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"Beauty culture Social aspects United States."
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Cosmetic surgery narratives : a cross-cultural analysis of women's accounts
This title examines British and American women's narratives of cosmetic surgery, exploring what those narratives say about the contemporary status of cosmetic surgery and 'local' ideas about its legitimate and illegitimate uses.
Book
The managed hand
Two women, virtual strangers, sit hand-in-hand across a narrow table, both intent on the same thing-achieving the perfect manicure. Encounters like this occur thousands of times across the United States in nail salons increasingly owned and operated by Asian immigrants. This study looks closely for the first time at these intimate encounters, focusing on New York City, where such nail salons have become ubiquitous. Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure-from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, The Managed Hand finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.
eBook
Body Work
Today women are lifting weights to build muscle, wrapping their bodies in seaweed to reduce unwanted water retention, attending weigh-ins at diet centers, and devoting themselves to many other types of \"body work.\" Filled with the voices of real women, this book unravels the complicated emotional and intellectual motivations that drive them as they confront American culture's unreachable beauty ideals. This powerful feminist study lucidly and compellingly argues against the idea that the popularity of body work means that women are enslaved to a male-fashioned \"beauty myth.\" Essential reading for understanding current debates on beauty, Body Work demonstrates that women actually use body work to escape that beauty myth. Debra Gimlin focuses on four sites where she conducted in-depth research--a beauty salon, aerobics classes, a plastic surgery clinic, and a social and political organization for overweight women. The honest and provocative interviews included in this book uncover these women's feelings about their bodies, their reasons for attempting to change or come to terms with them, and the reactions of others in their lives. These interviews show that women are redefining their identities through their participation in body work, that they are working on their self-images as much as on their bodies. Plastic surgery, for example, ultimately is an empowering life experience for many women who choose it, while hairstyling becomes an arena for laying claim to professional and social class identities. This book develops a convincing picture of how women use body work to negotiate the relationship between body and self, a process that inevitably involves coming to terms with our bodies' deviation from cultural ideals. One of the few studies that includes empirical evidence of women's own interpretations of body work, this important project is also based firmly in cultural studies, symbolic interactionism, and feminism. With this book, Debra Gimlin adds her voice to those of scholars who are now looking beyond the surface of the beauty myth to the complex reality of women's lives.
eBook
The Wow Climax
A spirited collection of essays that get to the heart of
what gives popular culture its emotional impact
Vaudevillians used the term \"the wow climax\" to refer to the
emotional highpoint of their acts-a final moment of peak spectacle
following a gradual building of audience's emotions. Viewed by most
critics as vulgar and sensationalistic, the vaudeville aesthetic
was celebrated by other writers for its vitality, its liveliness,
and its playfulness. The Wow Climax follows in the path of
this more laudatory tradition, drawing out the range of emotions in
popular culture and mapping what we might call an aesthetic of
immediacy. It pulls together a spirited range of work from Henry
Jenkins, one of our most astute media scholars, that spans
different media (film, television, literature, comics, games),
genres (slapstick, melodrama, horror, exploitation cinema), and
emotional reactions (shock, laughter, sentimentality). Whether
highlighting the sentimentality at the heart of the Lassie
franchise, examining the emotional experiences created by horror
filmmakers like Wes Craven and David Cronenberg and avant garde
artist Matthew Barney, or discussing the emerging aesthetics of
video games, these essays get to the heart of what gives popular
culture its emotional impact.
eBook
The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America
In eighteenth-century America, fashion served as a site of contests over various forms of gendered power. Here, Kate Haulman explores how and why fashion--both as a concept and as the changing style of personal adornment--linked gender relations, social order, commerce, and political authority during a time when traditional hierarchies were in flux.In the see-and-be-seen port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, fashion, a form of power and distinction, was conceptually feminized yet pursued by both men and women across class ranks. Haulman shows that elite men and women in these cities relied on fashion to present their status but also attempted to undercut its ability to do so for others. Disdain for others' fashionability was a means of safeguarding social position in cities where the modes of dress were particularly fluid and a way to maintain gender hierarchy in a world in which women's power as consumers was expanding. Concerns over gendered power expressed through fashion in dress, Haulman reveals, shaped the revolutionary-era struggles of the 1760s and 1770s, influenced national political debates, and helped to secure the exclusions of the new political order.
