High Heel (Object Lessons)

Coming towards the end of Summer Brennan’s book High Heel, this phrase encapsulates the high heeled shoe as both a fashion statement and a metaphor for the patriarchy.Brennan’s 150 short essays, can, like Cortázar’s book Hopscotch, be read in or out of order. She employs literary reference and allusion at a frenetic, though friendly pace, from Sylvia Plath to The Brothers Grimm, to Ovid.Perhaps my favorite is the re-imagining of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Daphne, amongst other women in Ovid’s tales flees a man, but is immobilized as a laurel tree. Rape, chase and immobilization are constant themes. Are High Heels but another way to slow down, to immobilize?Brennan fiercely illuminates both sides of the argument, never relinquishing a woman’s choice to wear heels, nor accepting the patriarchal implications. One wants her to choose sides but she is too wise to do so.Another crucial piece of Brennan’s argument concerns the fluidity of gender that exists outside duality. She examines how this can provide a path to understanding.While we must believe that a future of true gender equality exists, to get there one must embrace both the freedoms of today and limn clearly the biases of the past and present. This Summer Brennan does exquisitely.

Her phrasing- the word choices and cadence- is remarkable. Beautiful description in an interesting book.

This isn't a history of the high heel, of who first put a spike on the bottom of a heel and called it fashion though it contains many fascinating historical tidbits. It is an extended pondering on what the heel is, why the heel is, and what it is like to live with. It's thoughtful and wide ranging, touching briefly on various shores. It was a very satisfying book because it brought so much to the table and left me thinking about the questions it raised for days afterward.

Interesting examination at the socio-political function of high heels. Very readable

Great read and informative

“How do they walk in these things?” plaintively queries a high-heeled Jack Lemmon as ‘Daphne’ in Billy Wilder’s ‘Some Like It Hot’. The more fundamental question, directly and intelligently addressed in Summer Brennan’s ‘High Heel’, is why do they walk in these things at all, given that their pinched toe and tilt of the foot makes them so impractical and uncomfortable?Her own love-hate relationship with this object (she records falling whilst trying to run on 4-inch heels) results in Brennan offering a finely nuanced assessment of the ambiguity surrounding this cultural icon. Thus high heels can combine formality and femininity for the professional woman, whilst also being associated with the sex worker and fetishism. Their height suggests heightened status yet their restrictions on movement invite or impose passivity. They can come across both as empowering and liberating and as cruel and degrading (the modern-day equivalent of the lotus shoe), and those that wear them can thus appear as beautiful and alluring or vain and deluded. Not surprisingly, then, high heels constitute, as Brennan states a “fertile locus of feminist debate.”This loosely structured book has an historical dimension but doesn’t really provide a systematic or detailed history of the high heel. Tellingly Brennan’s Bibliography contains Ovid, the Brothers Grimm, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf but not June Swann’s ‘Shoes’ or Colin McDowell’s ‘Shoes; Fashion and Fantasy’, or Pattison and Woolley’s ‘Shoes: A Century of Style.’ This is because Brennan kicks off her high heels in order to range far and wide, pondering portrayals of femininity in Greek myth and in fairy tale as well as issues relating to female objectification and sensuality in the modern (western) world.The fetishist or historian interested only in high heels will likely find this book somewhat disappointing but anyone curious to learn how heels, and shoes more generally, are “about … power, or the lack of it” will find ‘High Heel’ very well written and thought provoking.

Breathtaking in its intimacy as well as scope: a hospitable starting place for anyone starting to ask questions about patriarchy but an equally refreshing place for those who have been engaging these questions for decades.I took my sweet time with the book, only reading a few portions a week. Maybe there’s a universe in which I could have raced through it and read it all in one sitting, but in this universe, I had to exhale, pause and regroup after nearly every section—in a good way. With powerful juxtapositions, poetic implications, and wide-reaching connections, Brennan's short Object Lessons book named, mined, and integrated so many common aspects of what “woman” has meant in centuries of patriarchal societies, all through the footprint of a shoe.The text was haunting, illuminating, and liberating. I literally would sigh every time I put it down—from relief of having aspects of my experience named or from parts that made me hold my breath with tension of hearing compounded repetition of the traumas and injustices that, familiar as they are, cause pain to read in their centuries of banal continuation. Each section was truly food for thought, with the space between each numbered section also speaking volumes. The shape and rhythm of the book weave together things just as powerfully in their implicitness/unspokenness as when explicit connections are made. It is as intellectually rigorous as it is lyrical and intuitive.I loved every page.

Reading this book as someone that identifies as male, it's very powerful on a number of levels and very uncomfortable. I completely agree with the sentiment on the back cover that Jami Attenberg "would like to press a copy...into the hands of every woman...and every man" and I'd personally go a step further to emphasise "every man" particularly when we see some of the language being used by powerful leaders that's getting them elected in a supposedly evolved society.This isn't a fetish book and it's not a frivolous holiday read about a girl shopping for shoes. And it's not a debate as to whether a woman should or should not wear heels. The high heel in question is a motif; it's Ariadne's ball of string that guides you through the labyrinth; it's the glass slipper that takes you on the journey to find Cinderella. And that journey is a vivid, insightful, and at times harrowing, account of how difficult it is to be a woman in a patriarchal society, from the foot-binding of Han dynasty Chinese girls through Julie Garland's starvation diet on the Wizard of Oz set, to the critical eyes of a jury trying to work out what type of woman it is that's claiming rape rather than focusing on the act.Overall, I'm unsure of the message, possibly because I got so absorbed in trying to process the myriad oppressive ways in which women have been treated through time. Maybe it's the journey and not the destination. I don't know that I could call it empowering, although there are observations on how people try and succeed in reclaiming all or part of themselves. Part of the feeling I'm left with is, even if a woman can empower herself, how much of a real say will she have had without a fundamental environmental and biological evolution?

An intelligent, passionate and engaging book. I equally want to keep it and I want to share it.I read this book in fits and starts throughout a day and it made me think, self analyse and see things in a different light.While it’s a book about high heeled shoes it is also so much more.