My Nails Tell A Story:

A Multimodal Ethnographic Exploration of Expression, Identity, and Resistance in Brooklyn Nail Salons 

Based on three months of camera-based fieldwork in Brooklyn nail salons, this research examines the cultural significance of professional nail services among Black women. Specifically, it explores how manicures facilitate Black women’s self-care, self-expression, and self-making while also investigating how the fashioning and care of hands challenge and, at times, reinforce hegemonic social, economic, and aesthetic regimes. 

Expressive manicure styles that emerged from working-class Black-American communities—often characterized by their perceived excessiveness and dramatic flair—have been stigmatized through racist and classist descriptors like "hood" or "ghetto." However, this "somatic ornamentation” (Lezama 2024), the expressive manicure is theorized here as a profound practice of world-making and embodied authorship. Adorned with materials like polish, gels, stones, foils, and charms, nails in this community become tiny canvases imbued with personal and collective narratives of memory and emotional landscapes, serving as conduits for storytelling and imaginative dream spaces. By examining the social constructs reflected on the surface of the fingernail, this study further highlights how manicures intertwine with identity, self-care, and the politics of race and class.

This multimodal ethnographic installation is a sample of an ongoing project that includes multiple modes of engagement, film, images, digital art, poetry, and an interactive zine to invite viewers to connect more intimately with the fingernail as a discursive surface. Together, these media underscore how expressive manicures transcend corporeal limits to encode meaning onto the body, celebrating this as a meaningful, creative, and cultural practice of care, personhood, and resistance.

The film will be screened for the first time on Nov 6 in Amsterdam at Visual Encounters. An ethnographic film screening and an exploratory version of the installation will be displayed at the 2024 AAA Annual Meeting in Tampa.

Future Implications:

This project contributes to broader discussions on self-care and adornment practices within marginalized communities, body politics, the politics of cultural appropriation, and dialectical aesthetics.