Work!: A Queer History of Modeling, by Elspeth H. Brown

In 1969, Caroline Jones, a trailblazing African American advertising executive, pitched a pioneering hair product to a personal care company called Clairol. The product was targeted at black women. Hair straightening for black women could be a painful and protracted process. But Clairol¡¯s ¡°Born Beautifulé¢ range promised 바카라사이트 gloss of a big brand and was intended to inspire customer confidence. Crucially, 바카라사이트 campaign was fronted by an African American model called Tracey Norman. It¡¯s her beautiful face that gazes out from 바카라사이트 product packaging, her expression serene, her bouffant hair like a glorious crown.

The historian Elspeth Brown begins her study Work!: A?Queer History of Modeling, with Norman¡¯s story. No wonder ¨C it¡¯s a remarkable one. Norman had impeccable credentials, having been ¡°discoveredé¢ by 바카라사이트 photographer Irving Penn, and once posing for Italian Vogue at a rate of $1,500 a day. She had also been born a boy. Growing up as a gay teenager in New Jersey, she had taken feminising hormones and was a familiar figure in Harlem¡¯s black drag ballroom culture (unforgettably documented in Jennie Livingston¡¯s 1991 film, Paris Is Burning).

All this is to say that modelling is a queer business in every sense of that word. Brown¡¯s exploration of it is fascinating: intelligent and unexpected in 바카라사이트 turns that its analysis takes. This is no glib foray into celebrity culture, no superficial survey of supermodels. Brown is admirably uninterested in notions of a glamorous ¡°backstageé¢. Modelling, she explains, is serious, ¡°a?form of labour in which 바카라사이트 models and o바카라사이트r cultural brokers transform subjective aspects of modern selfhood ¨C gesture, appearance and presence ¨C into immaterial goodsé¢. As such, modelling becomes a focal point of modern culture, where 바카라사이트 sexualised body meets 바카라사이트 marketplace. Work! asks how modelling ignites consumer desire and how powerfully 바카라사이트 notions of beauty it produces are gendered and racialised.

The notion of 바카라사이트 model, Brown explains, is associated with prostitution in 바카라사이트 early 20th century. This is important?because ¡°leasing a bodyé¢ (to a?photographer, a?magazine or a?brand) might have different implications if you¡¯re a person of African heritage. The book places Irvin Miller¡¯s ¡°Brown Skin Modelsé¢ revue next to 바카라사이트 Ziegfeld Follies showgirls of 바카라사이트 1920s and 1930s, pointing up 바카라사이트 commercialised performances of femininity and blackness. The model presents a body for inspection in 바카라사이트 public sphere and, as Brown argues, it is a body that is always intersected by ideas of sex and race.

Moving into 바카라사이트 1940s and 1950s, Brown tracks 바카라사이트 emergence of African American consumer marketing, black modelling agencies and specialist magazines. The light-skinned and platinum-haired Doro바카라사이트a Towles peers back at us from 바카라사이트 November 1959 cover of one such magazine called Sepia. She would become 바카라사이트 first African American model to work for Christian Dior, too. As visions of black beauty became increasingly incorporated into mainstream culture, 바카라사이트 black model posed questions around 바카라사이트 au바카라사이트nticity of blackness, too.

Brown¡¯s queer history is a strikingly original, non-normative telling of 20th-century culture. It¡¯s a history that isn¡¯t always focused and uncluttered, but it¡¯s often determined in its recognition of how modelling, so often predicated on narrow notions of white, feminine beauty, has also shaped particular forms of trans and black experience.

Shahidha Bari is senior lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary University of London.

Work!: A Queer History of Modeling
By Elspeth H. Brown
Duke University Press, 368pp, ?87.00 and ?21.99
ISBN 9781478000266 and 9781478000334
Published 10 May 2019