Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-vfjqv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T23:38:09.930Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Dangerous Subject: The Fashion Model and the Beauty/Narcissism Double Bind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Cecilie Basberg Neumann
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In the wake of modernity, women's sexuality was positioned in a way that created a beauty/narcissism double bind that is still with us today. My concern in this article is that the subject position of “fashion model” serves as a constant reminder of this split, which is directed at all women and weakens the generalized woman's political agency. Fashion models themselves experience harassment and humiliation as well as pleasure and desire in their work as fashion models. However, the small portion of feminist work that has engaged explicitly with the fashion‐model business sees it mainly as an enterprise that is alienating and hostile to women. Although I do not entirely disagree with this analysis, it neglects the meaning of beauty and what beauty does to us with regard to creativity and pleasure. I wish to explore how some of the work experience of fashion models intersects with and challenges the beauty/narcissism double bind. I suggest that rather than grounding our understanding of the subject position “fashion model” and the fashion business solely in their reinforcement of the beauty/narcissism double bind, we should pay attention to the importance of what beauty and aspects of narcissism may mean.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , Spring 2017 , pp. 380 - 396
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Amble, Nina. 2012. Reflection in action with care workers in emotion work. Action Research 10 (3): 260–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aspers, Patrick. 2001. Markets in fashion. Stockholm: City University Press.Google Scholar
Bates, Christina. 2011. “Their uniforms all esthetic and antiseptic”: Fashioning modern nursing identity, 1870–1900. In Cultures of femininity in modern fashion, ed. Parkins, Ilya and Sheehan, Elisabeth. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. 2002. Symbolic exchange and death. London: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of seeing. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Black, Paula. 2004. The beauty industry. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bordo, Susan. 2002. Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body. San Francisco: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian meditations. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. Transpositions: On nomadic ethics. London: Wiley.Google Scholar
Brighouse, Harry. 2005. Justice. Cambridge, UK: Polity.Google Scholar
Brown, Elspeth H. 2012. From artist's model to the “natural girl”: Containing sexuality in early‐twentieth‐century modelling. In Fashioning models: Image, text and industry, ed. Entwistle, Joanne and Wissinger, Elizabeth. London: Berg.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Mary. 2010. Health, medicine, and society in Victorian England. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger Publishers.Google Scholar
Crane, Diana. 2000. Fashion and its social agendas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dauphinee, Elizabeth. 2010. The ethics of autoethnography. Review of International Studies 36 (3): 799–818.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dauphinee, Elizabeth. 2013. The politics of exile. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Kathy. 2003. Dubious equalities and embodied differences: Cultural studies on cosmetic surgery. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Ellburg, Ann Frisell. 2008. Et fåfängt arbete: En sosialantropologisk studie av fotomodeller. Stockholm: Makadam Förlag.Google Scholar
England, Paula. 2010. The gender revolution: Uneven and stalled. Gender and Society 24 (2): 149–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Entwistle, Joanne. 2000. The fashioned body. Fashion, dress and modern social theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity.Google Scholar
Entwistle, Joanne. 2004. From catwalk to catalog: Male fashion models, masculinity and identity. In Cultural bodies, ed. Thomas, Helen and Amed, Jamilah. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Entwistle, Joanne, and Wissinger, Elizabeth. 2006. Keeping up appearances: Aesthetic labour in the fashion modelling industries of London and New York. Sociological Review 54 (4): 774–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Entwistle, Joanne, and Wissinger, Elizabeth. 2012. Fashioning models: Image, text and industry. London: Berg.Google Scholar
Etcoff, Nancy. 2000. The survival of the prettiest. New York: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Evans, Caroline. 2000. Yesterday's emblems and tomorrow's commodities. In Fashion cultures: Theories, explorations and analysis, ed. Bruzzi, Stella and Church Gibson, Pamela. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/knowledge. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Glørstad, Zanette Tsigaridas. 2010. Sign of the times? Dress and political symbolism in northern Europe in the early middle ages. Norwegian Archaeological Review 45 (1): 30–51.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1961. Asylums. New York: Anchor Books.Google Scholar
