High Heel

<p><b>Best Fifteen Books of March 2019, <i>Refinery29</i></b><br><b>Best Nonfiction Books of 2019, <i>Paste Magazine</i><br></b><br>Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. <br><br>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?<br><br>Meditating on the labyrinthine nature of sexual identity and the performance of gender, <i>High Heel</i> 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.<br><br>Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in <i>The Atlantic</i>.</p>