Relations of the Catwalk: Gender, Power, and Economics in the Fashion Modeling Market.

The work of fashion modeling draws attention to the connections between gender and economic forces. Drawing from participant observation in the New York City modeling industry, this paper explores the process through which women are converted into model "looks." They are subject to surveillance, infantilization, and uncertainty in a disciplinary regime that reproduces gender and power relations. Modeling is also constrained by "floating norms" of a cultural production market. The modeling market-as a site of economic activity and simultaneously a site for the display and production of gender-offers ways of thinking about how economic relations are fundamentally gendered. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]