High Heel : Object Lessons

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, & 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 & the performance of gender, High Heel moves from film to fairytale, from foot binding to feminism, & from the golden ratio to glam rock. Summer Brennan considers this most provocative of fashion accessories as a nexus of desire & struggle, sex & society, violence & 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.

“The Object Lessons project, edited by game theory legend Ian Bogost & cultural studies academic Christopher Schaberg, commissions short essays & small, beautiful books about everyday objects from shipping containers to toast. The Atlantic hosts a collection of ‘mini object-lessons’. . . . More substantive is Bloomsbury’s collection of small, gorgeously designed books that delve into their subjects in much more depth.” — Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

Summer Brennan is a journalist & author. She received the 2016 Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award & was a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NY University. Her first book, The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America (2015) was a finalist for the 2016 Orion Book Award. A longtime consultant for the United Nations, her writing has appeared in NY Magazine, S