Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture

Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (1998)
By Kathy Peiss

Synopsis: This book is an examination of the rise of the cosmetics and make-up industry in the U.S., and the constantly reconfigured and renegotiated understanding of make-up use among women, and in American culture overall. Aim is to understand women's intentions as well as social and cultural forces surrounding them. She focuses mostly on imagery and general cultural trends, rather than on what individual women thought, and does this by analyzing the history of the cosmetics industry from the early nineteenth-century to today, with the bulk of the focus on 1900-1930. She shows the way the beauty industry evolved from a female-run business which ducked standard advertising and marketing efforts, to a big consumer culture phenomenon in the 1920s run by men. She also shows how make-up moved from the realm of hookers to average American women, and the way it ultimately came to be deeply connected to femininity and self-expression, identity and community. Argues that the beauty industry continues to be a contested thing - the African American side is especially political, i.e. what is the ideal beauty?
Peiss argues that beauty culture was a way for women to negotiate modernity - the artifice and performance aspect of it was appealing and appropriate for the modern era, yet men continuously had a hard time with this "artifice." Make-up as "skin improvement" vs. make-up as "paint" was an early and tight distinction. This is all still up for debate though - i.e. is this oppressive? "Hussy" outsold "Lady" by a lot, and these two types were seen as moods and not types of people (how postmodern!!) Transformative power of make-up. [The parts about failed attempts to get men to use make-up are fascinating - kind of reminds me of failed attempts to get people to drink coke for breakfast].

Interacts With:

Manliness and Civilization, Tarzan, Houdini, and the Perfect Man, Venus Envy, Where the Girls Are, Fraud in the Age of Barnum (for the discussion of artifice), anything that deals with the performance or charade aspect of Modernity/urban life: Confidence Men and Painted Women,

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994)
By George Chauncey

Synopsis: This book seeks to challenge the idea that a vibrant gay culture did not exist prior to WWII by refuting three myths: 1) the myth of isolation, 2) the myth of invisibility, 3) the myth of internalization. Chuancey does an amazingly thorough social history which reconstructs the gay subculture of 1890-1940 New York City by drawing from vice society records, police records, newspapers, and all variety of media in order to provide a rich ethnographic description of gay life. The book is divided into three parts: I: Male (Homo) Sexual Practices and Identities in the Early Twentieth Century; II: The Making of the Gay Male World; III: The Politics of Gay Culture. Chauncey provides both a portrait and analysis of the geography and symbolism of the gay male world in order to show that it was more restricted/hidden in the second third of the century. Basically, the hetero/homo binary and way of defining personhood as based on sexual object preference did not really happen until the 1930s-50s, when it replaced the then-dominant system of "fairie" vs. "normal men" which used gender behavior/identification as the main categorizer (fairies were effeminate, queers were not but liked men, "trade" were masculine and "normal" but would fuck men if approached). This shows a much more fluid range of sexual activity that was allowed to "normal"men then versus now. The book also maps the "sexual topography of the gay world," and shows the way gay culture flourished within urban spaces like streets, parks, bathhouses, boarding houses, and nightclubs. Urban space was thus essential to the development of this culture. Argues that the thriving of this culture was an act of resistance, and that gay and straight culture were defined dialectically. Gays especially flourished among the working class and ethnic/immigrant communities. Seems to show that a sort of utopia emerged during prohibition in which all classes/sexualities were thrown together in search of booze/revelry, and that the repeal of prohibition ultimately led to a rise in anti-gay policing. "Privacy could only be had in public" (198).

Interacts With:

All books that deal with public life/public space:
Sidewalk, Rudeness and Civility, Urban Masses and Moral Order, Land of Desire, Confidence Man and Painted Women, Horrible Prettiness (urban life and the particularities of urban spaces like the theatre),
Maybe de Certeau (transgressive power of small everyday acts, use of space),
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (not on lists, but connects on urban space and sex culture, and both have a sort of utopian bent to them), Cities on a Hill,
Could maybe contrast with books that focus more on private life, like Behind the Gates, Building Suburbia, The Levittowners, Middletown, Country of Exiles, etc
For books that focus on a different, mobility-based form of public life/space:
Learning from Las Vegas, Neon Metropolis,
Flourishing of gay culture as act of resistance (there's the pop culture list tie-ine!!)
Connects with Foucault, for idea that middle class tries to control sexuality by naming it and defining it.

