315B Final
Nicholaus Mills
"A Bunny's Tale Fifty Years Later"
Gloria Steinem
"A Bunny's Tale"
CBS
"America's Next Top Model"
Bettina Love
"Body Image, Relationships...and Ass"
Marilyn Monroe
"Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend"
KJ Dell'Antonia
"Disney Princesses Do Change Girls..." (NY Times)
Pamela Hollander
"Elevate my Mind: Identities in Hip Hop Love Songs"
HBO
"Girls"
Pretty Woman
Because of his extreme wealth and suave good looks, Edward Lewis could seemingly have any woman he wants, that committed significant other which he needs on his arm at social events to further how he makes his money as a corporate raider. As Barney and his associates are able to transform Vivian into a Cinderella, the questions become whether Vivian can go back to her Hollywood Boulevard life and whether she does have her Prince Charming beyond this week in the form of Edward or anyone else who truly does see her as Cinderella as opposed to a Hollywood Boulevard streetwalker.
Kathy Peiss
Hope in a Jar: Chapter 1: "Masks and Faces," Chapter 3: "Beauty Culture: The Rise of the Cosmetics Industry," "Chapter 5: Promoting the Made-up Woman."
Josephine Baker
In Baker's iconic performance of the Charleston dance, she moves her arms and legs in a frenetic way that makes her appear disjointed and almost puppet-like, or inhuman. The raucous success wrought by the Hottentot Venus dates back to the beginnings of the colonial fetish in Paris, beginning a period of "negrophilia" in Paris that would last for centuries.
Disney Princesses Do Change Girls...
Researchers looked at the rates of engagement with Disney princess media in 198 5- and 6-year-olds, and found that for both boys and girls, higher princess involvement (through toys, products and media consumption) over the course of a year was associated with higher levels of female gender-stereotypical behavior at the end of the study — even after the researchers controlled for other variables.
Watson and Martin
There She Is Miss America
The Girls Next Door
They're often blond, very ambitious and always beautiful. They're the young women who travel from towns and cities across America in hopes of sharing one man's incredible dream: life at the Playboy Mansion. This unique eight episode reality series takes viewers beyond the gates and behind closed doors to reveal the world of Hugh Hefner's mansion as it has never been seen before: through the eyes of the women who live, play - and, of course, party - with him. It's the secret side of an American legend and the fabled home that has captivated the imagination of millions.
"Body Image, Relationships...and Ass"
This book has received the AESA (American Educational Studies Association) Critics Choice Award 2013. Through ethnographically informed interviews and observations conducted with six Black middle and high school girls, Hip Hop's Li'l Sistas Speak explores how young women navigate the space of Hip Hop music and culture to form ideas concerning race, body, class, inequality, and privilege. The thriving atmosphere of Atlanta, Georgia serves as the background against which these youth consume Hip Hop, and the book examines how the city's socially conservative politics, urban gentrification, race relations, Southern-flavored Hip Hop music and culture, and booming adult entertainment industry rest in their periphery. Intertwined within the girls' exploration of Hip Hop and coming of age in Atlanta, the author shares her love for the culture, struggles of being a queer educator and a Black lesbian living and researching in the South, and reimagining Hip Hop pedagogy for urban learners.
"The Case of Rihanna"
This essay examines Rihanna's post-assault performances and personae, both onstage and offstage, to consider how she cultivates erotic fantasy, sexual play, and intimate attachment, despite public pressures to conform to a familiar narrative of black female victimization and survival. I write this essay out of concern with how the culture of shaming and the disciplining of desire places a stranglehold on black women's sexual experiences and explorations of longing, attachment, and erotic pleasure. Rihanna's exploration of sexuality and intimate relationships reveal attachments to highly eroticized forms of racialized and masculinized violence. Instead of abiding by the protocols of the black female survivor of violence who repudiates her abuser, Rihanna sticks close to the scene of her assault and continues to rehearse and restage the interplay of love, violence, and erotic attachments in deliberately shocking ways. And in many respects, she performs complicity in "scenes of subjection," to borrow Saidiya Hartman's phrase. I argue that Rihanna promotes an erotic figuration of black female sexuality through a coalescence of sex and violence in intimate relations—one that I do not condone, but one that needs to be understood in ways more nuanced than how women's relationship to sexual violence gets conceived through typical victim/abuser frameworks. Her post-assault performances and public image do not cohere with a therapeutic and state-sanctioned model of recovery from intimate partner violence, in which a healthy and conforming female subject emerges after being "saved" from her abuser.
