Book Shelf
Work! A Queer History of Modeling
Models are everywhere. From the couture runway to the catalogue shoot, models sell things by soliciting our attention, sparking our desires. Whether performing live or in front of the camera, models produce sales through the affective labor of posing. Models do the work of representation in capitalism’s dream worlds.
Sexuality is central to the powerful, affective mix through which models enliven material things. But the industry has created a particular type of sexuality that emerged over the course of the 20th century, a racialized erotic appeal that became intertwined with the sale of goods for the market. Work! A Queer History of Modeling charts how models, photographers, agents, and advertisers cleaned up and toned down models’ sexuality, creating a sanitized, commercialized, sexual appeal.
Models have a history. Work! traces that history, starting from the rise of photographic modeling in the early 20th century. Soon after, the stage popularized the model, as black models went on tour and Ziegfeld hired the first couture models as showgirls. In the interwar years, queer photographers such as George Platt Lynes worked with favorite models to create glamour shaped by queer sensibility. After WWII, the first black modeling agencies served an expanding Black market. In the long 1960s, Black and white models co-produced varied ideas of the natural, the real, and the authentic to sell goods during a period of social and political upheaval.
Work! is queer history in the sense of the non-normative, or the unusual: it tracks models and photographers not usually included in industry history. The book shows how the modeling industry has been shaped by queer sensibilities since its origins, and how black models — in their very insistence on black glamour — have challenged whitestream hegemony. Work! shows how the modeling industry always has been the site of a queer structure of feeling, but one that has also always been tied to the market. In this way, Work! queers the history of capitalism.