**Still one of the best!** Tons of good info - See full notes for more details.

Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979)
By Dick Hebdige

Synopsis: This book investigates the styles of subculture and the processes through which mundane objects take on symbolic dimensions. In doing so, Hebdige seeks to "recreate the dialectic between action and reaction which renders the objects meaningful" (2). Basically, this is a study of the meaning of style. Grounded in a cultural studies/semiotics perspective, Hebdige looks at case studies (Rastafarianism, hipters, teddy boys, punks, glam rockers) and performs "readings" on them, focusing on the functions of subculture, the use of styles, style as a type of communication, and style as embedded in subcultural meaning. Argues that tensions between dominant and subordinate groups are found in the surfaces of subcultures and their styles. "The meaning of subculture is, then, always in dispute, and style is the arena in which the opposing definitions clash with the most dramatic force" (3). Argues that the use of "common sense" is a way to bury ideology, i.e. of "naturalizing" it. Subcultures, he argues, represent noise and interference, as well as "symbolic challenges to a symbolic order" (page?). "Others" can either be dealt with via trivialization/domestication or turned into meaningless exotica. Bottom line: Subcultural style is intentional communication which means to be read (unlike "normal" style which attempts to be "natural" or "invisible"). Subcultural style all about collage and re-organization and mutations, rather than "pure" expressions.

Interesting Specifics:

Sometimes objects/styles become "a form of stigmata, tokens of a self-imposed exile" (2).

"...ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common sense" (12).

"Hegemony can only be maintained so long as the dominant classes 'succeed in framing all competing definitions within their range' [Hall, 1977]" (16).

"The succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep structural adaptations which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community...We can watch, played out on the loaded system of British working-class youth cultures, a phantom history of race relations since the war" (45).

"...the punk aesthetic can be read in part as a white 'translation' of black 'ethnicity'" (64).

"Reggae and punk were audibly opposed" (68).

"The twin concepts of conjuncture and specificity, (each subculture representing a distinctive 'moment' - a particular response to a particular set of circumstances) are therefore indispensable to a study of subcultural style" (84).

By subverting "conventional uses and inventing new ones, the subcultural stylist gives the lie to what Althusser has called the 'false obviousness of everyday practice'...and opens up the world of objects to new and covertly oppositional readings. The communication of a significant difference then...is the point" (102).

Subcultures can be conservative or progressive - "integrated into the community, continuous with the values of that community, or extrapolated from it, defining themselves against the parent culture" (127).

"...no amount of stylistic incantation can alter the oppressive mode in which the commodities used in subculture have been produced" (130).

Interacts With:

Many books on Janet's list, especially Stuart Hall and anything that deals with the flexibility of popular culture and the subversive potential embedded in it.
Barthes (through focus on semiotics).
Foucault ("naturalizing" of ideology by dominant class)
Gramsci (hegemony)
This is a key cultural studies book as it focuses on the totality of society, and not just on the "high" culture elements

Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870

Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (1982)
By Karen Halttunen

Synopsis: This book is "a cultural history of the sentimental ideal of social conduct" that defined the morals and behaviors of the antebellum nineteenth-century middle-class in America (xvi). Asks: Why did nineteenth-century conduct manuals, etc, see hypocrisy as such a huge threat? Analyzes etiquette books, conduct manuals, advice books, fashion magazines, and mourning books to uncover the fact that perfect sincerity and transparency of character was essential to the sentimental ideal of the time. Includes sections on fears of the "confidence man" or trickster in urban culture, the important of sincerity as a middle class ideal, sentimental culture's influence on fashion and etiquette, mourning as a huge gesture of genteel theatricality, the decline of sentimental culture and the increased acceptance of theatricality, disguise, and performance. Each of these illustrates the ways in which Americans grappled with the urbanizing mass of strangers via initial resistance to artifice, followed by the eventual acceptance of the highly stylized and individualized mode of fashion, disguise, and theatricality. Argues that an influx of young people into crowded cities led to fears that the young would be duped and corrupted (and young people were seen as metaphor for the nation at that point). The increased fluidity and amorphous liminality of people meant that you never really knew what someone was like, hence the middle class demand that one always be sincere. This elaborate performance of sentimental sincerity ultimately gave way in the 1850-70s to a gradual acceptance of disguise and theatricality. So, in the end, skillful social performance beat out transparent sincerity. The middle class preference for sincerity does live on a bit today. [Who hates sincerity? What is the benefit of insincerity? Are we talking sarcasm here, or what?] Bottom line: "...sentimental demand for sincerity was a defensive strategy against the perceived dangers of placelessness in the open society and of anonymity in the urban world of strangers" (194). Also, "it was through their definition of the problem of hypocrisy, and their efforts to resolve that problem in the sentimental cult of sincerity, that American seeking to rise in the urban world of strangers became resolutely middle-class" (197). [Hmm, try to think about how this connects with other explanations for the rise of the middle class. Does it differ?]

Interesting Specifics:

The incredibly mobile Victorian culture meant positions were no fixed, and so there was an intense fear that people were passing for something they were not (xv).

American were thrown rather suddenly into a world dominated by strangers, and this vastness led people to characterize others based on appearance, as that's all they had to go on (36). [Wow, almost identical argument that Rudeness and Civility makes]

Middle class women struggled over what kind of fashion would not obscure their sincerity and true nature (73). The clean, minimalist, body-conscious classical style gave way to the "sentimental style" in the 1830s (characterized by bonnets and plain styles/simplicity (89).

With the rise of sentimentality and the domestic ideal, the parlor became even more important, and the genteel hostess felt increasingly pressured to act as a kind of "stage manager" (105). Parlor as zone between private and public. All about the "controlled communication of proper sentiments" (121).

Mourning was a huge deal; seen as the most transparent and hence sincere/genteel sentiments.

"By the 1850s, the sentimental view that a particular dress form could embody a particular feeling or moral quality was losing credence" (158).

1860s = increased use of makeup.

1850s = increased acceptance of theatricality and with parlor stages and games like charades.

1848-1875 was an era of huge economic prosperity, creating a "bourgeois world" (187).

By the 1850s, the middle class decided to rely on a general confidence in the good intentions of others, as opposed to a strict trust in their Christian morals.

Interacts With:

Rudeness and Civility, Urban Masses and Moral Order, The Arts of Deception (basically any book about P.T. Barnum - as an example of the place of "fraud" in nineteenth-century culture), Horrible Prettiness (evolution of Americans' view of theatricality and performance)

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"

Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)
by Judith Butler

Synopsis: Asks, how do certain bodies come to matter at all? Butler examines the fact that "'sex' is an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time," and that "performativity "produces the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2). This is a mostly theoretical work which relies heavily of psychoanalytic Lacanian theory to postulate about power and hegemony and the heterosexual regime. Butler is very interested in "the body" and materiality and naming and heterosexist images. Basic argument seems to be that the heterosexual regime tries to impose itself on the materiality of bodies. She is interested in the "lesbian phallus" and all things phallocentric. She argues that the way things are named is imbibed with power and gender issues. "Performing" gender re-enforces some kind of heterosexist regime; performative acts as authoritative speech.

Interesting Specifics:

Performativity "produce[s] the phenomena that it regulates and constrains" (2).

When things are not clearly gendered, they seem almost "unhuman" (8).

"Matter" linked to "materiality" linked to productive capacity linked to womb linked to female.

"...there is no sexuality outside of power" (95).

