The melancholy of the flesh: A psychosocial account of couture modeling work
Elena X. Wang
This paper addresses the sexual politics of the Euro-American high fashion, or, couture industry. Since
the 1980s, the changing conditions of the production of couture clothes have yielded the production of a
kind of human commodity that, I argue, reflects and reinforces Western cultural pathologies as discussed
by thinkers from Marx and Foucault to Irigaray and Bordo. Couture clothes, once hand-finished and made
in-house from the highest quality fabrics, are increasingly machine-assembled in developing nations from
inferior materials while sold at exponentially higher prices. Couture models are likewise sourced from the
poorest regions of the world, rapidly phased out and radically underpaid, but assimilated into
homogenous tableaus of wealth. The spectral, sullen couture model becomes a disposable good
eviscerated of her human as well as sexually specific features. The question is why, on the one hand, she
acquiesces to this injury, and, on the other, the injury that her body and mien articulate on the runway
renders her a marketable female ideal type in contemporary culture. The claim is that the kinds of psychic
attachment that the model forges to the couture industry evince a cultural attachment to injury enacted in
the name of pleasure. Drawing on narratives of couture models’ working practices as well as
contemporary feminist studies of female embodiment, the paper interrogates the relations between the
social and the feminine somatic expressed in couture today.
1
1. Producing model commodities
The corps of bodies that stalk the runways add to the auratic value of couture. Faces painted, hair teased
and limbs adorned, the models bring to life the concepts and narratives woven into the clothes and
enhance their aspirational decadence. The models are the industry’s human emblems of wealth. As with
the clothes however, the models’ real material value has declined with couture’s corporatization; unlike
the clothes, they are supplementary labor-commodities whose market value constitutes part of the matrix
of costs that corporations must cut in order to increase profits. The models thus appear to be elite
specimens of women whose figures denote expensive and intensive regimens of self-care (diet, exercise,
training in speech and manners), but are in fact the first expense to be saved in the couture industry. The
corporatization of the industry increasingly transfers the cost of maintaining the appearance of quality
onto the model herself. She is a radically disposable instrument, bought cheaply and, as a supplement to
the clothes, effectively sold at a killing. She is the life-force of a brand image but, in enriching the
industry, depletes herself.
Couture modeling emerged as an industry following the growing commercialization of high
fashion in the 1960s and 1970s. Earlier in the century, the models more than the clothes embodied the
distinctive qualities of each haute couture label. Six or more models worked exclusively for a label. They
were European and often married women (Collins 2009). With the success of cheaper ready-to-wear and
the consequent expansion of couture’s target audience to the Euro-American urban young, the age as well
as tenure of the models declined (Breward in Welters and Lillethun eds 2011). More Eastern European
and Eastern African girls entered the modeling industry. For the first time, individual models became
international celebrities – that is, ‘supermodels’ who commanded $22,000 a day in the 1970s1 (compare
this to a typical wage of $300 a day for a model in the 1940s). But the majority was paid little, the
turnover was rapid, and those who left the industry often left in debt to their modeling agencies
(Porizkova 2007).
The corporatization of couture in the 1980s intensified and systematized this trend; the couture
model became both a more specific and thus valuable instrument for the couture industry relative to the
1
All sums are present-day equivalents.
2
general class of models, and a more disposable commodity relative to other commodities in the couture
industry. She formed a part of a transient, international, largely underage and unpaid labor force that
enhanced the value of the clothes through individually taking on a vicious amalgamation of physical as
well as financial and psychological risks. A supermodel earned up to $38,000 a day in 1990, but, again,
the average couture model owed her agency money (for housing in multiple Euro-American cities where
clients are concentrated, all transportation and lodging expenses incurred on castings and assignments,
and numerous undisclosed agency fees2). Modeling agencies and couture clients thus profited from the
model’s self-financed accretion of value that, from a systemic perspective, efficiently self-destroys once it
is no longer useful. How then does this accretion and yet excision of value occur? Through what specific
processes of production has the couture model emerged as the most disposable commodity in the couture
industry? The production of the couture model occurs in three by and large disparate geographic regions,
over the course of several discrete stages: she begins as a preteen girl who is sourced from a developing
nation, vetted in the Asian-Pacific region, then assembled and standardized in the Euro-American fashion
capitals for display.
In their native countries, couture models are scouted for possessing three features: extreme youth,
height and thinness. Tall, skeletal physiques are thought to best offset the clothes. Youth is supposed to
attract the couture industry’s increasingly young target audience, but equally, younger models are easier
to work with and profit from. The scouting agency represents a model until she signs on with a modeling
agency, through which clients commission assignments. The modeling agency is based abroad, and the
average model – a 12- or 13-year-old girl from a poor Eastern European family – flies there under a
contract whose terms are purposely vague (Cosslett and Baxter 2013). The contract stipulates her unique
physical measurements and is rendered conditional on her maintaining those exact measurements. It
nominally guarantees her work in the host country as well as a ‘minimum’ lump sum to be received at the
end of her tenure.
Most models first arrive in the Asia-Pacific countries. There, her agency starts a portfolio and
opens an undisclosed charge account for her; the process of accruing as well as depleting value begins.
Her agency finds her housing, contacts potential clients and sends her to castings; every service rendered
is costly; the model’s debt mounts from her first day abroad. It would seem that she can make money if
2
See David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, dirs, Girl Model (2012).
3
she books assignments. But after trekking from casting to casting for weeks on end, she will realize that
casting calls for inexperienced models rarely yield work, and more importantly, that work does not yield
money; her agency is compensated and then supposedly subtracts the payment from her debt. Meanwhile,
her agent instructs her to add a few years to her age in compliance with the country’s labor laws; to lose
weight in order to attract clients; to always follow the photographer’s orders if she wants to keep her
clients, whether they entail staring directly into 10,000-Watt camera bulbs until her pupils burn or posing
nude, shaving her head or performing sexual favors3.
Thus the preteen recruit becomes, if she is at once docile and aggressive enough, a teenage
model: docile because she does what she is told, aggressive because she must compete with not only ever
younger competitors that flood the market but also her own maturing body. The unique measurements
with which she enters the Asian-Pacific modeling market resemble a satisfactory opening bid; she must
follow a punishing regimen of self-improvement in order to succeed in and then exceed this stage of the
game. Through restricting her diet, she drops sizes and gains employability. She secures more clients and
builds a portfolio. While this is necessary groundwork for launching into the Euro-American arena – and
possibly out of debt, couture clients demand a still finer range of height, weight and, crucially, age.
