Paper short abstract

This paper argues that hair’s ontological misalignment—neither human nor object—requires the hair to be intraceable. Intraceable wig enables misrecognition and trespass through eradicating Asian identity, resurrecting "Brazilian" from hair and disrupts the postcolonial racial order.

Paper long abstract

Traceability is often treated as a moral good-an instrument through which responsibility, transparency and recognition are secured. This paper approaches traceability instead as a risk produced by materials that refuse stable classification. Focusing on human-hair trade, I examine why hair can, and will, become intraceable to be industrialised and commodified.

China produces the majority of human-hair wigs for global Black consumer markets. Brazilian hair is the most valued category for its strength, bounce and sheen, yet it is not from Brazil. So-called Brazilian hair is the blend of heterogenous hair from donors across Asia, sanitised through chemical-washing, heating and styling. Dirt and cells are removed, alongside race and identity, making hair intraceable. Yet Brazilian hair sells. Mediating through repeated narration of “Brazilian” hair, manufacturers, traders and consumers are allowed to be irrecognisable, acquire potency of trespassing/hacking across racial boundaries.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in African wig shop and factories in China, I argue that the intraceability echoes on hair’s ontological misalignment: hair is neither human nor object, yet it persistently carries the demand to be traced to a person. This unstable position makes it possible and profitable to be displaced and misrecognised, through which Asian women are killed so that Brazilian women can resurrect, not as representational figures, but as material condition that sells. This unstable position also deems hair intraceable in order to function as an object, yet it can never cease to be traced. It must be somebody’s hair, even if that somebody must be produced repeatedly.