High Heel
Summer Brennan, Allyson Ryan
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars
4.17
· 6 ratings · 148 pages · Published: 21 Mar 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. It considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire and struggle, sex and society, setting out to understand what it means to be a woman by walking a few hundred years in her shoes.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.