The lucid essays in the original edition of High Heels and Bound Feet drove lively discussions and engagement with core anthropological concepts in traditional and online courses. Lenkeit showed how one’s daily life at work, at school, at home, and at play could be more engaging and provocative when viewed through anthropology’s multifaceted lens. The slightly expanded Second Edition is freshened by the addition of seven new essays. Each continues to illustrate myriad possible applications of concepts and methods from anthropology to everyday experiences. While essays focus on cultural anthropology, the inclusion of topics on linguistics, biological anthropology, and archaeology brings attention to the holistic nature of the discipline. All essays conclude with material useful for assimilating content: Thinking It Through, Anthropological Terms, and Thinking Practically. According to the author, education should color one’s life and broaden one’s perspective. High Heels and Bound Feet, 2/E will pique readers’ interest as they discover how anthropology informs, energizes, and infuses their lives every day.

This book discusses when one should not wear high heels, toe nail care, how to shop for high heels, getting the proper fit, shoe uppers, shoe soles, straps, boots, mules, slippers, loose fitting sandals, ground surfaces, foot cushions, platform soles, toe types, heel types, measuring heel height, mid-heels, high heels including super high 6 and 7 inch heels, shoe styles, how to prepare new shoes, what to do with shoes that do not fit, how long one can wear high heels, caring for shoes, maintaining health, and old age. There are also chapters about foot arches, Achilles tendons, calf muscles, walking, and much, much more. This book can be invaluable to devoted high heel wearers, as well as beginners.

Footbinding is widely condemned as perverse & as symbolic of male domination over women. This study offers a more complex explanation of a thousand year practice, contending that the binding of women's feet in China was sustained by the interests of both women and men.

Best Fifteen Books of March 2019, Refinery29 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019, Paste Magazine Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. 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 published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Discover the most extreme things in the world on the pages of this kid-friendly collection of entertaining and educational articles. Kids will have a blast learning about the most extreme things in the world! The World’s Fastest, Spookiest, Smelliest, Strongest Book is full of weird, wild, and wonderful facts about the world. Readers will learn about the most amazing waterfalls, the fastest animals, and more while being entertained by quirky drawings throughout the book.

The new edition of Beauty and Misogyny revisits and updates Sheila Jeffreys' uncompromising critique of Western beauty practice and the industries and ideologies behind it. Jeffreys argues that beauty practices are not related to individual female choice or creative expression, but represent instead an important aspect of women's oppression. As these practices have become increasingly brutal and pervasive, the need to scrutinize and dismantle them is if anything more urgent now as it was in 2005 when the first edition of the book was published. The United Nations concept of "harmful traditional/cultural practices" provides a useful lens for the author to advance her critique. She makes the case for including Western beauty practices within this definition, examining their role in damaging women's health, creating sexual difference and enforcing female deference. First-wave feminists of the 1970s criticized pervasive beauty regimes such as dieting and depilation, but a later argument took hold that beauty practices were no longer oppressive now that women could "choose" them. In recent years the reality of Western beauty practices has become much more bloody and severe, requiring the breaking of skin and the rearrangement or amputation of body parts. Beauty and Misogyny seeks to make sense of why beauty practices have not only persisted but become more extreme. It examines the pervasive use of makeup, the misogyny of fashion and high-heeled shoes, and looks at the role of pornography in the creation of increasingly popular beauty practices such as breast implants, genital waxing, surgical alteration of the labia and other forms of self-mutilation. The book concludes by considering how a culture of resistance to these practices can be created. A new and thoroughly updated edition of this essential work will appeal to all levels of students and teachers of gender studies, cultural studies and feminist psychology, and to anyone with an interest in feminism, women and beauty, and women's health.

Previous studies of the practice of footbinding in imperial China have theorized that it expressed ethnic identity or that it served an economic function. By analyzing the popularity of footbinding in different places and times, Footbinding as Fashion investigates the claim that early Qing (1644–1911) attempts by Manchu rulers to ban footbinding made it a symbol of anti-Manchu sentiment and Han identity and led to the spread of the practice throughout all levels of society. Detailed case studies of Taiwan, Hebei, and Liaoning provinces exploit rich bodies of previously neglected ethnographic reports, economic surveys, and rare censuses of footbinding to challenge the significance of sedentary female labor and ethnic rivalries as factors leading to the hegemony of the footbinding fashion. The study concludes that, independently of identity politics and economic factors, variations in local status hierarchies and elite culture coupled with status competition and fear of ridicule for not binding girls’ feet best explain how a culturally arbitrary fashion such as footbinding could attain hegemonic status.

First published in 1977, The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe examines the realities of foot and shoe eroticism practised by almost all of us, whether consciously or unconsciously. Provocative often witty and always original, the book takes us on a walking tour through history: from Chinese footbinding (completely sexual in intent) and the medieval poulaine (perhaps the most blatantly pornographic shoe ever worn) to the outrageous distortions of the foot gladly suffered by woman over the centuries in the cause of sexual allure. The author explores the obsession with ‘sick’ and ‘tired’ feet and the huge industry that has sprung up to cater to our negativism. He gives a psychosexual guide to us via footwear, grouping men’s and women’s shoes into such categories as sexy, sexless, neuter, bisexual, sensuous, peacock, masculine, eunuch and machismo. This book will be of interest to students of history, gender studies, sexuality studies and fashion.

The Internet has had a huge impact on channels of communication and information, reaching across time and space to connect the world through globalisation. In this Internet-led world, story links to story, windows open on new stories and no overall authority establishes priority. This sense of globalisation has raised many questions for contemporary American Novelists, primarily the usefulness or redundancy of narrative and its potentially adaptive function. What are the right stories for such a broadband world? How do contemporary American novelists respond to issues such as the influence of the multinational corporation and its predecessors, human rights Imperialism, the literary work as a marketable commodity, translation as betrayal, data overload, and the implosion of the virtual into the biosphere? Is globalisation inevitable – or is it a fiction which fiction turns into reality? Fictions of America explores these questions and looks at the ways in which India, China and Africa can be said to have underwritten American culture, how literature has been marketed globally, and how novelists have answered back to power with resistant fictions. Judie Newman examines a wide range of fiction from the mid nineteenth to the twenty-first century including the transnational adoption narrative, short story, historical novel, slave narrative, international bestseller and Western to illustrate her argument. Looking closely at authors such as Bharati Mukherjee, John Updike, Emily Prager, Hannah Crafts, Zora Neale Hurston, David Bradley, Peter Høeg, and Cormac McCarthy, Fictions of America provides a bold response to the crucial questions raised by globalisation.