business because they believe that men will know what will better suit a woman.