stiletto pumps in da club.

for my feminist theory course, i wrote a 17 page final paper about the stiletto heel and the way it informs conceptions of womanhood. i used theories of embodiment & gender performance to reason that a woman can wear stilettos and be a feminist. here is a excerpt:

The bodily manipulations made by the stiletto constitute a sexual science, a complex system of physical maneuvers around which we define what is feminine or sexy. This complex system of definition develops along two fronts--that is, the physical contortion of the body and a social understanding of femininity. The two concepts work in service to make the stiletto symbolic of womanhood. The feminist critique examines further how the stiletto as a symbol of womanhood alters the body and informs movement and gender construction. Cox describes the social outcome of this complex system by saying, "[w]ith a hardened, phallic body that inspired both terror and sexual longing....a woman could prove to be an untouchable object" (Cox, 103). Her comments speak to the imagined notions of womanhood constructed about the physical changes. The physical body and the cultural constructions are at play here in informing our thoughts on gender performance.