Models can work in the Asian-Pacific market well past their teens, but the typical couture model is 16
years old, and the age continues to decline. The window of time for models to break into the EuroAmerican market increasingly narrows therefore, compelling aspiring couture models to take increasingly
extreme measures to become ‘Paris thin’4. Common practices range from eating tissues to deflect hunger,
to receiving nutrients through hospital drips. Those who can, simply fast. The average couture model is
5’10” and must fit into sample size garments, which are long and slight. Garments, hence bodies
constructed according to these specific proportions are supposed to maximize the garments’
marketability; the model’s figure is minimized until it is an ideal supplement to the clothes.
The couture model emerges, but can she now maintain this standard? She is cast in a runway
show in a Euro-American high fashion capital, but can she last for more than one season? Can she sign
on, that is, with a major international modeling agency, which will distribute her portfolio to high-profile
3
See any number of firsthand accounts of experiences on the job, from 1980s supermodel Paulina Porizkova’s
autobiographical novel, A Model Summer (2007), to recent supermodel Sara Ziff’s documentary, Picture Me (2009).
4
See “Former Vogue Editor Exposes Fashion’s Dark Side,” Yahoo! Shine April 4 2013. Contrary to the belief that
models are airbrushed to look thinner, today’s editors routinely alter images to ‘get rid of bones’ that attest to the
models’ emaciation.
4
clients? This requires her to not only intensify but expand her regimen: on a daily basis, she continues to
restrict her diet while also beginning to exercise; prior to and during major assignments such as runway
shows, she returns to the extreme practices that had facilitated her advancement in the first place, now
enhanced by knowledge of as well as access to techniques of an entirely different order – drugs. A
cocktail of laxatives, diuretics and prescription medication that specifically delays puberty in adolescents
(and destroys their liver), prepares her figure for the shows5. Recreational drugs are then readily available
throughout the show season to make more bearable the long hours of fittings and waiting backstage6. The
finished product is her pared, enervated, evacuated body. And the blankness of her mien reflects the
hollow that has become her psyche. Finally, she steps out onto the illumined dais of the runway, an
apparent embodiment of the wealth and training that corresponds to the apparent opulence of the clothes,
but she lives out of a suitcase with 3 other models in a 4th-floor walk-up and owes her agency thousands
of dollars; she possesses little to no understanding of the language or customs of her host country; she is a
number in a line-up or look-book and scrutinized day in and day out like mute flesh; she struggles with
eating disorders, substance dependencies, stress, anxiety and depression (Sauers 2010). With its changing
crews and locales, each casting and show exacerbates the physical as well as emotional distance that she
experiences ‘from preexisting support systems [of]…family and friends’ (ibid), each assignment depersonalizes and de-sensitizes her a bit further. The stark ‘contrast…between [the model’s] reality and the
affluent arrogance [she is] paid to project’ (Tatiana 2009) grows more extreme as the price of the clothes
soar but her own compensation dissolves into debt. Thus the model takes on risks that will wear her down
without the industry’s explicit expulsion. She can either continue to work toward the real break of landing
a lucrative advertising campaign or return home. Either way, the industry gains: she enhances the auratic
value of the clothes during her tenure and pays her debts upon leaving.
A phalanx of hollow-eyed specters adorned in a dazzling spectrum of silhouettes, colors, fabrics,
identically groomed and spaced, smoothed skin stretched taut over artfully protruding bones. These
specters can be simply read as professional human hangers that animate expensive clothes. But two other
5
See Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous’ industry expose, Fashion Babylon: From High Fashion to High
Street – Looking Up the Skirts of the World’s Most Glamorous Industry (2006).
6
See “Suicide and Abuse in Fashion’s Top Echelon,” Jezebel January 14 2009.
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attributes of the runway show point to the models’ disquieting cultural salience. First, couture models
constitute a female ideal type: tall, skeletal, young and sullen. Second, this ideal is used to enhance the
marketability of couture. The model thus contributes to an aspirational image of luxury though her
appearance reflects a certain degree of physical as well as emotional damage7. Put another way, an ideal
that reflects female psychophysical damage is used to enhance decadence; this idealization adds to the
value of the clothes.
A political economic explanation of this macabre dimension of the runway show involves the
industry’s role as well as the model’s role in producing human commodities positioned at the nexus of
value and its evisceration. On the one hand, the industry produces the model in the manner of the clothes,
the raw materials sourced and assembled abroad, the merchandise, high-turnover commodities that are
marketed as rare artisanal objects. On the other hand, the model finances, starves, drugs and alienates
herself until she is an optimally efficient cipher for the industry. Her body can slip into any sample size
garment, her vacant visage can be made to resemble any character. Why however does the model
acquiesce to this kind of injury? Why is this kind of injury acceptable, more so, exalted in the couture
industry? These questions entail explorations of the psychosocial dimension of the model’s selfdestruction. Using Foucault to enhance Freud’s claim that melancholy is a love-relation turned
pathological8, I draw out the theoretical implications of documentary film narratives and journalistic
accounts of couture models’ working practices for the model read as a pathological cultural figure.
Modern Western society is perverse because it produces and deploys manifold forms of pleasure for the
purpose of social control9; in turn, the kind of love that the model harbors for the industry is precisely a
love that maintains her subjection to its injuries.
2. The model’s self-valuing
What is the precise nature of the model’s attachment to the industry, that is, to a force that wounds her? I
had suggested earlier that her attachment is a matter of financial and psychic necessity: her contract with
her agency is straightforward – though barely compensated during her tenure, she is penalized for
7
As Karen de Perthuis notes, ‘[E]ven hardened regulars at [couture] shows can be shocked at how emaciated models
can look’ (de Perthuis 2003: 144). I have argued however that the process of emaciation includes a psychic
evacuation as well.
8
Freud (1976).
9
Foucault (1980).
6
severing the terms – but in what ways does she depend on the industry’s acknowledgment of her to exist
at all as some kind of subject, however dehumanized, debased? Despite repeated sexual trauma, couture
models return to the industry so long as the industry accepts them, if not for modeling then for other
positions such as stylists, show producers, recruiters. Ashley is the model-turned-recruiter who drives the
narrative of the modeling documentary Girl Model (2012). Her pathology attests to the tenacity with
which the industry remains a love-object for the model in the face of profound abuse. The pathologies
produced by the industry can take a variety of forms: Ashley’s is psychosomatic; melancholia is another
possibility; both derive from the form of failed introjection (the normal process of ego-growth) that
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok call the fantasy of ‘incorporation.’ Here I focus on variations of
incorporation other than melancholy because, where melancholia is recognizable by the verbalization of
what Freud describes as shameless self-reproach (‘[The patient] abases himself before everyone’10;
Abraham and Torok: ‘[T]he ego begins the public display of an interminable process of mourning’11),
incorporation prohibits communication and psychosomatic illnesses at most ‘speak to the subject only
and not to others’ (155). Hence my metaphor of the melancholy of the flesh rather than of the model as
such: the model’s figure, in particular, its loss of female flesh and blank, petrified mien expresses that
which she cannot speak out. Her body is both a tomb for and a shrine to the industry, which she loves at
the cost of her self-acknowledgement12 and, in some cases, her life. I will explicate a number of
pathologies and their interrelations in the context of the couture modeling industry before focusing on
Ashley’s particular form of psychosomatic illness: a large ovarian cyst. ‘I hated this industry more than
anybody but now I’m 15 years into it,’ she says with a rueful half-smile. The aim is to explore why.
i. Reformulations of melancholy
According to Freud, melancholy is similar to the normal process of mourning insofar as it is a reaction to
the loss of a love-object. These reactions can be broadly characterized as ‘loss of interest in the outside
world’ and ‘inhibition of all activity’ (Freud 1914-1916: 244). Melancholy becomes pathological where
the subject experiences a radical ‘lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in
10
Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1914-1916).
