I do not use the term “Lolita Effect” in reference to Durham’s work (2008) about the media sexualization of young girls, but rather I describe an effect observed in “Reading Lolilta in Tehran” (Nafisi 2003). Nafisi explains that in Lolita, Nabokov (1955) uses the relationship between Humbert and Lolita to show how a person can be an individual even when oppressed by an outside force:
“Lolita was given to us as Humbert’s creature… To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own… Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert’s attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses” (Nafisi 2003: 36).
Nafisi noted the way that this concept impacted her life and how it took shape in the class that she was teaching. She explained that within the constraints that the Iranian government imposed on women after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the women found a way to express their individuality even though they were all required to wear a hijab and certain other attire when they were in public. This mostly included the women wearing bright colors under their required attire and ensuring that these colors were seen when they had the opportunity to remove their coverings.
In terms of this research, the constraint of having uncut hair, although self-selected by the participants choosing to be part of this religion, means that the women must have an outlet so that they can express their individuality. As Carol was quoted in the previous post, “Your hairstyle had to be of a certain caliber but you didn’t want to have your hair too similar to your neighbor’s hair.” This shows that although Pentecostal hairstyles were partly defined by members of the community by the poufs, the members of this community become creative with their hairstyles as a means of expressing their individuality.
Part of their individual identity lies within how these women are positioned socially within the church, for instance whether they are a pastor’s wife (who is expected to be the epitome of a pious woman) or a new comer to the faith (who isn’t expected to have most things figured out yet). The women in this study noted that the pastor’s wives and the older ladies typically did more elaborate hairstyles than the other women. They also noted that many of the generation behind them, 12-17-year-olds, tended to wear their hair down more often than they did. One woman described this as part of the normal stage of development where they try to find themselves by being as different as they can from their parents’ generation and hence they often rejected the more traditional Pentecostal hairstyles.
This phenomenon can be interpreted as the creation of social capital within the community when hair is examined at a level of second order of indexicality (Bourdieu 1986; Pierce 1931; Saussure 1983). A woman’s membership to this community is marked by uncut hair which then indexes a certain level of piety because she is seen as obedient to God’s word. These women then pouf their hair and the women with larger poufs are seen as the ones who are more rooted in the religion. Therefore, hair acts an indexer of status within this community and women with larger poufs are treated with respect. One woman, who wished to remain anonymous, added “Not only do the older women and women in higher positions do larger poufs, but if a young woman or a woman who is new to the religion tries to do a poof that is just as large, they are often seen as trying to be something they are not perceived to be.”
"The Bigger the Hair, the Closer to God" 