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Discipline of the catwalk

Gender, power and uncertainty in fashion modeling

New York University, USA, ashley.mears{at}nyu.edu

The work of women's fashion modeling is a disciplining labor process in which female bodily capital is transformed into a cultural commodity. Based on participant observation of the New York modeling industry, this article examines how models are made into `looks'. Models are subject to intense surveillance, a discourse of infantilization, and uncertain judging criteria. This labor process typifies the politics of gender, in which women exercise power over themselves insofar as they internalize and pursue the glamour of their regime. Models are mobilized into looks by adhering to floating norms, a concept introduced to describe discipline under market constraints. Models undergo a disciplining process that is at once a response to the instabilities of gender and to the vagaries of cultural production markets. The institutionalized market context and the impossibility of idealized femininity together draw linkages between the uncertainties of gender and of markets, two spheres that intertwine in the production of fashion models.

Key Words: bodily capital • discipline • femininity • uncertainty • fashion industry

Ethnography, Vol. 9, No. 4, 429-456 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1466138108096985


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