By Victor Greto
“Don’t pay attention to my shoes today,” says Suzanne Ferriss.
Impossible.
Especially now, after she and a University of Miami professor recently co-edited the book Footnotes: On Shoes (Rutgers University Press, $24), a collection of scholarly essays on the cultural implications of shoes.
Today, she’s wearing flat, strappy sandals. Bandages curl around two toes on her right foot.
“I usually wear high-heel sandals,” she says, “but I closed a door across my foot the other day.”
Ouch.
Admittedly, high heels aren’t the easiest shoes to wear if you’ve injured your foot.
Sexy, yes. Therapeutic, no.
Ferriss, 39, a professor of liberal arts at Nova Southeastern University in Davie, has a thing for shoes. But don’t confuse that with a fetish.
It’s a fetish when the shoe takes the place of the wearer. In other words, if you want to literally make love to a shoe, like Marla Maples’ ex-publicist admitted doing to his former employer’s shoes, you have a fetish — not to mention a problem relating to others.
No: Ferriss has an interest, infused with an academic rigor and jargon that may wrinkle your brow at first, but makes you smile in recognition once it registers.
How Ferriss’ mind matured from Nancy Drew, to British literature, to a serious discussion concerning foot cleavage, may seem circuitous, but it does make some sense in the current world of academia.
For Ferriss, it all began with her voracious love affair with reading, an affair first revealed when, as a child growing up in Toronto, she devoured Nancy Drew mysteries for hours at a time.
After she grew through adolescence rereading her favorites, Little Women, Jane Eyre and Emma, as a young college student at NSU she focused on British Romantic literature, the early 19th century stuff that includes the works of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft.
“I think it’s her complexity that makes her most interesting,” says Barbara Brodman, a professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NSU. Brodman was Ferriss’ teacher when the 19-year-old first arrived at NSU in 1982.
Ferriss had moved to South Florida with her family when her father, an investment banker, opened up shop here for more than a year.
Now, Brodman and Ferriss are colleagues, and have become best friends.
“She’s beautiful, feminine and yet she’s devoted to being a women’s rights advocate,” Brodman says, “both strong and gentle at the same time, an engaging set of qualities.”
Ferriss’ innate feminism expresses itself in her research.
After her initial romance with British literature, she took the road taken by many contemporary scholars who have redefined the idea of a “text” as encompassing different art forms, from traditional literature to movies to cultural artifacts (like shoes).
This is what makes her research so exciting, Ferriss says.
It’s the “text,” she says, paraphrasing Shelley, “that puts you into a mind, place or person not your own so you can see things differently — and so you can change it.”
As a graduate student at the University of Miami in the late 1980s, she became fascinated with another scholar’s idea that there was an omnipresent “male gaze” in mainstream film. That is, women in Hollywood movies were never fully dimensional characters, but objects to be observed from a distinct, male point of view.
Her curiosity piqued, she and her graduate professor, Shari Benstock, helped organize a critical theory seminar that focused on movies ostensibly about women, including 1945’s Mildred Pierce, starring Joan Crawford.
She and Benstock were watching the film when they experienced a Eureka! moment.
They noted in one scene that, as Crawford sat on a ladder and changed a light bulb in a chandelier, she nonchalantly wore high-heel pumps.
How did she get up that ladder? And why was she wearing pumps at a time like that?
That male gaze again.
After watching the scene, Ferriss says, “we wanted to write a paper on that.”
“The image of [Crawford] was one that struck us,” says Benstock, now an associate dean for academic affairs in the college of arts and sciences at the University of Miami.
“But it was quite a number of years later that we hit on the idea of doing a book together on fashion,” she says.
Ferriss and Benstock co-edited a book in 1994, On Fashion, which showed how clothing reflects cultural change.
They were just one foot away from a book focusing on shoes.
As they solicited contributions for the shoe book, the reaction from other scholars and developments in the outside world amazed her, Ferriss says.
“This coincided with an explosion of interest in shoes,” she says.