Abraham and Torok 1994: 136.
12
She eschews in other words the work of ‘asserting’ her own value for the work of enhancing the industry’s value.
Put another way, experiencing its injuring, she refuses the work of mourning – the introjection of the loss effected
by the industry – for the work of encryption, or, preservative repression (Abraham and Torok 1994).
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self-reproaches and self-revilings’ (ibid). This occurs because the libido, in lieu of re-attaching to a new
love-object, withdraws into the ego and establishes a narcissistic identification between the ego and the
lost love-object; the love-object is lost but the love for the object, or, the love relation, is preserved. And
this preservation is problematic because, in most cases of melancholy, the love-object’s loss is not
occasioned by ‘the clear [instance] of…death’ but by the love-object having wounded the subject. The
subject thus harbors ambivalent feelings of love and hate for the love-object that are however turned
against herself: ‘the hate comes into operation on this substitutive object [(that is, the ego)], making it
suffer’ (251).
The pathological conflict crucially takes place in the unconscious, hindered ‘from proceeding
along the normal path through the preconscious to consciousness’ due to ‘repressed material’ (257). Here,
Abraham and Torok part ways from Freud in a manner that is illuminating for the kind of melancholy that
the industry appears to engender in the model. The authors shift the defining feature of melancholia away
from the ‘constitutional ambivalence’ of the unconscious to Freud’s metaphor of the ‘open wound’ that
siphons away the libido’s cathectic energies (that is, its ability to re-attach), ‘emptying the ego until it is
totally impoverished’ (253). The wound is for Abraham and Torok a psychic crypt located in the
preconscious-conscious system. The love for the love-object is moreover free of ambivalence: ‘We find it
crucial to affirm the prior existence of [an unequivocal] love, to insist on the undisclosable character of
this love, and finally to show that a real and therefore traumatic cause had put an end to it’13; thereafter
however the love is interred. It becomes transmuted into the incommunicable fantasy of incorporation,
which may or may not yield melancholia in the Freudian sense and psychosomatic illnesses.
Abraham and Torok distinguish incorporation from the normal process of introjection, in which
the ego extends autoerotic interests into the ‘external’ world so that those interests become named desires
free to ‘unfold in the objectal sphere’ – free, that is, to circulate among objects without becoming
dependent on them. In introjection, objects act as mediators for desires whereas in incorporation,
specifically the traumatic loss of an object compels the ego to fantasize an imaginary object in which
desires for the object become trapped. Introjection gradually broadens and enriches the ego; incorporation
‘instantaneously’ and ‘magically’ petrifies and stunts it around this ‘imaginary tie,’ or, ‘hallucinatory
13
136.
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fulfillment.’ The paradigmatic example of introjection is the replacement of food and breast with
language during infancy, and it is only with the mother’s constant assistance that the introjection can
occur14. By contrast, take the model’s encrypting of her love for the industry: ‘[t]he abrupt loss of a
narcissistically indispensable object of love has occurred, yet the loss is of a type that prohibits its being
communicated’; and again, ‘[i]ncorporation results from those losses that for some reason cannot be
acknowledged as such…we are debarred from providing any indication whatsoever that we are
inconsolable’ (129-130). The entire process is covert because the ‘objectal experience [is] tainted with
shame [italics mine].’ The question is, as the authors pose, whose shame? The model first perceives her
agency as a glamorous foster family and the industry as a site of incomparable opportunities; then she
undergoes ‘shameful’ experiences that she inters. In order to retain her job on the one hand and the love
relation, which satisfies her narcissistic needs, on the other, the model buries the love object’s shameful
actions, transforms it into an ‘intrapsychic secret’ (‘Crypts are constructed only when the shameful secret
is the love object’s doing and when that object also functions for the subject as an ego ideal. It is therefore
the object’s secret that needs to be kept, his shame covered up.15’). Put another way, because the
industry’s wounding ‘d[oes] not admit of any form of verbal communication’ as a matter of financial and
psychic necessity, incorporation is her ‘only viable means of narcissistic reparation’ (131).
In incorporation, the model establishes what Abraham and Torok call an ‘endocryptic
identification’ with the industry, where she substitutes the industry’s ‘life’ for her own identity. This life
is ‘fantasmic’ because the model has abandoned the industry as a love-object on account of its injury but
installs an imago of ‘total innocence’ in its place. She believes that she has abandoned the industry
‘not…because of [its] infidelity but owing to hostile external forces’ (136). The industry as such becomes
dissociated from its traumatizing actions just as the ‘cherished’ content of the crypt is built with but
unmarred by ‘bricks of hate and aggression’ (ibid). In this ‘fantasy of identifying empathy,’ the industry’s
love for the model is ‘pure,’ hence providing her with ‘narcissistic bliss at having received the object’s
love despite dangerous transgressions’ (137). The model maintains this necrotic fantasy so long as the
walls of the crypt are not disturbed. But if the loss of a secondary love-object who had buttressed the
walls occurs – a close model friend’s disavowal of and departure from the industry perhaps or her suicide
14
‘Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation means channeling them through language into a communion of empty
mouths’ (128). This emptiness becomes acceptable as the nature of desire; incorporation refuses this insight.
15
131.
