Prom Night: Youth, Schools, and Popular Culture, and: Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?: American Women and the Kitchen in the Twentieth Century, and: The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader (review)

Abstract

Skillfully, using a myriad of information sources and thorough qualitative analysis techniques, Amy Best takes the reader to the site of a complex interaction of gender, race, class, and sexuality, namely the high school prom. Prom Night looks at past and present cultural expressions that take this rite of passage to almost mythic heights of significance in the adolescent's life and seamlessly blends these with the personal experiences of prom-goers who strive for that perfect night with increasingly extravagant expenditures. The historical significance of the prom as a homogenizing white, middle-class, heterosexual ideal in twentieth-century America, along with its accompanying symbols, rituals, and artifacts, is juxtaposed with the participant's struggle to engage in meaningful self-representation and originality.