The world’s only museum dedicated to shoes, the Bata Shoe Museum, recently opened in her hometown of Toronto. The Fashion Institute of New York also recently put on an exhibition, “Shoes: A Lexicon of Style.”
So, what are some of the cultural implications of shoes?
The book’s essays run the gamut, from lesbian fetishism to scholar Trace Hedrick’s “Are You a Pura Latina? Or, Menudo Everyday: Tacones and Symbolic Ethnicity,” which probes the importance of spike heels (tacones) to Hispanic women.
“Where would the Brazilian Carmen Miranda, Nuyorican Jennifer Lopez, or Mexican-born Salma Hayek be without their seemingly requisite high heels?” she writes.
Another article, by Anthony Barthelemy, explores the history of brogans, boots specifically manufactured in the North for Southern slaves. Those boots, he writes, have become symbolic of slavery, an “indisputable relic of a hideous and degrading past.”
Shoes as symbols move even beyond brogans, Ferriss and Benstock write, citing another essay in the book that speaks directly about the use of the 4,000 pairs of shoes at Washington’s Holocaust Museum to represent the victims who once wore them.
How about those ballerina slippers? Gerri Reaves says the slipper “unifies pain, restrained beauty, and control, and it clothes in glossy satin the wounded feet that make ballet beautiful.”
Speaking of beautiful feet, how about those high heels?
Why are high-heels, first worn by the 16th century elite, considered sexy?
“The high heel elongates the leg and increases the arch of the foot,” Ferriss and Benstock write in the introduction to Footnotes, “making it appear smaller. It raises the buttocks and curves the back, pushing the chest forward.”
So, that old male gaze has a field day watching — or, better yet, imagining — Joan Crawford climbing up a ladder in high heels and a knee-length skirt.
Then there’s Sigmund Freud’s theory that “the shoe or foot substitutes for the female body, as protection against the threat of castration.”
Say again? Freud’s view is not only a male gaze, but a quintessential Victorian’s one at that.
Besides studying and teaching, Ferriss jogs, teaches fitness classes at Bally’s, and, presumably without irony, kick boxes on Tuesday nights.
Nor is she stuck in an academic ivory tower at NSU.
When your specialty is literature and popular culture, the theoretical world meshes indistinguishably with the real.
Ferriss sprinkles her conversation with thick literary critical terms and explanations; but then smiles knowingly when she talks about the psychological allure of “foot cleavage” — you know, the space between the big toe and that other toe?
“It’s a very interesting literary and sociological method,” says Mark Cavanaugh, a liberal arts professor at NSU who has known Ferriss for 12 years. “You take one artifact, and that gives you a window onto the culture. She’s establishing a firm reputation on looking at shoes as reflections of larger issues in gender studies.”
Her teaching style, both observed and testified by students, is relaxed and familiar.
“Her excitement is irreplaceable,” says Jennifer Whitesel, a junior at NSU and the editor of the undergraduate newspaper.
For example, when a class seems unresponsive, Ferriss “just walks around and says, `C’mon people, you know this, talk to me,’ and gets the class involved with the lectures,” Whitesel says. “She’ll never just talk to you, she’ll tie things into other classes you’ve taken or into everyday life.”
Thanks to her book, Ferriss’ office has become cluttered with shoe memorabilia.
“Once I started working on [Footnotes],” she says, “people starting giving me stuff on shoes, posters, magnets.”
She’s gathering enough of a collection for it to be a running joke with her colleagues.
“Enough of the shoes already!” Cavanaugh recently said when he walked into her office unannounced.
Ferriss is now working on another book with Susanne Woods of Wheaton College and Benstock called A Handbook of Literary Feminisms.
It may perhaps sound like dense reading, but anyone who knows Ferriss also knows it will be as relevant as her book on shoes.
“We’re girls who shop together and buy shoes together,” says Benstock, “and this is part of girl culture. Suzanne and I have always done it. We’re like older sister, younger sister, and constantly looking out for these things for each other.”