Subtitle: On Shoes
Author: Edited by Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss
Subject: Cultural Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2870-4
Pages: 7 x 10, 288 pp., 95 b&w illus.
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Description: A lively and learned exploration of the cultural significance of shoes.
"Benstock and Ferris [have edited] fourteen essays of thought-provoking studies on shoes from many viewpoints by scholars of literature, history, gender studies, and design. . . . Whether one agrees with all the premises or not, these essays are provocative and challenging."--Choice
"Anyone who loves shoes will love this fascinating collection of essays on the subject."-Alison Lurie, author of The Language of Clothes
"At once cultural texts and commodities, shoes represent the human condition in all its complexity. This remarkable compendium of essays reveals how shoes transcend multiple identities, boundaries, and emotions. From brogans to Cinderella's tiny slipper and beyond, shoes embody the intersections among gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, race, age, and the multiple joys, sorrows, ambivalences, and anxieties of everyday life. Readers of this interdisciplinary volume will never again take shoes for granted."-Susan Kaiser, author of The Social Psychology of Clothing: Symbolic Appearances in Context
There's far more to shoes than leather. They are at once commodities and aesthetic artifacts. They inspire collectors, from the infamous Marie Antoinette and Imelda Marcos to contemporary Gen-Xers, who stockpile Steve Madden platforms, to the thirty- to forty-year old crowd who spend hundreds on Manolo Blahnik heels and Prada boots. Shoes, far more than mere foot coverings, both underscore and subvert class, gender, ethnic, and racial identities.
Footnotes: On Shoes explores the many paradoxes inherent in shoes-in collecting, consuming, representing, and wearing them-as well as their enduring fascination. This collection of fourteen essays-published here for the first time-captures the cultural, psychological, and sexual significance of shoes in art, film, literature, history, folklore, and dance. Contributors look at the shoes that former slaves wore in their march toward freedom following the Civil War, the empty shoes of the Holocaust that represent their murdered wearers, ballet slippers that bear the marks of artistic obsession, and high heels that serve as markers of Latina feminine identity. They also explore shoes in film and in works of contemporary art by Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, and Lisa Milroy.
Footnotes extends inquiry beyond the traditional approaches of fashion historians and students of design by using shoes as the foundation for explorations of broader cultural issues.
Shari Benstock is a professor of English and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Miami. She is the author of several books, most recently "No Gifts from Chance": A Biography of Edith Wharton. Suzanne Ferriss teaches literature and gender studies at Nova Southeastern University. Together they also edited On Fashion (Rutgers University Press).
