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Glamour: Women, History, Feminism

By Carol Dyhouse
Zed Books

The word glamour has lost a lot of its allure and power these days, bandied about by fashion writers who use glamour interchangeably with polished, chic, elegant, and sophisticated. (Hey, I've been guilty of this occasionally!) That was the conclusion I came to after reading Glamour: Women, History, Feminism by Carol Dyhouse, a scholarly and well-researched book by a social historian.

Society's attitude towards glamour has changed depending on the fashions of the time, Dyhouse argues. Although it might be easy to peg glamour as a male-manufactured concept that traps women with rigid concepts of female attractiveness and breeds a vicious consumer cycle, she sees glamour differently. Instead, glamour is a force associated with "women on the make": women who use the trappings of glamour—clothes, cosmetics, furs, feathers, and lavish jewelry—to transcend class and gender barriers and prescribed societal norms, and to escape the drudgery and burdens of everyday life.

To support her arguments, Dyhouse looks at the evolution and vilification of glamour throughout the twentieth century. Screen sirens and Hollywood films popularized it in the 1930s and '40s and inspired working class girls to emulate the styles of their favourite actresses. However, even when glamour was at its peak, conservative societal elements objected to it. Older generations deemed wearing cosmetics immodest. The editor of British Vogue encouraged young girls to sport a "natural English look" instead of the crass painted-on look of American actresses. The upper classes disapproved of working class girls dressing "above their station" in the hopes of attracting suitors who were better off.

Glamour fell out of fashion in later decades. The 1950s saw the rise of Dior's New Look and domestic femininity, which stressed demure, elegant beauty over artifice and excess—more Grace Kelly than Gloria Swanson. The '60s marked the rise of the gamine girl (e.g., Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Audrey Hepburn), whose mod clothes and doe-eyed innocence stood in marked contrast to the womanly aura of glamour girls. The emphasis on natural looks in the '70s meant an even more radical departure from glamour. But there were some signs of a resurgence: musicians, Motown acts, and the founding of Cosmopolitan magazine paved the way for the glamazons of the 1980s and the resurgence of full-blown glamour.

I realize I'm being glib in my summary of Glamour, but a short blog post can't do justice to the wealth of detail and research that Dyhouse presents here (with lots of illustrated examples, no less!). A scholarly book can easily slip into joyless perfunctory prose full of -isms and jargon, but she writes with a genuine enthusiasm for her subject. I really enjoyed this glamorous romp through the twentieth century, and hey, if anything, I will never take the word glamour for granted again.

Review by Lisa Wong

Cross-posted at Solo Lisa

Desigirls

Directed by Ishita Srivastava

Sometimes you stumble upon really small, obscure films that leave such an impact that you just want as many people to see it as possible. Desigirls by Ishita Srivastava is one such film. Filmed as a graduate thesis project at New York University, this twenty-minute documentary explores a refreshingly new topic—the South Asian lesbian community in New York City. I had the opportunity to watch the film and speak to the director afterward. Even though Desigirls is a student film, Srivastava approaches the topic with maturity and a sincerity that makes it a truly engaging film.

The film follows two women—Priyanka and ‘A’—as they discuss their sexual identities and their role within the South Asian queer community in New York, represented by two key institutions – the ‘Desilicious’ parties and the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (SALGA) meetings. Priyanka is an openly pansexual woman who embraces her sexual identity and is an active member of the community. ‘A’, on the contrary, is living a double life, afraid to come out to her parents and secretly exploring her sexual identity.

Srivastava explores the lives of the two women with sensitivity, never intruding too much on their space. While Priyanka willingly offers herself to the camera and interacts freely with it, ‘A’ turns out to be the more interesting character to follow since her anonymity allows her to be emotionally vulnerable in front of the camera. The segment where she discusses her relationship with her brother is particularly moving. Srivastava does a commendable job of letting the characters be, without forcing much upon them or from them.

At times the film becomes ambitious in its scope, trying to accomplish too much in its very short runtime. Srivastava attempts to develop the two main characters and also explore the various events centered on the community. There’s enough in there to be expanded to a longer documentary. Of the two main events, the film focuses more on the SALGA meetings even if that wasn’t the original intention. Srivastava has the ability to make the viewer feel comfortable with what’s going on in front of the camera. The presence in the SALGA support meetings doesn’t seem intrusive, and shadowing Priyanka and ‘A’s lives keep the viewer hooked.

The most fascinating elements in the film emerge from the observations and statements made by the various characters. At one point Priyanka decisively states that her friends from India are far more tolerant of her sexuality than the Indians she knows who have been raised in the U.S. Meanwhile ‘A’ exhibits certain resentment in the dichotomy of never being able to come out to her conservative parents yet witnessing her brother having much more freedom in lifestyle choices than her. Thus the film effectively presents the fractures present within this very small community. All in all, Desigirls is a low budget student film for sure, but the story it tells is very powerful nonetheless, and one that desperately needed to be told.