Greene, Jeanie A. 2006. Blue‐collar women at work with men. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers.Google Scholar
Greer, Germaine. 1999. The whole woman. London: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Gross, Michael. 2003. Model: The ugly business of beautiful women. New York: It Books.Google Scholar
Hakim, Catherine. 2010. Erotic capital. European Sociological Review 26 (5): 499–518.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Halrynjo, Sigtona, and Lyng, Selma Therese. 2009. Preferences, constraints or schemas of devotion? Exploring Norwegian mothers’ withdrawals from high‐commitment careers. British Journal of Sociology 60 (2): 321–43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women. The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women's lives. New York: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Haug, Frigga. 1983. Female sexualization. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983. The managed heart. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Holst, Cathrine. 2009. Hva er feminisme? Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.Google Scholar
Irigaray, Luce. 2002. To speak is never neutral. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Leira, Arnlaug. 1992. Welfare sates and working mothers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Jane. 1992. Woman and late‐nineteenth‐century social work. In Regulating womanhood: Historical essays on marriage, motherhood and sexuality, ed. Smart, Carol. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lister, Ruth et al. 2007. New challenges for citizenship research in a cross‐national context. Bristol, UK: The Policy Press.Google Scholar
McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The aftermath of feminism. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Mears, Ashley. 2011. Pricing beauty. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mears, Ashley. 2012. Made in Japan: Fashion modelling in Tokyo. In Fashioning Models: Image, text and industry, ed. Entwistle, Joanne and Wissinger, Elisabeth. London: Berg.Google Scholar
Neumann, Cecilie Basberg, and Neumann, Iver B. 2015. Uses of the self: Two ways of thinking about scholarly situatedness and method. Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43 (3): 798–819.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neumann, Iver B. 2012. At home with the diplomats: Inside a European foreign ministry. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paglia, Camille. 2001. Sexual personae. London: Yale Nota Bene.Google Scholar
Parkins, Ilya, and Sheehan, Elisabeth. 2011. Introduction: Cultures of femininity in modern fashion. In Cultures of femininity in modern fashion, ed. Parkins, Ilya and Sheehan, Elisabeth. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press.Google Scholar
Richmond, Mary. 1917. Social diagnosis. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk. 2011. Fear of fashion; or, how the coquette got her bad name. In Cultures of femininity in modern fashion, ed. Parkins, Ilya and Sheehan, Elisabeth. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press.Google Scholar
Scarry, Elaine. 2001. On beauty and being just. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Scott, Joan. 1988. Gender and the politics of history. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skeggs, Beverley. 2002. Formations of class and gender. London: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Smart, Carol. 1992. Disruptive bodies and unruly sex: The regulation of reproduction and sexuality in the nineteenth century. In Regulating womanhood: Historical essays on marriage, motherhood and sexuality, ed. Smart, Carol. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Smart, Carol. 1995. Feminism and the power of law. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Soley‐Beltran, Patricia. 2004. Modelling femininity. European Journal of Women's Studies 11 (3): 309–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soley‐Beltran, Patricia. 2012. Performing dreams: A counter history of models as glamour's embodiment. In Fashioning models: Image, text and industry, ed. Entwistle, Joanne and Wissinger, Elisabeth. London: Berg.Google Scholar
Wainwright, Steven P., and Turner, Bryan S. 2004. Narratives of embodiment: Body, aging and career in Royal Ballet dancers. In Cultural bodies: Ethnography and theory, ed. Thomas, Helen and Ahmed, Jamilah. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wang, Y. Claire, McPherson, Klim, Marsh, Tim, Gortmaker, Steven L., and Brown, Martin. 2011. Health and economic burden of the obesity trends in the USA and the UK. The Lancet 378 (9793): 815–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Willsher, Kim. 2015. France votes to ban ultra‐thin models in crackdown on anorexia. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/apr/03/france-bans-skinny-models-crackdown-anorexia (accessed August 3, 2015).Google Scholar
Wissinger, Elizabeth. 2015. This year's model: Fashion, media, and the making of glamour. New York: New York University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar