The desk, not the finished shelf

Grey, in Public

Something I keep noticing and want to sit with rather than rush into a proposal: the small but visible trend of women in their thirties, forties and beyond letting their grey come in on camera, on TikTok, rather than covering it up or apologising for it in the caption. What interests me is not the hair itself but the positioning work happening underneath it — how a woman narrates her own ageing body to an audience she cannot see, and how that audience answers back in the comments.

A shape is forming: a small-stories reading of grey-hair content and its comment sections across three regions — the UK, Bahrain (or the wider Gulf), and South Korea — where beauty norms around visible ageing diverge sharply. Same platform, same basic gesture (stopping the dye), three very different moral economies of comment. I'd want to know whether the metaphor families look anything like the ones I already know from the infertility corpus — defiance, liberation, decline, dignity — or whether ageing produces its own vocabulary entirely. Not yet a project. Just a question I don't want to lose.

Big Story, Small Story

I keep circling the same methodological discomfort without resolving it. Small-stories analysis — my usual tool — is built for the fine grain: a single hedge, a shift in stance, a moment of positioning inside one post. But a blog corpus also carries a big story, told across hundreds of entries over years, and small-stories method has no natural way to hold that longer arc in view without flattening it back into a sequence of moments. Big-story approaches do the reverse: they can narrate the arc, but they lose exactly the granular detail — the hedge, the stance shift — that made me trust small stories in the first place. I don't think this is a problem to solve so much as a tension to keep declaring honestly each time I choose one over the other.