Hoops: From the Margins to Mainstream
Hoops, studs, diamonds, cuffs: I want them all. However insignificant earrings may seem to some people they actually carry a great deal of meaning. Especially hoop earrings. Drawing on the readings, Misogynoir Transformed by Moya Bailey and On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future by Devon Powers, I argue that hoop earrings, originally known to be accessories of marginalized groups, got incorporated and sucked into the mainstream.
During the Black Power movement, in the 1960s and 70s, hoop earrings became extremely popular within the Black community. Black feminists, artists, and celebrities styled them with everything. Hoop earrings became something more than accessories, they became symbols of “resistance, strength, and identity” for the Black community and culture (Burke, 2020).
Then came the 90’s, Salt N Pepa were as hot as ever and were also styling hoops making them tremendously popular among black women. However, white folks frowned upon and criticized them, labeling them ‘ghetto’ (Burke, 2020). In Moya Bailey’s book, Misogynoir Transformed, she explores the meaning of misogynoir and its history. She states that misogynoir is the “co-constitutive” racist and sexist violence Black women experience because of their “interlocking oppression”: race and gender (p. 1). Bailey explains the various stereotypes that have been imposed on Black women over the years: during the Antebellum period there was the Jezebel, then there was the post-Civil War mammy, the Sapphire, and the Welfare Queen of the early 1970s. Bailey writes and expresses the long-lasting negative effects these stereotypes have had on Black women. Furthermore, an extension of these stereotypes would be the ghetto Black woman who wears hoop earrings (Burke, 2020). Each and every stereotype that Bailey mentions, including the more recent stereotype of the ghetto Black woman, have direct correlations to the media. The representations of Black women in popular media, television shows, movies, Facebook, etc. reinforce, perpetuate and boost the damage and “harm” Black women experience (Bailey, 2021, p. 13). Thus, these stereotypes in popular culture perpetuate misogynoir. As I mentioned earlier, white people, typically white women, dismissed Black women as ghetto and condemned black culture for wearing hoops. Yet, nowadays, hoops are seen by white people as extremely trendy and are worn very frequently by white women and white folks in general.
Now you must be asking yourself, how did white people go from stereotyping and criticizing Black women and culture for wearing hoop earrings to wearing them in all colors, shapes and sizes? Well, let's start off by defining the term coolhunting.
Coolhunting, described by Malcolm Gladwell in Devon Powers’ book, On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future, is the process of making predictions about what is going to become popular. Moreover, corporations attempt to “understand, anticipate, and ultimately shape consumer desire” (Powers, 2019, p. 62). Coolhunting was predominantly in style in the 90s and early 2000s, and the people who found the latest trends at that time were known as coolhunters (Powers, 2019, p. 59). Gladwell states they were, in simpler terms, the pre-social media influencers. Additionally, he states that coolhunters themselves were considered cool because they could identify what was and would be cool in the future. Many of these coolhunters found the upcoming biggest trends by digging through the culture and practices of marginalized groups (Powers, 2019, p.60). Importantly, coolhunters were doing this work on behalf of corporations. For instance, Robert Hanson, the president of Levi’s in Europe, explains how the corporation has a very “rigorous process of development” in which they send out coolhunters four times each year to live among the “opinion-leading target” who “tend” to be the people who start the trends (Powers, 2019, p.60). In Powers’ text, Gladwell states that as coolhunters brought cultural artifacts, among other things, from the margins into the mainstream they committed cultural appropriation (Powers, 2019, p.85). Coolhunters, under the employment of large corporations, put the subcultural market doctrine into play, this doctrine describes the idea that subcultural groups are “trendsetters and thus market leaders” which eventually would be appropriated by the mainstream (Powers, 2019, p.65).
As I discussed previously, misogynoir is perpetuated through popular media, this evidently includes the stereotypes of Black women also being continued and preserved through popular culture and media. In order for Bailey to communicate this concept to her audience and help them understand the implications of these representations in popular media she writes about the Black feminist theory: it is the power of images to “serve” the domination of the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” by monitoring and controlling how society perceives marginalized and subordinate groups and how we view and think of ourselves (Bailey, 2021, p.1). Misogynoir, including the stereotypes that reinforce this form of “interlocking oppression” (Bailey, 2021, p.1), the Black feminist theory and coolhunting allow us to comprehend how hoops, a subcultural trend, were appropriated and made part of the mainstream which consequently turned them into accessories for mass consumption. The Black feminist theory explains how the dominant race, white folks, shaped the world’s view of Black women who wore hoop earrings. They labeled and made people view them as ghetto, forming and imposing a new stereotype on Black women. They themselves, white folks, formed an image of marginalized people styling hoops as ghetto until coolhunters decided that marginalized groups were the new trendsetters (Powers, 2019, p.65). Coolhunters dug through Black culture and discovered that hoops were cool, as a result they brought hoops out of the margins and into the mainstream, simultaneously, appropriating them. (Powers, 2019, p.85). After this the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” transformed people’s view on hoop earrings into classy, fun and trendy accessories for all, completely disregarding how they used to represent black women wearing hoops in the past: ghetto. In sum, both readings Misogynoir Transformed by Moya Bailey and On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future by Devon Powers, allow us to understand how hoop earrings, marginalized accessories, got incorporated into the mainstream.
