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With the assistance of her close personal friend Mark Bego, founding Supremes member Mary Wilson tells the complete story of the group both on- and off-stage, from their beginnings as The Primettes in June 1959 to their 1964 breakthrough Motown hit--Where Did Our Love Go--and from the departure of Diana Ross to the group's comeback in the mid-1970s. Bego's narrative text is packed with personal ancedotes and reflections from Mary herself, and accompanied by rare archive photography and ephemera, much of which is taken from Mary's personal collection.

Since its early days of mass production in the 1850s, the sewing machine has been intricately connected with the global development of capitalism. Andrew Gordon traces the machine's remarkable journey into and throughout Japan, where it not only transformed manners of dress, but also helped change patterns of daily life, class structure, and the role of women. As he explores the selling, buying, and use of the sewing machine in the early to mid-twentieth century, Gordon finds that its history is a lens through which we can examine the modern transformation of daily life in Japan. Both as a tool of production and as an object of consumer desire, the sewing machine is entwined with the emergence and ascendance of the middle class, of the female consumer, and of the professional home manager as defining elements of Japanese modernity.

\"Besides being a award-winning musical hit-maker, Kylie Minogue is a true fashion icon whose daring and love of self-reinvention have kept her current twenty-five years into her career. In Kylie Fashion, the star herself presents the first ever showcase of her phenomenal fashion history with the most iconic designers in the world. This feast of fashion includes an Introduction by the legendary Jean-Paul Gaultier and commentary from the likes of Dolce & Gabbana and Karl Lagerfeld. Packed with awe-inspiring images including the very best rare and unseen archival photography, video outtakes, fashion sketches, red carpet shots, and ephemera from Kylie's archives, this book captures the cultural icon, trendsetter, and Vogue cover girl in all her guises\"--Publisher's web site.

This article explores the media controversy surrounding the victory of Ermia, a veiled female vocalist, on the 2013 expatriate Iranian talent competition Googoosh Music Academy (GMA). A historically and ethnographically informed “ethnotextual” analysis of a selection of Persian-language television programs, articles and news reports, weblogs, and Facebook posts responding to Ermia reveals how a reality television contestant came to disturb simplistic but powerful binaries of modest/immodest, religious/secular, Iranian/Western, and national/diasporic as she combined signifying elements of these positions into one unsettling figure. The article shows how Ermia’s case gathered political valence through the contentious transnational Iranian mediascape and the televised talent genre’s premise—representing “real,” “ordinary” contestants and fostering audience participation. I argue that GMA became a space for publicly playing with cultural norms, political participation, and the politics of piety at some distance from the pressures that make publicly living difference so challenging.

Since its inception in 2006, the Real Housewivesfranchise has grown from a docusoap showcasing the lives of women in one community in the US, to a global franchise. Today, the Real Housewiveshas a presence across continents, with the recent inclusion of a version set in Johannesburg, South Africa. However, while there is ample research concerning global versions of the Real Housewives franchise, the same cannot be said of The Real Housewives of Johannesburg. Indeed, at the time of writing, little (if any) research has been published on the premiere African rendition. Is this because location has little bearing on the content of the franchise overall? There are multiple similarities across the franchise, regardless of setting, which may support this theory. However, as will be discussed in this research, the city could also be viewed as a key differentiator between versions of the Real Housewivesfranchise.Through a content analysis of the first two seasons of The Real Housewives of Johannesburg,this research aims to provide a better understanding of the complexities of this local version of a global franchise. Do the performances of femininity in Johannesburg differ from those in Dallas? Does being a woman in Salt Lake City hold different significance to being a woman in Sydney? How do the shopping sprees of the Johannesburg cast compare with those of their Beverly Hills counterparts? Using the theoretical framework of glocalization, I will ascertain the significance of the local elements in the Johannesburg version. Regarding performances of femininity, the other theoretical framework to be used in my research is the advisory nature of postfeminist media. The intention here is to garner an understanding of whether the advice given to women in Johannesburg regarding femininity is locally specific, or informed by a greater expectation of how women should behave, irrespective of location.To ascertain the frequency of references to how women should behave in Johannesburg, and indeed how Johannesburg is represented in the series, this research makes use of a quantitative content analysis. However, given that quantitative methods do not allow for particularly in-depth analysis, this was combined with a qualitative, textual approach that considered both discursive and visual elements of The Real Housewives of Johannesburg. In examining these components of the text, this research concludes that much of the expectation of how femininity is performed in relation to the city is informed by notions of respectability and the politics of belonging in a Johannesburg context.

This study examines the Singer Sewing Machine Company’s strategies for selling family sewing machines on a global scale. In marketing the sewing machine, the American-headquartered Singer focused on ornamental embroidery or “fancy” sewing, defining home sewing as art, to distance the company and the appliance from negative perceptions of women’s garment work as industrial manufacturing. Singer created its Embroidery Department in the early 1890s in response to consumers’ sewing preferences. The department reflects how the home became a site where global capitalism was constructed and articulated. Singer’s Embroidery Department had representatives in many countries, coordinating expositions and other advertising. In the case of Singer in Spain and the United States, women who took part in the department’s work were an essential part of the corporate-integrated operation. This article examines the relationship between Singer’s corporate strategies and gender and culture in Spain and the United States.

Rush (born Emmit Ellis Jr.) first \"recognized that [he] really loved the blues\" as a child while listening to Nashville's 50,000-watt radio station WLAC and its disc jockey Bill \"Hoss Man\" Allen, who hosted a late-night blues program heard throughout the South. [...] if you talk about black music, blues was the only thing I heard a black man or woman singing. [...] I'm flattered I'm giving a service to a little small town.

The community of theatre and its space transgress social boundaries of caste, class and gender. Since performers were looked down upon in society, only women from marginalised, 'anonymous' and 'condemned' quarters came into theatre. According to her, 'food, clothes and education given was the same for boys and girls'. Dina Gandhi got the opportunity to watch these performances too. Besides these, painters and singers came to her house and she had the privilege to interact with them.

Discusses the ceremonial dances performed by girl initiates, or Moye, from the Zambian Soli people. The author describes how the dances negotiate opposing characteristics including hardness and softness, visibility and invisibility, noise and silence, modesty and flamboyance, passivity and power. She describes the girls' costume with reference to symbolic and performative functions and to the relationship between body and clothing. She traces the history of Zambian cultural festivals, observing that many academics view them as expressive of a pseudo-culture promoted by the government and observes that questions of authenticity are difficult to negotiate due to variants in local style and inter-cultural exchange between different Soli groups and between urban and rural populations. She describes variants in Moye dress, dance and music and focuses particularly on the role of the beaded veil and the impande shell with reference to Soli iconography and to the ways in Soli women conceptualise and negotiate power relations and gender roles. She notes that the mimetic initiation dances are often seen to promote passivity and domesticity in women and argues that the initiation of young women by their elders involves a more complex interplay of cultural referents and conceptualisations.