Raunch Culture
a book by Ariel Levy which critiques the highly sexualized American culture in which women are objectified, objectify one another, and are encouraged to objectify themselves. Levy refers to this as "raunch culture".
Pygmalion
a guy falls in love with his creation. The artwork is a woman and it represents how men look at women as objects not people.
Madonna
"Material Girl"
Camille Paglia
"Mona Lisa in Motion: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis" On Madonna in the New York Times "What a Woman President Should be Like"
Kathryn Lofton
"Preacher Queen" chapter 4 in Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon
TLC
"Say Yes to the Dress" "Miss America Pageant 2014"
Nicole Fleetwood
"The Case of Rihanna"
FOX
"The Swan"
Roxane Gay
"The Trouble with Prince Charming," "Girls, Girls, Girls," and "On the Solace of Preparing Fried Foods" (from Bad Feminist)
Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon
"Today on Oprah," intoned the TV announcer, and all over America viewers tuned in to learn, empathize, and celebrate. In this book, Kathryn Lofton investigates the Oprah phenomenon and finds in Winfrey's empire—Harpo Productions, O Magazine, and her new television network—an uncanny reflection of religion in modern society. Lofton shows that when Oprah liked, needed, or believed something, she offered her audience nothing less than spiritual revolution, reinforced by practices that fuse consumer behavior, celebrity ambition, and religious idiom. In short, Oprah Winfrey is a media messiah for a secular age. Lofton's unique approach also situates the Oprah enterprise culturally, illuminating how Winfrey reflects and continues historical patterns of American religions.
Anne Cheng
"What Bananas Mean"
Andi Zeisler
"Why Pop Culture Matters," Chapter One in Feminism and Pop Culture
Girls
A comedy about the experiences of a group of girls in their early 20s.
America's Next Top Model
A cyclical competition where women from all over the U.S. compete for the honor of being America's next "it girl" in the modeling world.
Picture Me
A documentary filmmaker follows a model for several years, chronicling her rise from a fresh face to one that adorns billboards and magazines around the world. Go behind the scenes and chronicle the glitzy world of high fashion modeling, from photo shoots with celebrated photographers to runway shows in New York, Milan, and Paris.
The Little Mermaid
A fairytale by a Danish author about a young mermaid who is willing to give up her life in the sea and her identity as a mermaid to gain a human soul and true love.
Walt Disney, The Little Mermaid
A mermaid princess makes a Faustian bargain with an unscrupulous sea-witch in order to meet a human prince on land.
Chasing Beauty
A rare glimpse into the intriguing and complex world of modeling. Behind the glossy covers of Vogue and Glamour lie the rarely talked about, uncensored stories of what models endure and sacrifice to become a top model. CHASING BEAUTY examines body image and the psychological effects of the beauty business on young women and men. The film examines what it takes to be a top model - the demanding and oftentimes unattainable physical requirements of the position, the financial and emotional investment, and the moral negotiations that are sometimes prerequisites for making it. The film follows supermodels, photographers, agents, designers, plastic surgeons, make-up artists and psychologists and asks the question...what is beauty and is it worth the cost?
The Swan
A reality show about an ugly duckling turned beautiful swan, only it's a woman giving herself a physical makeover with plastic surgery, to compete in a beauty pageant.
Jackie Under My Skin
A richly original and fascinating investigation into how Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis transformed our definitions of personal identity and style. For thirty years we have lived with our internalized images of "Jackie, " but until now no writer has definitively explored what it feels like to exist in imaginative and heartfelt connection to this ubiquitous icon. In an elegiac gallery of fantasies and tableaux, Wayne Koestenbaum explains the late First Lady's mesmeric hold on America by anatomizing the myths and metaphors that have attached to her. Analyzing her iconography with both passion and precision, he places stories about Jackie - and photos of Jackie - within the context of literature, film, and the idiosyncratic imagination. Following her into America's dreamwork, far from pious "family values, " Wayne Koestenbaum dares to see her as an embodiment of pleasure, a figure of Circean extravagance, and a unique and necessary emblem of that most exhilarating of pursuits: freedom without responsibility.
The Bachelor
A single bachelor dates multiple women over several weeks, narrowing them down to hopefully find his true love.
"Elevate my Mind: Identities in Hip Hop Love Songs"
An essay is presented about the identities of women in hip hop and love songs in the U.S. The author mentions the existence of rap love songs and how love hip hop songs are constrained to fit women and men identities. Moreover, she mentions the significance of love in social justice and how popular culture mocks real love.