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– an expressive melancholia can set in. Alternately, psychosomatic illnesses can prevail. There,
endocryptic subjects are for some reason unable to establish endocryptic identification and so exchange
their own body for the love-object’s ‘life.’ It is an ‘internal conversion’ in which symptoms are neither
manifested through melancholic affects or words but rather, like incorporation, incommunicable. Subjects
physically carry inside the dead love-object. A person with an ulcer for instance constructs the fantasy
that his love-object is ‘unable to digest the loss of his beloved subject, [and so] must die’16; the subject
preserves this proof of the love-object’s love for her in her body. But, as Abraham and Torok argue, ‘the
reasons for the specific location of the necrosis need to be elucidated in each case’ (163). What then
might Ashley’s ovarian cyst intimate about the specifically female losses as well as fantasmic possessions
that the model experiences? We see Ashley cradling the womb that holds a cyst as she would one that
holds a child; at home in Connecticut, two plastic babies always await her return, propped on a dark grey
love seat.
ii. Reproducing illness
The model can neither show signs of physical sexual maturity nor disclose the experiences that incur its
stunting; she is sexualized through not only dress and make up but modes of sexual assault that she must
reroute in her psyche, transforming sexual trauma into a ‘consummation of desire [italics mine]’ that is
‘buried – equally incapable of rising or of disintegrating’17 in order to remain functional, alive. It is
dangerous to disrupt this fantasy, which aims at ‘narcissistic restoration.’ By virtue of her situation, the
model lacks the means to reclaim ‘the libidinal resources the object had hitherto retained,’ she is unable to
face the consequences of mourning and undertake ‘the painful process of [psychic] reorganization’18. Her
stalwart fidelity to the crypt appears to preserve a life whose self-deceit corrodes and eventually destroys.
This life, nourished by the illusion of the love-object’s presence (that is, carried inside) rather than by the
cognizance of the object’s necessary absence (to be replaced, that is, by figurative expression such as
language), produces in turn not life but sickness, not a baby but a cyst with blonde hair.
16
163.
159.
18
156 and 127.
17
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Ashley is the main recruiter featured in Girl Model. She freelances for both Russia’s largest
scouting agency and the Japanese modeling agency that contracts the film’s two other protagonists, the
Russian teenagers Nadya and Madlen. We see Ashley vet, question, cajole the girls at the scouting
sessions, her voice gentle but her speech clipped, her lips upturned but her eyes unsmiling. She is tall,
thin, flat-chested like her recruits but, as the documentary proceeds, Ashley’s waist expands because of a
growth in her uterus. Interspersed among scenes of Nadya and Madlen’s experience in Tokyo is video
footage from Ashley’s own teenage years abroad as a model. She records herself in front of a hotel
bathroom mirror, sitting against a blank wall in bed, on trains and planes, bitter, sad, tired, wistful. She
vaguely gestures toward getting out of the industry, becoming a writer, becoming, it would seem, free.
‘I’m not happy here,’ she manages to say once. Most of the time, she describes her location and
assignment; she speaks slowly with long periods of silent gazing into the camera, direct but absent, with
an ironic, petrified smile. Now, as a recruit, she does not express any grievances against her job but, when
asked, hesitates and again slowly answers that ‘it pays well and allows me the freedom to travel.’ In
exchange, she gives the agencies what they want: young girls whose families believe her promises of
financial reward and agree to send their children abroad, girls whom she watches through the gradual
process of dehumanization she had experienced herself – their embittering, petrifaction, evisceration.
Ashley does not relate any specific personal experiences of modeling work; they have to be
inferred from her present symptoms and how she interacts with her recruits. We see her check on Nadya
and Madlen once during their stay in Tokyo. She navigates their neighborhood with ease and when she
enters their apartment she regards the bunk bed and bare walls with a look of recognition and something
approaching delight19. It is clear that she identifies with the girls in the same way that her ego identifies
with the lost love-object that is the modeling industry: writes Freud, ‘the hate [that] comes into operation
on this substitutive object…mak[es] it suffer and deriv[es] sadistic satisfaction from its suffering’ (Freud
1914-1916: 251). This is the perversity of the preserved love-relation that Freud elucidates and that
Abraham and Torok fail to discuss. ‘The self-torment in melancholia…is without doubt enjoyable,
signifies…a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been
turned round upon the subject’s own self’ (ibid). Ashley’s cyst exemplifies the ‘internal conversion’ of
psychosomatic illnesses rather than the public self-bereavement characteristic of melancholia but both are
19
See Whitefield-Madrano’s “Review: Girl Model” (2013) on the last point.
11
forms of endocryptic identification that invert the positions of subject and love-object and take the subject
as the object of loss and hate. Ashley cherishes a cyst that causes her stomach to stiffen and distend, that
loss that she has swallowed. She is not alarmed by the illness; she only wishes that it was a baby instead.
After she has the cyst removed, she offers to show it to us in its plastic baggie. ‘The doctors said they had
never seen such an enormous one!’ she proudly proclaims, ‘And look! It has blonde hair!’ She assimilates
this operation to the process of childbirth: ‘I want a baby because that's what I am born to do. . . . So
when I go to have a baby I will…decide which date and just go and have the same operation that I just
had [italics mine].’ Ashley now believes herself to be sexually mature, a woman. But she remains as
stunted and sterile as the girl models she purveys abroad and the plastic babies she keeps at home; the
removal of her cyst has not removed her pathology. As Ashley returns to Russia to scout, she continues to
encrypt the loss of a love-object with ‘bricks [built] of hate and aggression,’ displacing onto herself ‘the
hostility which relates to [the love-object] and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in
the external world [italics mine]’ (Freud 1914-1916: 252). She has not rid herself of the ‘sense of selfmutilation’ that consumes her in other words20. And this is because she still does not know what she has
lost through her tenure in the industry first as model, then as scout – that ‘part of ourselves that we placed
in what we lost’21, namely, for the model, what she is and what she is worth independent of the industry’s
use and valuing.
3. The industry’s ascription of value
I have argued that the model enters from a situation (age, country, social class and so on) that renders her
radically dependent on the industry’s directives; in lieu of her family, the industry becomes her sense and
reference, imparts to her her physical as well as psychological awareness of being an object of display and
sexual abuse. From a phenomenological perspective, then, the model is an extreme instance of ‘feminine
existence [that] experiences the body as a mere thing…a thing that exists as looked at and acted upon’
(Young 2005: 39). What does this human object communicate on a cultural register? The model supplies
the industry’s demand for a certain female ideal type; why is this type ideal today and how might its
macabre contradictions express certain psychopathological preferences specific to contemporary Euro20
Abraham and Torok 1994: 164.
127. Freud writes too, ‘[T]he patient is aware of the loss…but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost
but not what he has lost in him’ (Freud 1914-1916: 245).
