Why girly shoes?

"High heels are the work of the patriarchy," my officemate snootily informed me, wandering around on our dirty carpet, bare naked feet leaving impressions in the dust. "My ex husband made me wear them, and I'm never going to again, and I don't think that anybody who does is a good person or a good feminist."

As I sat there blinking for awhile, and I looked down at my strappy wedges, I realized that my working definition of a lot of different terms was going to have to change. I like feminism AND shoes, after all, and according to most of the people I worked with then, those two things didn't go together.

"You can't be taken seriously unless you X" is a fairly common walked out trope by certain sorts of feminists, and I'm not particularly sure why. After all, if we're trying to break free from being X because somebody tells us to, isn't it just as bad to do Y because someone tells us to?

And as such, I shut up, the argument faded into winter, when boots meant that my options for shoes were big bulky Columbia boots or big bulky Timberlands, and eventually people started believing that I might just start to be on their side after all.

But is it enough? Am I a bad person for not currently owning a single pair of Birkenstocks? And, furthermore, is it really a problem that I'm a lot more moderate than your everyday average feminist or liberal? And, being in academia, what does my general appearance have to say about me? (And, if you count clothes over time, who the heck wears a shirt from threadless one day and D&G the next? Am I stuck permanently in some sort of bipolar moderateness that means that NOBODY will take my work seriously once they actually, you know, meet me?)

Hence, girly shoes + theory as a blog. I love wedges, I love bluefly.com. I love buying designer stuff on the cheap, because sometimes (depending on brand and style, so you have to shop well) it lasts longer than its cheaply priced counterparts. My students have appreciated this in the past (but their comments... weren't so nice about other teachers, and aren't worth reporting here).

Elizabeth Flynn actually has an interesting book out about multiple feminisms and their rhetoric. Quite honestly the idea that there is only one definition of any -ism out there is kinda silly. The book is called Feminism Beyond Modernism and I'm considering using some of its research in a paper I have to write later this term.

And to wrap it up, I'll tie this directly to class/teaching:
I changed my style during grad school, when it became apparent that wearing t-shirt and jeans made my students, to nearly a one, think I was a lesbian. I was really tired of answering questions about queer theory asked in jest (or to make fun of me) that I had no business answering because I'm straight--queer is not part of my identity, and I can't speak FOR anyone who is, just because I wear jeans and clunky boots all the freaking time. (The sheer number of people that were, indeed, homosexual that were grad students at that department at that time, is immaterial, their conclusions were cruel, and I felt the need to defend my colleaugues. After all, just because someone is queer doesn't mean you should dismiss them as an instructor, and that's just what these staunch little republicans were trying to do!)


And thus, I was lead to find girlier clothes for the first time ever. I discovered a couple stores that will do for the 20s to 30s set if you can pick through the teenage garbage--Maurice's (which sells flattering business wear as well as fancy but affordable day to day clothes), Vanity (more of the same), and Forever 21--a Christian run junk pit of eclectic weirdness made in California sweatshops but that is, nevertheless, fashionable.

But due to the fact that Forever 21 was crappy and sort of a liberal sin, I finally found my way online.

The real answer to this question is: Shop at www.bluefly.com

There are designer clothes there, they are relatively cheap, and there's stuff to fit all tastes/budgets/blah blah blah. But what's really important is that it's a great place to browse and find stuff that suits you and is fashionable all at once. Through bluefly I fell in love with wedge heels and I no longer get grilled about my sexuality on the first day of class just because I happen to be a female English student. *sigH*