Bridesmaids
Annie is a single woman whose own life is a mess, but when she learns that her lifelong best friend, Lillian , is engaged, she has no choice but to serve as maid of honor. Though lovelorn and almost penniless, Annie, nevertheless, winds her way through the strange and expensive rituals associated with her job as the bride's go-to girl. Determined to make things perfect, she gamely leads Lillian and other bridesmaids down the wild road to the wedding.
Femininity
A witty and often pointed critique of the concept of femininity in contemporary culture and throughout history. She explores the demands placed upon women to fit an established mold, examines female stereotypes, and celebrates the hard-won advances in women's lifestyle and attire. At once profound, revolutionary, empowering, and entertaining, Femininity challenges the accepted female norm while appreciating the women throughout history who have courageously broken free of its constraints.
Mona Lisa in Motion: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
A year after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's death, her intimate possessions have been made public, and her friends have begun to lift the veil of secrecy that surrounded her.
One Perfect Day
Acutely observed and deftly witty, this text masterfully mixes investigative journalism and social commentary to explore the workings of the wedding industry an industry that claims to be worth $160 billion to the US economy and which has every interest in ensuring that the American wedding becomes ever more lavish and complex. Taking us inside the workings of the wedding industry including including the swelling ranks of professional event planners, department stores with their own online registries, the retailers and manufacturers of bridal gowns, and the Walt Disney Company and its Fairy Tale Weddings program, this New Yorker writer skillfully holds the mirror up to the bride's deepest hopes and fears about her wedding day, revealing that for better or worse, the way we marry is who we are.
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Almost a century after its original publication, Thorstein Veblen's work is as fresh and relevant as ever. Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class is in the tradition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, yet it provides a surprisingly contemporary look at American economics and society. Establishing such terms as "conspicuous consumption" and "pecuniary emulation," Veblen's most famous work has become an archetype not only of economic theory, but of historical and sociological thought as well. As sociologist Alan Wolfe writes in his Introduction, Veblen "skillfully . . . wrote a book that will be read so long as the rich are different from the rest of us; which, if the future is anything like the past, they always will be."
"Say Yes to the Dress"
An American reality television show on TLC which follows events at Kleinfeld Bridal in Manhattan. The series shows the progress of individual sales associates, managers, and fitters at the store, along with profiling brides as they search for the perfect wedding dress. Common themes include: overwhelming advice from friends and family, the ability of the perfect dress to help a bride overcome personal difficulty, struggle with weight and body image concerns, and the challenge of staying in budget, especially in the case of dresses by Kleinfeld's exclusive designer, Pnina Tornai. Dresses are sold at a variety of price points.
The Help
An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African American maids' point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.
"What a Woman President Should be Like"
But there are systemic factors, arising from the Constitution, popular tradition, and our electoral process, that have inhibited American women from attaining the highest office in the land. Commander of the armed forces, ceremonial function, must overcome misogyny. What has kept women from winning the White House is not simple sexism but their own reluctance to subject themselves to the harsh scrutiny and ritual abuse of the presidential sweepstakes. But that woman must have the right array of qualities and ideally have risen to prominence through her own talents and not (like Hillary Clinton or Argentina's President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) through her marriage to a powerful man. She must be statesmanlike, pursuing women's progress without playing victim or bashing men.
Oprah Winfrey Show
Chicago-based daytime talk-show host Oprah Winfrey invites a guest panel to discuss a topic, in front of a studio audience. The topics are often controversial or sensational.
Brothers Grimm
Cinderella
Charles Perrault
Cinderella
Disney
Cinderella The Little Mermaid
Peggy Orenstein
Cinderella Ate My Daughter
Cinderella
Dark rehashing of a famous fairytale about an orphan girl who works as a servant for her evil stepmother. Charles Perrault: Cinderella (a different version) (1697) The story is about an ill-treated girl who, with the help of her fairy godmother, travels to a ball in a pumpkin coach. She flees the ball at midnight and loses her glass slipper. Walt Disney animated movie, 1950, Cinderella (online) In a far away, long ago kingdom, Cinderella is living happily with her mother and father until her mother dies. Cinderella's father remarries a cold, cruel woman who has two daughters, Drizella and Anastasia. When the father dies, Cinderella's wicked stepmother turns her into a virtual servant in her own house. Meanwhile, across town in the castle, the King determines that his son the Prince should find a suitable bride and provide him with a required number of grandchildren. So the King invites every eligible maiden in the kingdom to a fancy dress ball, where his son will be able to choose his bride. Cinderella has no suitable party dress for a ball, but her friends the mice, led by Jaques and Gus, and the birds lend a hand in making her one, a dress the evil stepsisters immediately tear apart on the evening of the ball. At this point, enter the Fairy Godmother, the pumpkin carriage, the royal ball, the stroke of midnight, the glass slipper, and the rest, as they say, is fairy tale history.
Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery
Elizabeth Haiken traces the quest for physical perfection through surgery from the turn of the century to the present. Drawing on a wide array of sources - personal accounts, medical records, popular magazines, medical journals, and beauty guides - Haiken reveals how our culture came to see cosmetic surgery as a panacea for both individual and societal problems. As Americans and their surgeons linked the significance of "normal" standards of beauty to social adjustment and economic success, they also linked "undesirable" physical characteristics to psychological conditions such as the "inferiority complex, " for which cosmetic surgery appeared to offer a sure cure. Many Americans now view cosmetic surgery as the most practical solution for an ever-increasing number of perceived problems - from low self-esteem to stalled careers - and plastic surgery has become one of the largest and fastest growing medical specialties in the world. But Haiken questions whether these "solutions" are not in some sense chimeras: by emphasizing the importance of appearance, cosmetic surgery raises serious concerns about how society views such intractable problems as aging, gender, and race - and about how Americans view themselves.
Susan Brownmiller
Femininity
A Bunny's Tale
Gloria Steinem's two-part series chronicling the eleven days she spent undercover as a Bunny in Hugh Hefner's New York Playboy Club in 1963.
Wayne Koestenbaum
Jackie Under My Skin
Rebecca Mead
One Perfect Day
Madona NYT
Madonna is the true feminist. She exposes the puritanism and suffocating ideology of American feminism, which is stuck in an adolescent whining mode. Madonna has taught young women to be fully female and sexual while still exercising total control over their lives. She shows girls how to be attractive, sensual, energetic, ambitious, aggressive and funny -- all at the same time.
Reality Bites Back
Nearly every night on every major network, "unscripted" (but carefully crafted) "reality" TV shows routinely glorify retrograde stereotypes that most people would assume got left behind 35 years ago. In Reality Bites Back, media critic Jennifer L. Pozner aims a critical, analytical lens at a trend most people dismiss as harmless fluff. She deconstructs reality TV's twisted fairytales to demonstrate that far from being simple "guilty pleasures," these programs are actually guilty of fomenting gender-war ideology and significantly affecting the intellectual and political development of this generation's young viewers. She lays out the cultural biases promoted by reality TV about gender, race, class, sexuality, and consumerism, and explores how those biases shape and reflect our cultural perceptions of who we are, what we're valued for, and what we should view as "our place" in society. Smart and informative, this text arms readers with the tools they need to understand and challenge the stereotypes reality TV reinforces and, ultimately, to demand accountability from the corporations responsible for this contemporary cultural attack on three decades of feminist progress.
Bad Feminist
Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman of color while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years and commenting on the state of feminism today. The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture. Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better.
Gary Marshall
Pretty Woman
ovid
Pygmalion
Ariel Levy
Raunch Culture
Jennifer Pozner
Reality Bites Back Chapter 3: "Get Comfortable with my Flaw Finder"
The Second Sex
Revolutionary and incendiary, this text is one of the earliest attempts to confront human history from a feminist perspective. It won the author many admirers and just as many detractors. Today, many regard this massive and meticulously researched masterwork as not only a pillar of feminist thought but of twentieth-century philosophy in general. The primary thesis of this work is that men fundamentally oppress women by characterizing them, on every level, as the Other, defined exclusively in opposition to men. Man occupies the role of the self, or the subject; woman is the object, the other. He is essential, absolute, and transcendent. She is inessential, incomplete, and mutilated. He extends out into the world to impose his will on it, whereas woman is doomed to immanence, or inwardness. He creates, acts, invents; she waits for him to save her. While it is natural for humans to understand themselves in opposition to others, this process is flawed when applied to the genders. In defining woman as Other, man is effectively denying her humanity. This text is an effort to locate the source of these profoundly imbalanced gender roles.