21
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American life? To be clear, I am not interested in directly interrogating the ‘slender body’ – the model’s
emaciated frame as part of the psychopathology of anorexia that Susan Bordo famously addresses in
Unbearable Weight22. I am rather conceptualizing the model’s deathly thinness in terms of her
manipulable objecthood, which foremost evinces her dehumanization. The model’s body is a cultural
cipher evacuated of any regard for her human being. She is what Irigaray calls a ‘value-invested
idealit[y]’23 – an ideality because she means nothing as her own person, being only the carrier of a value
determined by the needs of the industry. I consider here the industry’s use and valuing of the model in the
context of broader cultural pathologies. The commodification of all spheres of life under capitalist
modernity is one of the mechanisms that enjoins pleasure with power. ‘Objects and experiences come to
be organized as systems of consumption’ – human objects and social relations acquire the ‘possibility of
exchange, of one thing standing in for another’24, and it is this impetus that drives the market as well as
psychic economy. I open the discussion with a psychosocial reading of Ashley’s symptoms, wherein
Ashley becomes, as it were, a mouthpiece for the industry. Through Ashley, the industry’s actions as well
as fears are revealed and explicated. What remains is the question of their specific displacement on the
female body.
i. The industry speaks
Today, Ashley wields the power that she had despised in her earlier modeling years. She questions and
incites, monitors and searches out; she administers the standards that had once circumscribed her own
actions and affects; she is the judge, the sovereign, the one who first decides before the legions of girls
and parents gathered at the industry’s entrance. Has she triumphed over the industry? Fooled it? The
symptoms that we are able to observe suggest otherwise. There is Ashley’s cyst, and there are also
various other expressions of endocryptic identification. When Ashley speaks in other words, the ‘I’
should be understood as the industry’s fantasized ego; in both her professional and personal life, she also
acts in the manner of the industry – ‘in fact, she live[s] entirely on the concealed fantasy that she [is]
22
See Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (UC Press 2003). While Bordo’s
book is a comprehensive treatment of discourses and representations of the slender Western female body, the
chapter on anorexia (“Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture”) stands out for its
argument of anorexia as a symptom of long-held cultural anxieties rather than a personal pathology. I will briefly
review the argument later in this section.
23
Irigaray 1985: 181.
24
Mitchell in Mitchell ed 2000: 21-22.
13
herself [the love-object]’ (Abraham and Torok 1994: 147-8). I discuss three symptoms below. One
symptom echoes the dream of one of Abraham and Torok’s patients, which I will reference. Analyses of
the other two are my own speculations.
We witness a series of bizarre behavior when the documentary crew follows Ashley home to the
United States. Ashley meanders around her spacious modernist residence, her slight figure swallowed by
its soaring ceilings and glass walls. From the kitchen, where a lone bowl of sliced kiwi sits at the end of
the long granite counter, she brings us to the living room and then bathroom. In the living room, she
retrieves two plastic dolls from behind the sofa – a boy and a girl baby, she tells us – and seats them next
to one another. ‘They’re always here waiting for me,’ she says. ‘I had a third but I dissected it.’ Why does
Ashley feel compelled to dissect a toy that she ostensibly knows contains nothing inside? What is she
looking for? Or does she simply desire to take it apart in the same way that she scrutinizes and gradually
eviscerates her recruits on behalf of the industry? Supposing that Ashley ‘is’ the modeling industry, her
relation to the sterile objects of her affection at home parallels her relation to her wards abroad as scout.
She provides homes for both but is absent herself. She is ambivalently drawn to the girls as she is to the
dolls, regarding the former with a mixture of empathetic pity and clinical indifference, the latter with a
certain estranged adoration (she picks up the dolls by their limbs as if afraid of too much contact). She
desires to nurture in the manner of a parent or mentor but, as a matter of course for her job, must also
coldly survey, scrutinize and appraise.
On a small stand by the bathtub, Ashley then points to a pile of photographs of girls’ body parts –
legs, feet, torsos. She secretly snaps these shots at recruiting sessions and, after developing them, cuts the
prints into random sizes and plays a game where she attempts to match them. She enacts it for us: ‘Maybe
this one with this one?’ She giggles and sifts through a few more. ‘Oh my god! I think they really go
together!’ But on closer inspection, she decides, not quite. Abraham and Torok too analyze a patient who
dreams of fragmented bodies; the authors ask, ‘Whose are these scattered limbs? Does the patient have to
recover a lost object in her own name, an object that might be projected onto the analyst, or one that the
oedipal mother, for instance, might have taken away from her?’ (ibid). It turns out that the patient’s father
deserted the family when the patient was a little girl, and in endocryptically identifying with her lost
father, she ‘is’ the father whom she fantasizes to be looking for her rather than vice versa. The limbs, cuts
14
and dislocations that she dreams both constitute that which she seeks to reassemble and the pain that she
believes her father to feel ‘bereft of her.’ Ashley’s matching game lends itself to a similar conclusion. Her
search for the correct wholes can be understood as her fantasy of the industry’s loving attempt to put her
back together. The industry may have ‘fragmented’ her but, through Ashley’s preserving the love relation,
the industry remains ‘pure.’ It is ‘looking for her, is going to find her’ (ibid). Always almost, never
quite25.
Back in the living room, Ashley pauses before the glass walls and gestures outside. She says that
she is afraid to live here where ‘they can see you, but you can’t see them.’ But who would wish to spy on
her? Whose fear of being exposed is at issue? In this affluent Connecticut town, each house sits on acres
of land, swimming pools and tennis courts surrounded by woods. What does Ashley have to hide amidst
such neighbors? Why has she chosen to buy a glass house to begin with? Considered from the perspective
of the industry’s fantasized ego, Ashley’s actions and attitudes begin to make sense. The industry purveys
objects of display and icons of glamour for the global media. It generates as well as reaps massive
amounts of wealth precisely through searching out, isolating and monitoring recruits who cannot, on
account of their native situation and subsequent positioning in the industry, ‘see’ how they are being
‘seen’ by the industry. To invoke Foucault’s image of the Panopticon, the recruits behold ‘the tall outline
of the central tower from which [they are] spied upon’ – they are aware of their being scrutinized and
assessed from the ‘celebrated, transparent, circular cage’ that describes the industry – but, scattered across
Tokyo or Paris, individually dispatched by their agencies to castings and assignments, each ‘is the object
of information, never a subject in communication’ (Foucault 1979: 195-228). The Panopticon is a model
for how modern disciplinary power functions. This mode of surveillant rather than punitive power is in
fact exercised throughout society, or, in the recruit’s case, throughout the industry, by scout, casting
agent, photographer, magazine editor…and not least by the recruit herself. ‘[I]t is not that the [original]
beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the
individual is carefully fabricated in it [italics mine],’ Foucault writes26. The recruit is from the beginning
constituted through a mode of power that sees without being seen in content, only in form. The fear, then,
25
This recalls again the metaphor of the exquisite corpse. The model cannot attain a certain authorial coherence, as it
were, because she has simply been authored by too many for too long.
26
Foucault 1979: 217. Note the distinction between the industry amputating a mythical whole of an individual and
my earlier argument about the industry fragmenting the model in the sense of treating her as sexualized body parts.
This trauma creates a profound fragmentation in her psyche, namely, the erecting of Abraham and Torok’s psychic
crypt. She is thus ‘fabricated’ through fragmentation, one might say.
