These Shoes Aren't Made for Walking: Rethinking High-Heeled Shoes as Cultural Artifacts

Abstract

A feminist remix video is a visual arts approach to critique social constructions of gender expectations. In my interrogation of the cultural phenome-non of high-heeled shoes, I remixed media messages about high heels into a video (see Figure 1) that included my video interviews with six people from six different countries, each different from the other in ethnic, work status, age, gender, and sexual-orientation identity. I asked interviewees about their understandings of and associations with high-heeled shoes. In the accompanying essay to my video, I reflect on my personal sense of self in high heels as both an acknowledgement and reinforcement of gender constructions of desire/luxury, femininity, elegance, restriction, and op-pression. A possibility for inversion of given gender categories; as well as how my research-based video art re-envisions high-heeled gender identity, then is also explored.