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High heels as a disciplinary practice of femininity in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street

Abstract With high heels brought back into fashion in the 2000s by the beauty-industrial complex, health organizations have since reported an ‘epidemiology of high-heeled shoe injuries’, especially among young women. Feminist theory in general, and literary criticism on gender, have not yet systematically addressed the role high heels play in upholding and naturalizing the construct of femininity. This article examines seemingly diverse but complementary ways in which high heels function as one of the contemporary devices of femininity in capitalist patriarchy, and argues that the promotion of high heels has a direct stake in reconfiguring women, and their bodies, as symbolically, and literally, tiny and unstable, as fragile and helpless, and as sexually objectified and commodified. The article relies on an interdisciplinary approach, which brings together feminist theory on body and recent medical findings on the effects that wearing high heels has on women’s health and motility. These are applied to the way the problematics of high heels tends to be captured and exposed in socially engaged literary works such as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, which serves as a rare instance of a critically engaged literary piece on this matter.