Book Review: Work! A Queer History of Modeling
Elspeth H. Brown, Work! A Queer History of Modeling, Duke University Press, $27.95, 368 pp., May 2019
In this thoroughly researched and accessibly written book, Elspeth H. Brown artfully weaves several narratives together to present a unique history of twentieth-century American culture and capitalism. Fundamentally, she argues that capitalist heteronormativity has been shaped largely by queer sensibilities.
It is important to note, as Brown states, that “through attention to historical specificity, my use of the term ‘queer’ throughout this project attends to racial and gender difference.”
Brown’s key themes are these:
The history of a new form of sexuality in modern America; one that is a managed, de-eroticized form of sexuality that becomes the foundation of modern capitalism globally.
Demonstrating how this emerging form of sexual capital was racialized, and explaining how and why both black and the white models have had to navigate this sexuality in different ways.
The contributions of black models and sexual minority photographers, and presenting a queer history of the modeling industry that emphasizes the central role that these characters played in the history of twentieth-century capitalism.
Analyzing and documenting the models’ affective labour, explaining how the body is used to produce and transfer emotion, and how this has been commodified and become central to the process of economic value accruing within commercial culture.
Outlining how queer and black cultural intermediaries have been central to capitalism; offering one account of capitalism’s queer history.
Photographer Baron Adolph de Meyer is introduced to us as Condé Nast’s first paid photographer on staff and, as such, was highly influential. He was well connected in both the European and American queer cosmopolitan scenes, and well entrenched in the New York creative circle. According to British fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, de Meyer was known to be “excessive” and “affected.” Moreover, de Meyer displayed in his work a “queer cosmopolitan sensibility, characterised by affective excess.” His technical brilliance in achieving the aesthetic of luxury commodity culture ensured his work was indispensable to Condé Nast, whose magazine empire required the support of luxury retailers such as Cartier and Tiffany.
Brown asserts that, in particular, de Meyer’s work with model Dolores (Kathleen Rose) in 1919 was influential in creating the template for fashion models in general. Dolores’s laconic performance of “elite whiteness” helped consolidate what José Muñoz termed a “standard national effect” in the United States. The model’s lack of affect creates the ideal canvas for de Meyer’s excessive accessorizing for the “implied viewer’s commodity longings,” and this thread of queer capitalism has remained with fashion to this day.
Gerald Kelly, in drag, photographed by Hoyningen-Huene, 1933. Valentine Lawford, Horst (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 92-93.
The author also charts the development of the modeling industry in relation to the history of commercialized sexuality. Rather than the traditional sex trade, Brown shines a light on an area that has received little investigation to date, yet one that has emerged as significantly underpinning modern marketing: commodified sex appeal.
This form of sexuality depends on the production of feelings generated through the models’ ability to create desire through glances and movement, and the subsequent transference of feeling to the intended audience. However, rather than selling their bodies to the audience, the models are selling commodities by using their bodies to produce commercialized affect in relation to specific goods.
“For this project, the vein of scholarship that most shaped my thinking about modelling has been that concerned with political economy and the movement of emotions between bodies, rather than simply the effective potentiality within the individual body” says Brown.
George Platt Lynes with Paul Cadmus, on the set, c. 1941. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.
Merchandisers developed a new discourse of commercial attraction, interestingly both channeling and containing the model’s sexual appeal in a manner extremely familiar to twentieth-century culture. Industries then organized themselves around the commodified display of the female body, and the implied sexuality is “contained,” as Peter Bailey discussed in his work on the Victorian barmaid. This implied sexuality is contained through distance, whether that be a catwalk or a magazine page, and this distance heightens the desire for the elusive object. So close yet so far.
As I am not American, I found particularly interesting the emergence of the so-called “American beauty,” whose appeal I have never fully appreciated. Brown explains that John Robert Powers was largely responsible for this. As the founder of the first New York-based professional modeling agency in 1923, Powers sought to distance the models he represented from the original nineteenth-century artist’s models who were then viewed as ‘public women’ and, in that sense, much too closely related to prostitutes. Most modeling contracts were intended to sell household goods, so Powers needed “respectable” models devoid of “problematic sexuality” who seemed “a world away from the theatre district’s chorus girl” to appeal to white middle-class housewives who made the majority of their household purchasing decisions.
The book charts how photographers, agents, advertisers and other cultural brokers solved the problem posed by the model’s untoward erotic appeal through the production of a new type of managed, commercialized sexuality. This sanitized version of sexuality, with its history interwoven with the modelling industry and so central to modern consumer culture, is pleasurable to view. Though intriguingly non-erotic, its contrived appeal beckons the viewer yet remains inaccessible.
Lily Yuen with fellow performers, in Lily Yuen Collection, Schomburg, Folder 6: scrapbook 1926-1930. Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
However, according to the author, this is where the black models were marginalized. The definitions of female beauty articulated on the stage, catwalk, and in magazines reflected the construct of American beauty that was both white and Anglo-Saxon. The containment of the white and female model’s sexuality implicitly established non-white models as a sexualized and racialized ‘other.’ Even if studios, agents, or clients were willing to work with a black model, the racist argument was that white customers would not buy something being promoted by a black model, and therefore sales would be forfeited.
It was not until demographic research post-World War Two uncovered that the changing black middle-class was a lucrative new market worth targeting that black models began to gain traction in the mainstream, or whitestream, American market. Even in the 1950s, the black model’s challenge was to navigate a space between the jezebel / buck and the mammy / Uncle Tom stereotypes to find a place in the middle ground of commodified sexuality.
There is so much more to this book, and I have only briefly touched on the key themes here. Second wave feminism and the battle of acceptance for transwomen are discussed, as is the success of some black models based in Europe when faced with racist rejection in their home country. Apart from de Meyer, there are many other fashion photographers’ stories presented, and, of course, there are the stories and struggles of the models themselves. This highly recommended book offers us a unique perspective on the history and cultural influences of the modeling industry, something to which we probably haven’t given proper consideration before now.
