{"id":33073,"date":"2011-02-07T13:34:37","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T18:34:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=33073"},"modified":"2013-11-14T06:14:47","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T11:14:47","slug":"its-all-in-the-genes-the-invisibility-of-labor-in-modeling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/02\/07\/its-all-in-the-genes-the-invisibility-of-labor-in-modeling\/","title":{"rendered":"“It’s All in the Genes”: The Invisibility of Labor in Modeling"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t be taught the skills to model, because first and foremost, skill doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 It\u2019s all in the jeans<\/span> genes.\u201d<\/p>\n

So notes a shirtless man, a self-described \u201cmale mannequin\u201d in commercials for Next Top Model<\/em> in Vietnam:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

My sociological knee-jerk reaction is to point to the ways in which models\u2019 labor is deliberately rendered invisible, masking performance as mere appearance, in much the same way social categories are naturalized to appear like states of being instead of products of social organization — think gender, ethnicity, class, and yes, beauty.<\/p>\n

As concerns the category of beauty, there is considerable work involved in pulling it off.\u00a0 Like retail service workers, models do \u201caesthetic labor,\u201d as documented by sociologists Elizabeth Wissinger and Joanne Entwistle<\/a> and more recently by Christine Williams and Catherine Connell<\/a>.\u00a0 Aesthetic labor is the work of manipulating one\u2019s physique and personality to embody a company brand.\u00a0 In the modeling market, some people easily have that physique, as the shirtless guy claims to have, but most models have to fight for it, and they\u2019re fighting against the clock of aging.\u00a0 If they don\u2019t have to work for cut abs and narrow hips, they most likely still feel compelled<\/em> to work at it, given the rampant uncertainties facing them in their daily grinds of auditions and rejections.\u00a0 All of this work gets carefully tucked behind the scenes of fashion and beauty images — a clandestine world NTM<\/em> purports to expose for voyeuristic consumers around the world.<\/p>\n

But instead of exposing it, the NTM <\/em>franchise caricatures it.\u00a0 In the American version, Tyra Banks insists that effort is everything, and she axes candidates left and right because they didn\u2019t \u201cwant it badly enough.\u201d\u00a0 She just didn\u2019t work hard at it, goes the usual dismissal, or she lacked the determination to keep smiling when Jay Manuel told her that her face is weird. \u00a0It\u2019s not that you\u2019ve got the wrong look, the show tells contestants, but that you didn\u2019t put in the work to get the right one.\u00a0 NTM<\/em> sticks close to an individualistic ethos:\u00a0 if you fail, it\u2019s because you lacked the individual effort needed to succeed.<\/p>\n

Success in any culture industry is a mix of both hard work and the luck of being the \u201cright\u201d contender at the right moment, which is somewhat arbitrarily decided in any given fashion season.\u00a0 Saying that success is \u201call in the genes\u201d renders the \u201clook\u201d into a natural state of being, when like all culture industries, modeling is a complex social production.<\/p>\n

Saying it\u2019s all in the jeans<\/em> is also pretty funny.\u00a0 Let\u2019s not overlook this guy\u2019s self-deprecating humor:\u00a0 here\u2019s a man surrendering himself (and his manhood) to the whims and preferences of fashion, an industry widely believed to be controlled by women and gay men.\u00a0 In other ads he mocks his talent and wryly notes the biggest hazard in his line of work: wearing leopard print g-strings (to say nothing of occupational challenges like the precarious nature of freelance labor, the lack of health and retirement benefits, or the unpaid labor of castings and magazine shoots).\u00a0 What\u2019s most striking about this guy and his seductive black-and-white commercial is not the sociological back story, it\u2019s his own silliness.\u00a0 He\u2019s playing on the ironic gap between social expectations of masculinity and the realities of being featured as a passive visual object.\u00a0 We probably wouldn\u2019t be so charmed if the commercial featured a young woman laughing about her job title: \u201cI\u2019m a professional model!\u201d\u00a0 We\u2019d probably roll our eyes.\u00a0 The source of that silliness\u2014unequal cultural expectations about the display value of men and women\u2014is as problematic as it is good fodder for comedy.<\/p>\n

Ashley Mears<\/a> is a former model and current Assistant Professor of sociology at Boston University who is doing fantastic work on the modeling industry.\u00a0 In her book,\u00a0<\/em>Pricing Beauty: Value in the Fashion Modeling World (UC Berkeley Press), she examines the production of value in fashion modeling markets.<\/em><\/p>\nGwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou can\u2019t be taught the skills to model, because first and foremost, skill doesn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 It\u2019s all in the jeans genes.\u201d So notes a shirtless man, a self-described \u201cmale mannequin\u201d in commercials for Next Top Model in Vietnam: My sociological knee-jerk reaction is to point to the ways in which models\u2019 labor is deliberately rendered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,225,227,23384,55,2089,2103,2087,1810],"class_list":["post-33073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-clothesfashion","tag-commodification","tag-social-construction-discourselanguage","tag-gender","tag-gender-beauty","tag-gender-bodies","tag-gender-masculinity","tag-nation-vietnam"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33073"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59136,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33073\/revisions\/59136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}