15
is that this relationship will be reversed. The normalization of a ‘perpetual penality that…compares,
differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes’ will be seen in its ‘dissymmetry, disequilibirium,
difference’27 and challenged, revoked. The ‘real subjection [that] is born mechanically from a fictitious
relation’28 will no longer hold.
The industry is thus haunted by its own mechanisms of subjection. Like Ashley in her expensive
glass house, the industry exercises a privilege that is covetable yet anxious. Its privilege is moreover
perverse because its hold is the hold of narcissistic love. If the family, over and above school, hospital,
military or factory, has become the ‘privileged locus’ of normalization29, then the industry, as both the site
of her emergent adult/professional identity and a surrogate family for the young recruit, wields a double
sway. The recruit’s need for a love relation, that is, to experience the pleasure of being loved, trumps her
hate and aggression toward the industry’s abuses. The industry in turn cultivates pleasures, bodies and
sexualities that specifically satisfy its exigencies. As with the modern state’s production and regulation of
sexuality, ‘countless economic interests’ are at stake – the ‘political energy’ and ‘biological vigor’ of a
society in the former case30, massive profit margins in the latter. This is also where the industry parts
ways from the broader context of the modern state. The industry operates on the principle of the recruit’s
rapid replaceability; her utility phases out within a five years at most (Entwistle and Wissinger eds 2012).
It is not a matter of investing in the body with the aim of maximizing the productivity of the population
but using up and then disposing the body without the need to contend with the question of population. In
this sense, the industry becomes an archetypical actor in the contemporary neoliberal state, in which
structural transformations in the labor market more and more render large swaths of the available labor
pool obsolete31. But, again, the industry cultivates a love-relation with the recruit, which strengthens with
the recruit’s becoming a couture model32. The model may be disposed but remains attached. So she seeks
27
183 and 202.
202.
29
215-6.
30
Foucault 1980: 48 and 146.
31
See for instance Bauman (2004). Bauman distinguishes between the unemployed population of a producer society
and the redundant population of the consumer society that emerged in the late 1970s. In the first, those who lose
their jobs remain useful, active members of society insofar as they now constitute a reserve workforce; society still
needs this form of labor power ‘on the battlefront of production’ (13). In the latter society, the jobless are radically
irrelevant.
32
Foucault makes the same point when he writes that ‘an emotion rewarded the overseeing control [of sexuality] and
carried [that control] further…the pleasure discovered fed back to the power that encircled it [italics mine]’
(Foucault 1980: 44-5).
28
16
to return despite dehumanization and disposal, now a stylist or scout, another Ashley who can only
communicate her intrapsychic conflicts through cysts and mutilated photographs. As a cultural cipher
however, her symptoms constitute, in Bordo’s words, ‘the extreme expression of…some of the
multifaceted and heterogeneous distresses of our age’ (Bordo 2003: 141). Why are these distresses
displaced onto the female body however? In what specific ways does the figure of the couture model
signify these cultural pathologies?
ii. Psychosocial readings
Discourses over the slender female ideal typically converge around cultural diagnoses of eating disorders
on the one hand and the modern aesthetic of thinness on the other33. The couture model who functions as
a contemporary female ideal type is no doubt a pathological case that can be understood in terms of
certain cultural ideologies; she unambiguously embodies the modernist preference for flat planes and
spare lines. Bordo’s study of anorexia as a characteristic expression of Western culture has been
especially influential. She identifies anorexia as a psychopathology that is not however ‘pathological’ in
the sense of being outside the norm but rather a ubiquitous, normalizing mode of female body
management34. ‘Female bodies have historically been significantly more vulnerable than male bodies to
extremes in [the]…cultural manipulation of the body,’ argues Bordo (143). The dualist ‘axis,’ which
derives from a historical denigration of the brute materiality of the flesh in favor of the soul or will, and
the control ‘axis,’ which Bordo attributes to anxieties regarding the contemporary body’s ‘special sort of
vulnerability and dependency’35, disproportionately affect girls and women. Hence the third gender/power
‘axis’: the ‘male side’ of the self triumphs over ‘the self of the uncontrollable appetites, the impurities and
taints, the flabby will and tendency to mental torpor’ that the female body traditionally represents (155).
Hence too the contemporary slender female body’s association with social mobility – the ability to ‘shape
33
See for instance de Perthuis (2005), Bordo (2003) and Heywood (1996). Heywood uses the logic of anorexia to
examine the aesthetic principles governing high modernist literature in particular. Like Bordo, she relates cultural
representations of the body back to the ways in which the body is actually experienced. The scope of her argument is
severely limited however to those who partake in ‘high culture.’ Bordo’s argument is similarly circumscribed
insofar as her focus on eating disorders by and large apply to white, middle-class women in advanced economies.
34
Bordo (2003), passim. While few girls and women are actually anorexic in other words, the preoccupation with
anorexic norms is widespread.
35
153. For Bordo, the contemporary body is not only highly reliant on sophisticated medical technology but also
exposed to the ‘structural contradictions’ of a consumer culture that encourage boundless consumption alongside
rigid self-management.
17
[one’s] life’ seen as coextensive with the ability to shape one’s body – and with freedom from a
‘domestic, reproductive destiny’ (195 and 206). But the focus on the specific proportions of the female
ideal, while illuminating, misses a crucial dimension of the female body’s commodification. Inquiries into
the cultural centrality of female slenderness presume the human status of women. The experience of the
anorexic is accorded primary significance; indeed, Bordo’s three ‘axes of continuity’ are constructed from
the imagery and language of anorexic women whom she studied. The model is however foremost a
dehumanized object. The industry uses her as a mere object, which is not, as Young distinguishes, ‘the
same phenomenon as the objectification by the Other that is a condition of self-consciousness’ (Young
2005: 44 fn 24). This mode of female objectification differs from objectification as the condition of being
recognized in other words. I will draw on Irigaray’s account of women’s use and value as mere goods in
the capitalist market economy to think through the model’s use and value in the couture industry. But to
consider from a psychosocial rather than individual psychic vantage point why the model not only
acquiesces to but takes pleasure in her commodification, I turn to Foucault’s argument on the perverse
pleasures that modern forms of power produce and consider its relation to women in particular.
a. Valuing objects
Two characteristics of objects are germane to a discussion of women’s circulation in the marketplace. In
Young’s words, an object is, ontologically speaking, ‘what can be handled, manipulated, constructed,
built up and broken down, with clear accountability of matter gained and lost’; on a practical level, it is
‘what is had, owned, with clear boundaries of right’36. An object is thus ‘essentially’ a quantitative entity:
witness the model’s body, valued, tracked and managed by way of height, weight and age. She is a piece
of property who ‘attain[s] [her] full weight as…objects of exchange on the market [italics mine],’ namely,
as a commodity (Young 2005: 78). But the value of a commodity does not turn on its ‘determinate and
definable’ material features. The relation between its value and its material composition is, according to
Marx’s analysis of commodities, an enigma. A commodity is always valued against an external standard,
another commodity to which it is rendered equivalent. What is the equalizing force? Man’s labor-power,
itself reduced to homogenous units. And what enables this abstraction? ‘Some transcendental element,’
which Irigaray specifically ascribes to the ‘needs/desires of man’: ‘women bring to light [these
36
Young 2005: 78. Here, Young is discussing the object in the specific context of the objectification of women’s
breasts.
