High Heel (Object Lessons) - Softcover

Brennan, Summer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 150132599X ISBN 13: 9781501325991

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019

Synopsis

A Refinery29 Best Book of March 2019A Paste Magazine Best Book of March 2019
Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed, the high heel is central to the iconography of modern womanhood. But are high heels good? Are they feminist? What does it mean for a woman (or, for that matter, a man) to choose to wear them?

Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, and from the golden ratio to glam rock. Summer Brennan considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire and struggle, sex and society, violence and self expression, setting out to understand what it means to be a woman by walking a few hundred years in her shoes.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things, published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

About this title

About the Author:

Summer Brennan is a journalist and author. She received the 2016 Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award and was a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. Her first book, The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America (2015) was a finalist for the 2016 Orion Book Award. A longtime consultant for the United Nations, her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Scientific American, McSweeney's, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and New Mexico.

Review:

"[A] thought-provoking meditation on what it means to move through the world as a woman...Powerful enough to completely change your world view." -Refinery29

"High Heel is a riveting, ferociously intelligent, deeply liberating book. I would like to press a copy of it into the hands of every woman I know--and every man, too." -Jami Attenberg, bestselling author of All Grown Up

"Wide-ranging and thoughtful." -Jezebel-"In 150 little essays, Brennan goes at it with poetry, literary references, myth, the psychopathology of rape, fairy tales, politics, and fashion history. All is brought off so beautifully that you can't help reading." -Philadelphia Inquirer-
"Combining brilliant writing with extensive research, Summer Brennan delivers an entertaining read..." -Paste Magazine-"From Cinderella's glass slippers to Carrie Bradshaw's Manolo Blahniks, Summer Brennan deftly analyzes one of the world's most provocative and sexualized fashion accessories..." - Longreads

"Brennan resists giving way to easy judgments on either side. She's inhabiting the same space as so-called "bad feminist" Roxane Gay, interrogating both sides of the high heel dilemma and refusing to declare a winner... The lovely cadences stack up like so many sand castles that sift iconic examples of high heels into a finely grained pile of pros and cons that each reader will sift through quite differently... Whether you're for them or against them, the radical uncertainty of Brennan's take on high heels is worth reflection." - Pop Matters

"High Heel is a glowing showcase of what it means to be a woman, in every historical, political, and publicly consumed meaning of the word ... So much of High Heel feels like it has been presented in an act of kismet ... proof that we had not experienced any of these events in our life alone." - The Attic on Eighth

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 150132599X
• ISBN 13: 9781501325991
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192