Works Cited
Bailey, M. (2021). Introduction: What Is Misogynoir?. In Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (pp. 1-34). New York, USA: New York University Press. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.18574/nyu/9781479803392.003.0004
Burke, J. (2020, June 18). Hoop Earrings Are Not A Trend. Tini Lux. Retrieved November 13, 2022, from https://tinilux.com/blogs/tini-lux-edit/hoop-earrings-in-black-culture
Powers, D. (2019). On trend: The business of forecasting the future. Chapter 3. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. (Annenberg Reserve HF 5415.32 P695 2019)
By: Anastasia Russell
ReplyDeleteHi Gabriela! You had a really interesting blog post. I particularly found it interesting that hoop earrings were once not an element of mainstream culture. When reading your post, I couldn’t help but make a connection to Adorno & Horkheimer’s piece - Dialectic of Enlightenment. In it, they address the term Culture industry: the idea that culture is mass-produced and commercialized. This process is motivated by the incentives of capitalism. Through this operation, media becomes uniform and standardized. Producers avoid risk by not differentiating their content and consumers become accustomed to passively absorbing it. Through the culture industry, consumers possess pseudo-individuality, in which they feel as though they have agency to decide what they buy, but they are still a victim to pop cultures' captivity. Adorno & Horkheimer argue that a danger of the culture industry is how it cultivates commodity fetishisms: the inaccurate assignment of value for goods. For example, a bottle of water which is vital to survival costs about $2. A designer bag, an entity not key to survival, costs multiple thousands. There is a gap between the price and its utility. Purchasing a product is instead an investment in social value, rather than practical (Adorno, 2). As you stated in your post, through a means of coolhunting, earrings have been incorporated into mainstream society. As a result of that, a pair of hoop earrings now can cost up to $4,000. Hoop earrings have been incorporated into mainstream culture and became a fetishized commodity.
By: Anastasia Russell
Gabriela, I loved your blog post and funny enough, I also wrote about an earring trend in response to this prompt. While I discussed the trend of having a “curated ear” through having multiple piercings and its roots in punk subculture, this trend certainly involves having one or more hoop in each ear. I really enjoyed reading your piece because it provided me with even more knowledge about the history of earrings, along with more evidence in how trendy pierced ears are an excellent example of pseudo-individuality from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. As you discussed, hoops were exploited from Black culture through coolhunting, leading to transformed views of classiness, trendisness, and fashionable, and thus new markets. Today what astonishes me most about the hoop market is the sheer amount of options there are for such a tiny commodity. Take a brand like Studs for example, this trendy brand revolves around their sale of hoops and studs, and are continuously forced to produce new and exciting styles and designs. While customers keep coming for more, they experience pseudo-individuality in their pursuit to be part of the trend. Whether wearing a classic pair of hoops or ones that they believe to be “different” because they are in a slightly more oval or hexagonal shape than your classic circular hoops, or maybe they are enameled a hot pink color, or wrapped in pauve-diamonds, consumers believe they are unique and fashionable. However, at the core, this consumer is the same as every other consumer of the hoop earring and part of the same exact culture industry.
ReplyDeleteSophia Freedman
Commenter: Rebecca Anderson
ReplyDeleteI love this topic and think it has so many connections to concepts we’ve studied this year! As I was reading I thought a lot about the pieces we worked on at the beginning of October – jeaning, Class Dismissed, Queer Eye.
The first thing that I thought had strong connections to the idea of hoops and their shifting cultural position over time was Fiske’s work. His definition of incorporation seems like a good description of exactly what has happened with hoop earrings – he explains that in capitalist economies, there are profit incentives for commodifying aspects of counter-cultural groups’ lives. Hoops began as an item that was made fun of, called “ghetto”, and generally associated with women of color – to the mainstream, they were a counter-cultural item. However, when hoops were suddenly deemed “cool”, non-Black and Latina women began wearing them everywhere (...also hence the “Clean Girl Aesthetic”) – this was particularly true of influencers/celebrities because it was good for their image and therefore profitable.