Cinderella Ate My Daughter
Sweet and sassy or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as the source of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages. But how dangerous is pink and pretty, anyway? Being a princess is just make-believe; eventually they grow out of it . . . or do they?In search of answers, Peggy Orenstein visited Disneyland, trolled American Girl Place, and met parents of beauty-pageant preschoolers tricked out like Vegas showgirls. The stakes turn out to be higher than she ever imagined. From premature sexualization to the risk of depression to rising rates of narcissism, the potential negative impact of this new girlie-girl culture is undeniable—yet armed with awareness and recognition, parents can effectively counterbalance its influence in their daughters' lives.
Naomi Wolf
The Beauty Myth
Hans Christian Andersen
The Little Mermaid
ABC
The Oprah Winfrey Show The Bachelor
Simone de Beauvoir
The Second Sex
Thorsten Veblen
The Theory of the Leisure Class
The Beauty Myth
The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife. It's the beauty myth, an obsession with physical perfection that traps the modern woman in an endless spiral of hope, self-consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society's impossible definition of "the flawless beauty."
"Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend"
The song is perhaps most famously performed by Marilyn Monroe in the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Monroe's character, Lorelei Lee, has been followed on a Transatlantic ocean liner by a detective hired by her fiance's father, who wants assurance that she is not marrying purely for money. He is informed of compromising pictures taken with a British diamond mine owner and cancels her letter of credit before she arrives in France, requiring her to work in a nightclub to survive. Her fiance arrives at the cabaret to see her perform this song, about exploiting men for riches. Diamonds are an element in another story line in the film, in which Lorelei is given a diamond tiara by the mine owner, in gratitude for her recovering the photographs. In a later scene, Jane Russell, who played opposite Monroe, sang "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" in court, while pretending to be Lorelei.
Hope in a Jar
This text gives us the first full-scale social history of America's beauty culture, from the buttermilk and rice powder recommended by Victorian recipe books to the mass-produced products of our contemporary consumer age. This author shows how women, far from being pawns and victims, used makeup to declare their freedom, identity, and sexual allure as they flocked to enter public life. And she highlights the leading role of white and black women--Helena Rubenstein and Annie Turnbo Malone, Elizabeth Arden, and Madame CJ Walker--in shaping a unique industry that relied less on advertising than on women's customs of visiting and conversation. Replete with the voices and experiences of ordinary women, this text is a richly textured account of the ways women created the cosmetics industry and the cosmetics created the modern woman.
Elizabeth Haiken
Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery
Janell Hobson
Venus in the Dark
Venus in the Dark
Western culture has long been fascinated by black women, but a history of enslavement and colonial conquest has variously labeled black women's bodies as "exotic" and "grotesque." In this remarkable cultural history of black female beauty, Janell Hobson explores the enduring figure of the "Hottentot Venus." In 1810, Saartjie Baartman was taken from South Africa to Europe, where she was put on display at circuses, salons, and museums and universities as the "Hottentot Venus." The subsequent legacy of representations of black women's sexuality-from Josephine Baker to Serena Williams to hip-hop and dancehall videos-continues to refer back to this persistent icon. This book analyzes the history of critical and artistic responses to this iconography by black women in contemporary photography, film, literature, music, and dance.
"Some Like it Hot"
When two male musicians witness a mob hit, they flee the state in an all-female band disguised as women, but further complications set in.
Feminism and Pop Culture
Whether or not we like to admit it, pop culture is a lens through which we alternately view and shape the world around us. When it comes to feminism, pop culture aids us in translating feminist philosophies, issues, and concepts into everyday language, making them relevant and relatable. In Feminism and Pop Culture,author and cofounder of Bitch magazine Andi Zeisler traces the impact of feminism on pop culture (and vice versa) from the 1940s to the present and beyond. With a comprehensive overview of the intertwining relationship between women and pop culture, this book is an ideal introduction to discussing feminism and daily life
There She Is Miss America
While some see the Miss American Pageant as hokey vestige of another era, many remain enthralled by the annual Atlantic City event. And whether you love it or hate it, no one can deny the impact the contest has had on American popular culture-indeed, many reality television shows seem to have taken cues from the pageant. Founded in 1921, the Miss America Pageant has provided a fascinating glimpse into how American standards of femininity have been defined, projected, maintained, and challenged. At various times, it has been praised as a positive role model for young American women, protested as degrading to women by feminists, and shamed by scandals, such as the one caused by the Penthouse photos of Vanessa Williams in 1984. In this first interdisciplinary anthology to examine this uniquely American event, scholars defend, critique, and reflect on the pageant, grappling with themes like beauty, race, the body, identity, kitsch, and consumerism. "There She Is, Miss America" provides a fascinating examination of an enduring American icon.
