The Feminine Awkward: Graceless Bodies and the Performance of Femininity in Fashion Photographs
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 9z2qx
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1080/1362704X.2016.1252524
- Title of journal
- Fashion Theory
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 201
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 1362-704X
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This peer reviewed article builds on earlier writing by Shinkle to identify and critically examine the idiom of awkwardness, a widely recognised but critically unexplored trend in contemporary fashion photography. Awkwardness represents a shift in the affective economy of the photograph away from more conventionally feminine composure towards something less controlled. Drawing on examples of western fashion photography from the early 20th century to the present, Shinkle charts the historical emergence of this shift in terms of relations between the model, the photographic frame, and the viewer. The article uses affect theory – specifically, the work of Brian Massumi and Sianne Ngai – to examine not just what the image signifies, but the way that it mobilises an interlocking set of deeper bodily and emotional responses. As a methodological framework, affect theory opens up new ways of thinking about the way that fashion photography both participates in, and unsettles, the production of gendered bodies. Suggesting new ways of thinking through the nature and limits of the political, the article also has a wider relevance to the fields of fashion studies, performance studies, and political theory.
The article is methodologically aligned with Shinkle’s work on video games in terms of its interest in the haptic and embodied dimensions of our encounters with images. It opens up new ways of thinking about fashion photography as a site for the biopolitical articulation of contemporary gendered bodies. The latter ideas are also explored in her shorter essays written for Foam (‘On Politics, Photography, and the Fashioned Body’) and The Photographers Gallery. This article is also closely related to Shinkle’s book Fashion Photography: The Story in 180 Pictures, a critical exploration of the history of fashion photography since 1979.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