Another topic that I thought might have an interesting connection was the idea of respectability politics in the article on Queer Eye. Although the article dives more specifically into things like the AIDS crisis in this context, the general idea holds true – that respectability politics occur when marginalized groups are expected to “comport themselves well” and in a way that seems proximate to whiteness in order to be accepted by dominant groups. Something to note when examining the recent rise in popularity of hoops is that many of the celebrities who made them “stylish again” are not Black – Olivia Munn, Hailey Bieber, Kim Kardashian, etc. However, it is interesting that many of them are, in fact, women of color. I started to think about respectability politics here in relation to colorism and classism – the idea that these women, who are women of color but not of darker skin tones, are wealthy and well-known, are accepted by society for wearing hoops that darker-skinned women are shunned for. Perhaps this is a bit of a broad interpretation of respectability politics, but the idea of comporting oneself in a way that is accepted by the mainstream and proximate to whiteness in a way seems apparent in the fact that lighter-skinned wealthy women of color are celebrated for wearing hoops while darker-skinned women are not.
Conor Smith:
ReplyDeleteThis was a very interesting piece! I had no idea hoop earrings had origins in the black community. As well, I did not know about the racism black women faced for wearing these earrings. The description of this racism is especially jarring, and I think your connection to Moya Bailey's piece was perfect.
To assist with Moya Bailey's piece on misogynoir, Stuart Hall's "spectacle of the other" piece is an interesting lens to view hoop earrings with. Hall describes how stereotypes form and what causes differences that lead to these stereotypes. Anthropological difference is what, I believe, you are arguing caused the harmful stereotypes of misogynoir. Hall believes anthropological difference occurs due to the “basis of that symbolic order which we call culture” (Hall 236). Hoop earrings belong to the symbolic order of culture. To conservative white consumers at the time of their conception, they saw hoop earrings as socially inferior to stud earrings due to hoop earrings belonging to marginalized groups.
Additionally, your descriptions of the various harmful archetypes of black women represented in media demonstrate Hall’s definition of intertextuality. According to Hall, Intertextuality is
“the ‘accumulation of meanings across different texts, where one image refers to another, or has its meaning altered by being ‘read’ in the context of other images” (p. 232). Each archetype seems to build off of each other, adding more harmful stereotypes that hurt black women specifically.
I feel like, if you were to rewrite this, bringing in Stuart Hall's work would add another degree of depth to your piece. Once again, great job!
Commenter: Lia Simmons
ReplyDeleteGabriela,
Thank you for righting such an insightful piece on the cultural appropriation of wearing hoops. And diving into how an object so simple like a certain pair of earrings can be considered "ghetto" when worn by a black women but then considered "cool" when worn by a white women. Another instance of this that I could think of is black women and laying there edges. I remember when black women would lay there edges it was again considered "ghetto" but when a white girl would it was then all of a sudden considered "classy".
When reading your blog post I thought of the Williams reading Black Memes Matter and how he talk about #LivingWhileBlack and the hardships black people face while just living there lives. He dives into two very popular memes #BBQBecky and #Karen. These memes both depicting two women who harassed black people who were just trying to go about their day when two white women decided to interrupt and call the police and implying that they were doing something wrong. When defined on the internet A “Becky” has been defined by Urban Dictionary as “a stereotypical, basic White girl; obsessed with Starbucks [and] Ugg boots.” A “Karen” is described as a “middle aged woman, typically blonde, [who] makes solutions to others’ problems an inconvenience to her although she isn’t even remotely affected”(Williams, 2020, P.2) Both of these two definitions undermining and way to nice to what they actually signify. In the article they talk about how when a black person does something it is considered bad and not as significant as when a white person doing it. And in this article it talks about how black memes are not getting the attention and respect they deserved and that #BBQBeckys' and #Karens' are getting it too easy. And that if it was to be the other way around a black person hassling a white person when they are just trying to live their life their would be way more attention and that the definitions of their actions wouldn't be as kinda and nonchalant.
Hi Gaby! I loved reading your piece. As a girl who loves to wear hoops, I really appreciate that your piece gave me an insight into how one of my favorite accessories came to be adopted by the mainstream. Moreover, it made me think about the first time I bought a pair of hoop earrings for myself. I remember scrolling through TikTok and seeing most girls on my For You Page wearing dainty gold hoops, which made me want to purchase a pair. When I went online to buy the earrings, I came across hundreds of websites that sold almost identical pairs of the gold hoops I wanted. Now that I’ve read Adorno & Horkheimer’s piece, Dialectic of Enlightenment, I can see how this experience illustrates that hoops have become a part of The Culture Industry. Being that so many companies produce replicas of the same hoops, the theorists would argue that they constitute part of this industry because they are mass produced and commercialized. Further, the popularity of gold hoops also manifests the idea of standardization, which is the idea that “under monopoly, all mass culture is identical” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944, p. 1). Although companies might produce slightly different versions of the gold hoops — they can vary in size, thickness, shade, etc. — all hoops are essentially the same. I think this connects really well to what you mentioned about coolhunters, given that because hoops were dramatically transported from the margins to the mainstream, their popularity grew exponentially — leading to their incorporation into The Culture Industry.
ReplyDeleteLiliana Dávila