Moustachioed Women: A digital humanities investigation into the politics of female facial hair in literature, 1835-1906.

This project examines what the literary representations of moustachioed women between 1835-1906 reveal about the history and politics of facial hair that have remained prevalent to today.

Unlike her nineteenth-century literary counterparts, such the angel in the house, the New Woman and the femme fatale (popular subjects of scholarly discussion), the moustachioed woman has elicited little critical attention. Yet, her very invisibility is suspect.

The research thus has two major aims: to use 'distant reading' (Moretti 2005) to create a corpus of works in which this figure appears and to study the way in which women's facial hair is politicised