18
needs/desires] although men do not recognize them in that form’ (Irigaray 1985: 182). Irigaray identifies,
then, the form but not the content of that which determines women’s value on the market 37. Her insight
that the commodity of the female body in no way corresponds to the qualities of a woman qua unique
individual nonetheless addresses the discrepancy between the value that the model brings to the industry
and her price. Women who are exchanged in this way are not remunerated but exploited. The model pays
for the chance to profit; the industry is a lottery system rigged against her, a power relationship that will
constitute her as subject ‘in both senses of the word’38.
The subordination of a commodity’s use-value to its exchange-value generates the surplus value
necessary for capitalist growth. To this basic principle underlying the modern market economy, which
Marx theorized as a conflict between different social classes, Irigaray adds the problem of gender
difference. For Irigaray, the use of women as commodities was the inaugural act of submitting ‘nature’ to
a ‘labor’ that assigns value with respect to a third term from which both ‘nature’ and women are exempt.
‘The exchange of women as goods accompanies and stimulates exchanges of other “wealth” among
groups of men’ (172). This exchange is not what Irigaray calls an ‘“immediate” practice’ but a form of
‘“social” mediation.’ The female body becomes the raw material for man’s activity; man’s speculation;
man’s determination of her social use, which is only social insofar as it concerns men’s collective
exigencies. The historical validity of such an argument derives from anthropological studies of kinship
structures39 and women’s patent reproductive use-value – her primary role – in social life. The argument’s
contemporary applicability is clearly more limited, however much women must assume the values as well
as bodies of men to secure public, professional roles40. But the couture model remains a ‘value-bearing
form.’ The commodity that is her body is stripped of signs of physical sexual difference yet sexualized by
male desire. ‘The economy of exchange – of desire – is man’s business’ and she gains value in it through
reconstituting her body in the image of his desire. And just as her value fragments into use and exchange,
37
Irigaray argues that the content resides in part in the ‘needs/desires’ of masculine sexuality, which she believes is
an ‘essentially economic pleasure’, that is, rapacious, reductive and conservative. For similar accounts of masculine
sexuality, see Schaeffer (2011), Grosz (1995), Cixous and Clement (1986) and Cixous (1976).
38
Foucault 1980: 60.
39
Irigaray specifically relies on Levi-Strauss’ works.
40
Bordo maintains that the professional female body must not signify maternal power in any way, hence the ‘lean
body of the career businesswoman.’ And yet the woman donning a female version of male business dress is still
seen as ‘playing male…[and hence] represents no serious competition…to the real men of the workplace’ (Bordo
2003: 206-11).
19
her unique, individual qualities become on one level standardized and abstract, and on another
dispossessed, eliminated. The model’s physical measurements adhere to a general standard that repudiates
the value of the specificities of her body in and for itself. She is assigned a price like any other
commodity on the market and is thereby exchanged and used as a commodity. As a woman, she is
‘remunerate[d]…only partially, or even not at all’ (190).
b. Instrumentalizing pleasure
And yet the model remains attached to, indeed, enamored with the industry. If one grants that modern
power ‘insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied’ by way of technologies founded on the
principle of productivity rather than repression, subtle pleasures rather than violent pains, then the
model’s subjection to the industry is similarly constituted in a social matrix that Foucault describes as ‘in
actual fact, and directly, perverse’41. The perversity is ‘actual’ because modern forms of power –
anonymous, continuous, normalizing – produce real conducts and affects. The perversity is direct because
power produces in order to subjugate, utilize and optimize. Power controls for instance the kinds of
pleasures that it cultivates and is so reinforced. Hence its exceptional effectiveness and efficiency: beyond
the organizational methods of ‘time-tables, collective training, exercises, total and detailed surveillance’
described in Discipline & Punish, there is the wielding of love in combination with fear that History of
Sexuality asserts. Sexuality became a central target of power beginning in the 17th-century not only for the
straightforward reason that greater knowledge of sexuality was believed to secure bourgeois hegemony
but on account of the pathological intensity of the ‘fear, curiosity, delight, and excitement’ that it
aroused42. Where the normalized subjection of prisoner, soldier or factory worker was inflected with a
negative affect alone, the confessor submits with a certain relish. Sexuality provides for modern power a
psychological access point for exploitation; the same perversion of pleasure characterizes the industry’s
use of the model.
The analogy being established here takes place between sexuality as a technology of modern
power and the love-relation cultivated by the couture industry. Both are what Foucault calls ‘instrumenteffects,’ at once ‘intentional and nonsubjective’: the interests at stake are clear though untraceable to a
41
42
Foucault 1979: 220 and Foucault 1980: 47.
Foucault 1980: 124.
20
single source (94-5). Both also centrally involve the production of pleasure and narcissistic affirmation
rather than specific sexual acts43. The pleasure that power began to cultivate in the 16th-century was the
pleasure of analysis, of a specific form of attention. First, the Christian penance for which sex was a
‘privileged theme.’ The confession was not a simple matter of describing the deed ‘but of reconstructing,
in and around the act, the thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accompanied it, the images,
desires, modulations, and quality of the pleasure that animated it’ (63). It was a knowledge extracted and
isolated by an authority that required the authority’s judgment and punishment, consolation and
absolution. In a second moment, sex then came under the jurisdiction of a number of disciplines – at the
turn of the 19th-century, pedagogy, medicine and demography; at the century’s end, psychiatry; and,
through each field, an object of the state. This ‘completely new’ technology of sex was paradigmatically
instanced in Charcot’s Salpêtrière:
‘[I]t was an enormous apparatus for observation, with its examinations, interrogations, and
experiments, but it was also a machinery for incitement, with its public presentations, its theater
of ritual crises…its interplay of dialogues, palpations, laying on of hands, postures which the
doctors elicited or obliterated with a gesture or a word, its hierarchy of personnel who kept watch,
organized, provoked, monitored, and reported, and who accumulated an immense pyramid of
observations and dossiers.’ (55-6)
The pleasures at work were above all a seduction on the part of power. There was the pleasure of the gaze
and of being listened to and interpreted, the ‘basic intimacy’ of the confessional booth but also the
excitement of the public spectacle. How much the chief spectacle of power had changed therefore from
the blood-drenched executions of only decades prior, now a matter of ‘mildness-production-profit’44
effected through a doctor’s visit or a teacher’s report. Sexuality and the pleasures of its discourse were
being ‘busy produc[ed] in the light of day and broadcast[ed] to noisy accompaniment’ (Foucault 1980:
158). And yet because they remained instruments of a power that had altered its modes of operation but
not its objectives, they were perverse. Punishment had changed its form: it was ‘of a less immediately
physical kind, a certain discretion in the art of inflicting pain, a combination of more subtle, more
subdued sufferings [italics mine]’ (Foucault 1979: 8). Within rather than under the hold of power,
punishment entwined with pleasure as fear did with desire. What emerged was a psychic attachment to
injury enacted in pleasure’s name.