eBook
Zoot Suit
ZOOT SUIT (n.): the ultimate in clothes. The only totally and truly American civilian suit. -Cab Calloway,The Hepster's Dictionary, 1944 Before the fashion statements of hippies, punks, or hip-hop, there was the zoot suit, a striking urban look of the World War II era that captivated the imagination. Created by poor African American men and obscure tailors, the \"drape shape\" was embraced by Mexican American pachucos, working-class youth, entertainers, and swing dancers, yet condemned by the U.S. government as wasteful and unpatriotic in a time of war. The fashion became notorious when it appeared to trigger violence and disorder in Los Angeles in 1943-events forever known as the \"zoot suit riot.\" In its wake, social scientists, psychiatrists, journalists, and politicians all tried to explain the riddle of the zoot suit, transforming it into a multifaceted symbol: to some, a sign of social deviance and psychological disturbance, to others, a gesture of resistance against racial prejudice and discrimination. As controversy swirled at home, young men in other places-French zazous, South African tsotsi, Trinidadian saga boys, and Russian stiliagi-made the American zoot suit their own. InZoot Suit, historian Kathy Peiss explores this extreme fashion and its mysterious career during World War II and after, as it spread from Harlem across the United States and around the world. She traces the unfolding history of this style and its importance to the youth who adopted it as their uniform, and at the same time considers the way public figures, experts, political activists, and historians have interpreted it. This outré style was a turning point in the way we understand the meaning of clothing as an expression of social conditions and power relations. Zoot Suit offers a new perspective on youth culture and the politics of style, tracing the seam between fashion and social action.
eBook
Community health worker intervention to reduce worker exposure to volatile organic compounds in small business auto and beauty shops in a marginalized community: A cluster randomized controlled trial
Occupational diseases affect many workers in the United States, with Latinos disproportionately affected. Small businesses face barriers to implementing workplace health protections that community health workers (CHWs) may help overcome. The objective of this study was to determine whether a CHW-led industrial hygiene intervention could reduce volatile organic compound (VOC) exposure in small auto repair and beauty shops that primarily employ marginalized workers.
In this two-arm, parallel, cluster randomized trial, small business (≤25 employees) auto repair and beauty shops in Tucson, AZ were randomized to immediate or delayed intervention, stratified by sector. CHWs assessed shops and provided knowledge of controls and $300 for new ones. Total VOCs (TVOCs) were measured using photoionization detectors placed on or near participants. The primary outcome was the change in TVOCs at the shop level after the intervention, assessed across three timepoints with four workshift measurements per assessment. Mixed-effects models accounted for clustering by shop.
We enrolled 38 auto repair shops and 46 beauty shops (73% Latino workers) and analyzed 846 workshift measurements at 236 shop assessments. Adjusted models showed a non-statistically significant intervention effect: auto shops experienced on average an estimated 28% TVOC increase (95% CI: -46% to 203%); beauty shops experienced on average an estimated 27% reduction (95% CI: -55% to 19%). Beauty shops had TVOC concentrations about 10 times higher than auto shops, and 87% of their assessments had ventilation rates below the recommended minimum.
Although not statistically significant, the CHW-led intervention may meaningfully reduce VOC exposure in beauty shops. High TVOC concentrations and inadequate ventilation in beauty shops highlight the need for targeted interventions and policy changes to improve the air quality in these underserved small businesses.
This trial was registered with clinicaltrials.gov (NCT03455530) on March 6, 2018.
Journal Article
The Naked Communist
The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the \"world\" names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti-Communist \"aesthetic ideology.\" The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program.
eBook
Hope in a Jar
How did powder and paint, once scorned as immoral, become indispensable to millions of respectable women? How did a \"kitchen physic,\" as homemade cosmetics were once called, become a multibillion-dollar industry? And how did men finally take over that rarest of institutions, a woman's business? InHope in a Jar, historian Kathy Peiss 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. She 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 C. J. 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,Hope in a Jaris a richly textured account of the ways women created the cosmetics industry and cosmetics created the modern woman.
eBook