(DOWNLOAD) "An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, And Sexuality" by Journal of Social History " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, And Sexuality
- Author : Journal of Social History
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: History,Books,Nonfiction,Social Science,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 49 KB
Description
An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality. By Jill Fields (Berkeley, University of California University Press, 2007. xvi plus 375 pp. $21.95 paperback). In her remarkable book, An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality, Jill Fields has written an impressively wide-ranging history. She sets herself the daunting task of exploring "the history of undergarments in modern America both as manufactured objects and cultural icons, intertwining their fabrication and distribution as mass-produced goods and objects of material culture with their construction and circulation as representations of the female body and producers of meaning" (5). And she succeeds. While most historians of fashion, sexuality and the body focus on either consumption or production, Fields studies them in tandem and in a way that never wanders far from critical issues of power. In fact, she argues, in the early twentieth century, a new transnational "fashion-industrial complex" took hold as a result of the second industrial revolution. Just as garment workers stitched undergarments, piece by piece, Fields stitches together a complex, inter-disciplinary secondary literature with disparate and copious pieces of documentary evidence including oral histories, popular movies, fashion magazines, novels, trade journals, advertisements and material artifacts. Amply and beautifully illustrated, it opens with four histories of specific undergarments: drawers, corsets, bras, and black lingerie, then shifts to thematic analyses of advertising, the garment industry, and Christian Dior's New Look, with a closing overview of "feminist intimate apparel art." At times, the breadth of Fields' research and ideas make for difficult going and the overall narrative is a bit choppy, but taking one's time with this book is well worth the effort.
 "An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, And Sexuality" by Journal of Social History " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}