43
While Foucault aims to show the ‘direct’ effects of power on bodies, he is not, as David Halperin argues,
interested in defining sexuality but rather in ‘specify[ing] what it does and how it works in discursive and
institutional practice’ (Halperin in Phillips and Reay eds 2002: 42-68).
44
Foucault 1979: 219.
21
For Foucault, the modern technology of sexuality was specifically an instrument of bourgeois
power45. Here, I shift the focus from class to gender: how might refiguring a class analysis of sexuality in
terms of gender elucidate the psychosocial dimension of the model’s attachment to the industry? Among
the bourgeoisie, the woman was ‘the first figure to be invested by the deployment of sexuality’ (Foucault
1980: 121). Foucault notes the significance of this fact yet declines to offer a direct explanation. We are
later given a purely functional reason for the medicalization of her sexuality – woman is a reproductive
vessel whose health must be ensured on behalf of ‘the health of [her] children, the solidity of the family
institution, and the safeguarding of society’ (146-7). But just as the bourgeois fascination with its
sexuality exceeded political interests alone, the attentiveness to the sexuality of the ‘idle’ woman suggests
other forces at play. Foucault emphasizes the utility of a thorough knowledge of bourgeois sexuality for
its hegemony; this knowledge was however invented by the bourgeoisie as a mode of control as well as
titillation. The bourgeoisie ‘cultivated [its sexuality]…made this element identical with its body
[and]…subordinated its soul to sex by conceiving of it as what constituted the soul’s most secret and
determinant part [italics mine]’ (124). The excitements and fears of sexuality created a specific subject. A
subject in subjection, hence politically useful46, but also a subject of ‘truth.’ A truth produced within
relations of power, pleasures of seeking the truth ‘thoroughly imbued’ with power’s aims, but also
pleasures and techniques of evading power that produce in turn the possibility of ‘a different economy of
bodies and pleasures’47. Pursuing the knowledge of its sexuality was a pathological preoccupation,
perverse in its objectives but, crucially, uncertain in its outcomes.
The investment in the sexuality of the bourgeois woman was likewise psychologically complex.
Though her body was reduced to its reproductive uses, the construct of the ‘nervous’ woman – her
hysterization – constituted part of her class’s ‘fragile treasure…[the] secret that had to be discovered at all
costs’ (121). Her symptoms were studied at Salpêtrière as a means of, again, uncovering the ‘truth’ of
bourgeois sexuality. But was this truth supposed to be uniform between women and men? If bourgeois
sexuality carried a ‘high political price’ relative to its social inferiors, where did the sexuality of its
women stand relative to that of its men? Foucault observes,
45
Sexuality was a means of bourgeois self-affirmation and -strengthening that eventually extended to the working
classes. Even so, it operated by way of different forms and instruments (such as medical treatment and juridical
authority; see for instance Foucault 1980: 122) for different classes.
46
The forms and instruments of subjection again varied among different classes but all were subjects ‘in both senses
of the word.’
47
Foucault 1980: 60 and 159.
22
‘in the process of hysterization of women, “sex” was defined in three ways: as that which belongs
in common to men and women; as that which belongs, par excellence, to men, and hence is
lacking in women; but at the same time, as that which by itself constitutes woman’s body,
ordering it wholly in terms of the functions of reproduction and keeping it in constant agitation
through the effects of that very function.’ (153)
Foucault interprets this ambiguity as part of power’s ruse of creating an agency and urgency possessed by
women as well as men that appeared to elude power. To grasp the mystery of one’s ‘sex’ was to liberate it
and affirm one’s own rights against power when the very desire to pursue such knowledge was implanted
by power. But it was around women’s hysterical attacks that audiences gathered to witness the production
of sexuality’s ‘truth.’ While a peripheral figure, a listless presence kept in the shadows of public life, the
bourgeois woman was also thrust on stage and her sexuality the first to be medicalized48. Thus was she an
object of desire as well as fear throughout culture – in the specific instance of Salpêtrière, the hysteric
manipulated by hand and baton, questions and drugs, regarded with horror and delight; more generally, in
the private spaces of the home, the mysterious bearer of value, conjugal, parental and, within and beyond
both, sexual.
Today, the model is of course excised of all association with the conjugal and parental obligations
demanded of the 19th-century bourgeois woman49. The ideal that she embodies is one of sterile
prepubescence but nonetheless sexualized, desirable on account of the latter but repellent because of the
former. She is an icon of female beauty and she relishes the attention: a mere teenager labored over by
teams of make-up artists, hairdressers, stylists and seamstresses; photographed, filmed and instantly
beamed over the internet to millions of viewers. She is an anonymous celebrity50, ‘worshipped in our
culture [though]…rarely regarded without ambivalence, evoking paradoxical emotions of envy, respect,
vitriol, desire, guilt, wonder, resentment, mystification, hostility, superiority and repulsion’ (de Perthuis
2003: 141). Her disquieting appeal seems to escape any direct reference to the couture industry’s
mechanisms of production but it is in fact the ‘most internal element’ in the industry, organized by that
industry ‘in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures’51 –
her body and all those for whom she is an ideal. ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,’ the supermodel
Kate Moss is known to say. We are now aware of the kinds of experiences and practices that create the
48
This is contrasted with the problematization of children’s sexuality in Foucault’s account.
As Bordo remarks, the 19th-century female ideal was an hourglass silhouette that marked ‘reproductive
femaleness’ (Bordo 2003: 208).
50
See Seltzer (1997).
51
Foucault 1980: 155.
49
23
model’s gaunt frame; they constitute for her a psychic ‘Reality…born of the necessity of remaining
concealed, unspoken…comparable to an offense, a crime,’ as Abraham and Torok argue (Abraham and
Torok 1994: 158). Comparable because ‘Reality’ is a crime only insofar as it is recognized as ‘Reality.’
‘Reality’ has been encrypted into a fantasy of genuine affirmation of the industry and the crime lies with
speaking against the ‘most precious and carefully concealed [love-object]’52 and destroying that fantasy.
Thus is the model lain waste, with her consent, and in her ‘orgasmic delight.’
52
Abraham and Torok 1994: 137.
24