Review by Pulkit Datta

Click here to read Pulkit's interview with Ishita Srivastava at The NRI.

Desigirls will be screened at the Queerin’ Queens film festival at the Queens Museum of Art in New York City on June 20th.

A Thread of Sky

By Deanna Fei
Penguin Press

Six Chinese American female characters form the main narrative perspectives of Deanna Fei’s ambitious first novel, A Thread of Sky. There is family matriarch Lin Yulan, once a revolutionary for the nationalist party in China, and her daughters Irene and Susan. Irene is a bereaved widow looking to herself reconnect with her three daughters: Nora, a finance and marketing success; Kay, the one most connected to her Chinese ethnic roots; and Sophie, the youngest who struggles with an eating disorder and was just accepted to Stanford University. Irene’s grand plan to unite the family is to plan a trip to China, a venture in which only women will be invited.

Lin Yulan’s revolutionary past is one that sets the tone for the generations that follow, as she raises both Irene and Susan to be independent women who strive for careers of their own. When Irene’s career as a scientist begins to find a renaissance after the birth of her first two children, she discovers she is pregnant again. Irene’s mother wants her to abort the child, but Irene does not, and yet, despite Irene’s own commitment to raising a family, the values instilled in her by her mother regarding the importance of self-sustainment are also ones she hands down to her daughters.

There are many complications on the trip, and all revolve around romance and relationships (perhaps with the exception of Sophie). Nora’s crumbling relationship with her Caucasian WASP-y husband leaves her in an escapist mindset when she assents to go on the tour. Having arranged a meeting with her grandfather while she was in China previously, Kay possesses her own agenda about the impending trip. (Lin Yulan and her husband, Kay’s grandfather, parted on bad terms when she left for the United States, making Kay’s overtures both risky and somewhat sentimental.) Sophie would rather stay at home preparing for her freshman year and developing a relationship with her African American boyfriend, Brandon. She also finds herself dealing with an eating disorder that arises not long after her father dies. Susan, a poet, although seemingly happily married to Winston, still finds herself thinking about an ill-conceived affair with a former creative writing student named Ernesto.

At one point early on in the novel, The Joy Luck Club is referenced. It is an apt moment that recalls the self-consciousness of many Asian American writers publishing today. In that novel, Jing-mei returns to China, sets foot on what is believed to be a kind of homeland, and finds some sort of resolution within the last handful of pages. This kind of return journey is not the one that Fei has planned. Indeed, the tour of China is just the beginning of a narrative about the complications of intergenerational relationships between these Chinese American women. Fei lets her characters find footing by exposing their flaws and judiciously characterizing their various goals and motivations. The novel finds its surest stride within character construction.

There is, of course, one other major “character,” which is the way Fei configures China. The Chinese American women struggle to find clear and transparent attachments to nation and place. China is not a landscape that yields easily to them, but Fei is clear to mark these women off differently than other tourists and mobile elites. Indeed, there is a large discourse related to China’s modernization that is being interrogated any time the six women find themselves in bazaars or markets, where global capitalism is ambivalently represented.

There is a delicate balancing act in the characters' desire to root out problematic inequities arising from China’s modernization while simultaneously discovering that such problematics are difficult and thorny to address. The most compelling parts of the novel are rooted here, especially when Kay attempts to constitute a mode of transnational feminism that is thwarted at almost every turn by the way upward mobility becomes one of the ways by which China’s future is brokered. It is clear that Fei’s novel does not broker to presenting China as an exotic, unchanging landscape that can be claimed by the credit card. Rather, it is complex and shifting, a place that is constantly being razed and rebuilt, preserved in some locations, but disintegrating in others.

A Thread of Sky does not conclude with easy answers and, instead, leaves many open questions. In this suspended state of expectance, the novel resolutely moves outside of sentimentalism and resides in a domestic drama that unfolds unceasingly and with admirable restraint. In this regard, A Thread of Sky manages to offer a visually stunning tableau of China’s evolution in the twenty-first century without shifting into the superficiality of a travelogue, letting the reader’s sense of an already complex geography change as her characters do too.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Sexy Beach wear Body Painting

A woman painting a section with beach clothes on his body. Nice bikini body painting

Irina Shayk on Beach Body Paint

Irina Shayk looks sexy for a photo session for the body paint Sports Illustrated Swimsuit body painting on the beach.

Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India

By Kalyani Devaki Menon
University of Pennsylvania Press

Everyday Nationalism, a publication in "The Ethnography of Political Violence" series, offers readers a provocative and sometimes disturbing look at Hindu nationalist organizations and the role of Indian women in representing the nationalist movement. Kalyani Devaki Menon conducted her principal fieldwork in and around Delhi from January 1999 to January 2000, acting as a participant observer; interviewing women activists; visiting schools and training camps associated with the movement; and taking part in women's education classes, meetings, rallies, and protest marches. She reports that “gender and sexuality were pivotal to the narratives of self and 'other' produced by the women” she worked with, and that women played a crucial role in building the broad-based support for the movement that brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into power from 1998 to 2004.

The nationalist movement in India remains powerful, drawing thousands of women and men to accept a sociopolitical vision that is “xenophobic, exclusionary, and tremendously violent,” a view of India that sees Muslims and Christians as invaders, defilers both of Hindu women and the sacred soil itself, the body of the goddess Bharat Mata (Mother India). Hindu nationalists assert the need for “violent reclamations of Hindu masculinity” and for vengeance on outsiders who have violated the honor of Hindu women. Menon asserts, "This gendered construction of history, that perpetuates the logic of revenge, is widely promulgated to young female recruits, and remains central to mobilizing support for the politics and actions of the movement today." She makes clear to readers that she disagrees with this policy, yet she does not comment directly on the horrible irony of a politic that encourages Hindu youth to rape Muslim women and Christian nuns as payback for the sexual assaults said to have been enacted on Hindu women now and in the past.

The image of women as vulnerable victims is somewhat offset within the movement's various organizations by efforts to strengthen and toughen girls and women. Camp sessions include military drill, endurance training, yoga, and rough physical games. Women are taught to overcome their fears and to defend themselves. One woman activist said, “Girls today want to be free. We ask them, do you want to be free or strong?” Hindu nationalists criticize the desire to be free like Western or feminist women, claiming Indian women should be strong in order to serve the Hindu state, but still subservient to their husbands and male leaders. In Hindu societies, women are traditionally seen as “mothers, wives, and caretakers of their families.” Nationalists consider the whole Hindu nation to be an extended family, and in this context, women find reasons for civic activism: they become, in a sense, mothers of the nation.

Most Indian women marry, and many Hindu women nationalists are married, but many activists in the movement are either female renouncers; religious sadhvis, who give up worldly attachments but remain political; or pracharikas, unmarried celibate female volunteers who devote all their energies to the movement. A number of other women activists are widows or separated from their husbands. In a sense, the political organizations to which they belong become their families. Women find a favorite role model in a historical figure, Queen Jijabai, mother of the Hindu king Shivaji in the seventeenth century. Male historians concentrate on Shivaji himself, but the women nationalists portray Jijabai as an “enlightened mother” who played a key role in the nation's destiny by inculcating Hindu values in her son.

Menon's witness is compelling because she acts as intermediary between the people she studies and her readers, who need to understand what's going on in the crucial Indian subcontinent. Just as she translates Hindi texts into English, she explains many customs and beliefs that may be unfamiliar to non-Hindus. I found her presentation enormously helpful and would recommend Everyday Nationalism to anyone interested in religious movements, rightist politics, or both.

Review by Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring

Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire

By Lynne A. Haney
University of California Press

In Offending Women, ethnographer and sociologist Lynne Haney takes readers on a journey into “a world that few people would otherwise have access to”: the everyday reality of the lives of incarcerated women. She introduces readers to incarcerated mothers who are housed together with their children and serving terms in community-based prisons, a type of facility that is becoming increasingly widespread in the US. Haney uncovers the complex layers of control and contestation in these institutions, as well as the relationship of dominance and power that characterize them. The book analyzes the practices, programmatic narratives, and effects of two state prisons in the US, and offers ethnographic and theoretical insights into how programs like these work. Haney's primary aim is to explain how the treatment of imprisoned women has changed over the past decade.

Haney finds that these “alternative” prisons, contrary to their stated goals, often disempower women by transforming their social vulnerabilities into personal pathologies. She exposes the complex gendered underpinnings of methods of control and intervention used in the criminal justice system and links that system to broader discussions of contemporary government and state power by asking why these strategies have emerged and what forms of citizenship they have given rise to. While the intentions of the state were to "empower" and "enhance self-reliance," Haney suggests they instead push women into a state of disentitlement.

Offending Women uncovers two fundamental ways in which states of disentitlement operate: through the narrowing of woman’s needs and the regulation of women’s desires. Enriched with vivid images and details on incarcerated women’s lives, this book reminds us of incarcerated women's social realities. All of them faced poverty and experienced neglect, abandonment, and restricted access to social support. The fact that they not only survived histories of abuse, but managed to keep their familial bonds intact is outstanding. Offending Women acknowledges and honors these women's survival in a social system that promotes their demise.