Says she seeks in this book "to recast performativity as a specific modality of power as discourse" (187). She seems especially concerned with "the real" and with the construction of power relations.

"To the extent that gender is an assignment, it is an assignment which is never quite carried out according to expectation, whose addressee never quite inhabits the ideal s/he is compelled to approximate" (231).

Interacts With:

Honestly, this book was nearly impossible to understand, and I'm not sure if I even have a basic understanding of it yet. I realize basically that she is obsessed with gender in a fairly paranoid way, and is also obsessed with idea of "performing" gender.

Apparently, she takes a "poststructuralist" approach. According to some review in Gender and Society, Butler sees sex as "not simply a factual/natural category...rather, it is a normative one." Supposedly her theory is meant as an improvement on social constructionism.

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (1991)
By Robert C. Allen

Synopsis: Asks how burlesque moved from a movement of bold female transgression to one of mere spectacle. This book traces the history of burlesque in the U.S. via a history of theatre in the 1820s-30s, the wild chaos of the "lower class" crowds with their participatory nature, to the bourgeois-ification of burlesque in the 1850-60s, to the relegation of burlesque back to the working classes 1880-1920s, to its last-ditch efforts by taking over failed legit theatres in Times Square which only brought it increased public scrutiny and the moral outrage that led to its demise in the 1930s. Burlesque is complicated and complex, and its "decline" into pure female sexual spectacle at the end partly silenced the transgressive nature it had earlier when female performers actually talked and joked too. In those days, burlesque was largely about the bottom-up inversion of social order, with a focus on the grotesque and on the mockery of the power system in place.

Interesting Specifics:

Burlesque in the U.S. was tied to the "spectacular female performer" and raised "questions about how a woman should be 'allowed' to act on state, about how femininity should and could be represented, and about the relationship of women on stage to women in the outside, 'real' world" (21).

Burlesque as monstrous, grounded in the "aesthetics of transgression, inversion, and the grotesque" (26) - in "the low other."

Ordination = "the exercise of power bound by the limits of discourse;" Insubordination = "resistance contained by discourse" (35).
Argues that struggles over burlesque are about ordination and insubordination rather than domination and resistance (35).

In the late 18th-early 19-century there were many anti-theatrical laws because theatricality was said to "disrupt" the natural order of things; that to disguise oneself and act as something else was seen as mocking nature and God's order of things (47).

The third tier of the theatre was always reserved for prostitutes and their clients.

1820s-30s, theatre gets popular in the U.S.; 1850s marked huge shift in theatre - it became increasingly "feminized" and respectable and less rowdy.

Lydia Thompson Troupe huge.

Dyed blonde hair very popular, and became popular with middle class by 1860s.

Burlesque paralleled and/or joined minstrelsy a bit in the 1870s.

Vaudeville combined most of the other show types one one stage and was appealing to the middle class (tried not to offend); 1890s. Became first place women really attended alone.

Benjamin Franklin Keith largely responsible for creating this brand of clean, family-friendly egalitarian vaudeville, and vaudeville banned any kind of humor that relied on difference (i.e. that caricatured or drew attention to otherness in any way - was the opposite of burlesque).

Burlesque was mostly an East Coast, Midwest, and San Francisco urban phenomenon.

Burlesque posters depicted huge, all-powerful women "playing" wealthy men (i.e. "gold-diggers" riding huge lobsters in mockery of the fancy lobster palaces of the day). This prob didn't offend its mostly working-class audience because the men being lampooned were wealthy men.

Cooch dance merges in 1890s (with the Chicago Expo), a direct precursor to striptease. Runways were invented in 1917, and stripping didn't become standard part until 1920s.

By the 1890s, female burlesque dancers were silent on stage, and was now just about the sexual display of their bodies.

Depression of the 1930s caused many "legit" theatres to close, allowing burlesque to move into those spaces. This however hastened its demise as those in power didn't like them and sought to shut them down.

Interacts With:
Bakhtin; Manliness and Civilization; Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man;