Review by Olivera Simic

The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society

By Janet A. Flammang
University of Illinois Press

At a time when Western society is becoming more and more dependent on cheap and rapid sustenance of often dubious nutritional value, Janet Flammang’s study is an important reminder of both the way it was and the way it perhaps should be. In The Taste for Civilization, Flammang sets out to present what she calls “table activities” as central to respect, citizenship, and a greater good. Inevitably (because of both the topic and her expertise in Women’s Studies), the author’s analysis explicitly and logically makes gender a key factor in this construction. This researcher’s previous book was an analysis of the importance of studying women’s movements at all levels in political science, entitled Women’s Political Voice: How Women are Transforming the Practice and Study of Politics. As politics evolve, the “politics of food” could be said to be what is being examined in this new work.

This attractive volume (the cover photo is especially lovely) is divided into five parts and thirteen chapters, including extensive notes, a bibliography, and a handy index. An historical analysis of meals and food preparation in (principally) the Western world is included, and Flammang shows demonstrates her extensive knowledge of a wide array of topics from ancient Greek philosophy, to the Enlightenment thinkers, anthropology, sociology, and modern psychological studies. Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and Freud are all called upon in the text, whether it is to define society or to explain women’s role in the feeding process.

Flammang begins with the premise that “table activities” (in other words, “everyday food practices” or “mealtime rituals of food preparation, serving, and dining”) are central to socialization, and therefore tackles the conundrum of women’s shifting position in this activity (from traditional gender roles, for example) and the possible consequences on Western civilization (the end of communication, discussion, and consensus?). Naturally, the author does not pass judgment on women for their lack of investment in the rituals (enough do!), but rather examines this important social change as it presents itself and proposes possible solutions to this important shift in practice. Interestingly and importantly, the author also analyzes shifting “food practices” along racial and class lines in several chapters.

Flammang also draws the topic away from the domestic sphere and discusses food-related issues that are regional, national, and international. Her discussions of the effect on North American society of certain food stuffs, like the use of bleached white flour or processes such as canning, are intriguing. Along with testimonials from the general population, she includes cultural references to changes brought about by immigration, including the semantic importance of food for certain groups (e.g., “breaking bread”). In chapter ten, entitled “Delicious Revolution,” she examines Alice Water, California chef and cookbook author, who has also extended her revolutionary food philosophy to schools where she is a vocal advocate for healthy meals in schools for all children.

Surprisingly, Julia Child, is not mentioned explicitly by Flammang, despite having been again prominent in the media since the 2009 movie retracing certain aspects of her life. At times, the subtitles of the chapters are sometimes puzzling and the author cannot avoid a certain amount of repetition (French philosopher Brillat-Savarin seems to be a favourite). Despite these remarks, this thorough analysis is exceptionally well written, and of interest to anyone who has even a remote curiosity as to the link between food and civilization in Western society.

Review by Sophie M. Lavoie

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

By Dubravka Ugresic
Canongate

When she sleeps, her nose scrapes the ceiling of her small cottage. Her breasts hang from a pole over the fireplace, and she has a leg made of iron. She lives alone in a hut on chicken legs, and her gates are topped with human skulls. Passing heroes can flatter her and order her to do their bidding, but heroines must serve her in order to win her favor. Baba Yaga, a complicated crone from Central and Eastern European mythology, is a theme explored and exploded in Dubravka Ugresic's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg.

The novel has three parts, all set in Central and Eastern Europe. In the first, a woman deals with her aging mother's increasing senility and travels to their hometown in search of memory and meaning. In the second, three old women visit a health resort to relax and rejuvenate; romance and death follow. The final part is a meta-level, scholarly treatise of Baba Yaga written written from the perspective of a minor character in the first story and as though a folklorist had teased out all the feminine symbols woven throughout the previous two stories.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is an exploration of women growing older in a post-Soviet state where distance between people is becoming the norm. Like Baba Yaga, the older women in these stories are dealing with their aging bodies, are often alone or isolated, and are frequently misunderstood, though they help or hinder other characters as they please. While these women are marginalized, they are definitely not powerless. They have the power to transform lives, and this is usually done through wealth they've accumulated during their younger years.

At its core, this is a book about women, bodies, and journeys. While Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a thicket of fairytale symbols and references to life in the former Soviet bloc, it can be enjoyed by those who don't have a prior interest in either fairytales or the locale. Ugresic is a clever writer who shows in this book that imaginary lands are dangerous places and little old ladies aren't as toothless as they may appear.

Review by Catherine Nicotera