My thesis is a memoir of fashion and higher ed. Its ostensible focus is my career as a runway and magazine model, which occupied the years between 2013 and 2018, but it gives equal air time to my career in academia so far. Its attention is split between the story of my body, once a high achieving aesthetic object and now something I regard as simply useful, and the story of my mind, the intellectual trajectory I have taken since I enrolled in a community college and then transferred to Wesleyan. The memoir is self-conscious and refers continuously to its own making while raising questions of beauty; femininity; influence and inspiration; hidden forms of labor; girlhood and womanhood in society. Part of what this thesis does is present a collection of model bodies—those of myself, my peers in high fashion, my mothers, and my mentors in queerness and in academia—and shows our interdependence and our effects on one another, which are sometimes regrettable, often beautiful. My thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for the multiple themes of the memoir. It weaves together the temporality of modeling—a chronological overview of my five year career—with the temporality of writing—some of the thinking about modeling that I did with my thesis advisor Christina Crosby in 2020. It ends with Crosby's sudden death at the start of 2021. Chapter 2 starts at the beginning of my modeling career in 2013. It chronicles how I became a model, how I developed an eating disorder once I was a model, how I was sent home from Paris in 2014 for being too skinny and in 2016 for being too \"fat.\" It includes a discussion of different kinds of \"model bodies\" that exist in the fashion world and tracks the two model bodies I inhabited in the course of my career. The chapter documents a number of ways in which, as Hilton Als wrote, \"femininity, as an idea, does fuck you up.\" Chapter 3 focuses more directly on issues of work and art in relation to fashion modeling. It opens with a classroom anecdote about a boy I encountered in an Art History class at Wesleyan who thought that fashion photography was a perversion of or threat to so-called high art. It then analyses a video of female models dancing in mens' suits that Vogue made in 2017, interrogating traditionally masculine and feminine spheres of work. I describe my experience working on a corporate office schedule as a model for Zara in Spain; the work that modeling entails; and the various ways it is compensated. The chapter winds down with a discussion of gender and sexuality in my brother's life and in mine, and concludes with a scene in which I tell my agent I am quitting modeling for good. Chapter 4 discusses the aftereffects of modeling: how I thought about my body after I quit, how I experienced the weight I gained, how I altered my dress and my gender to accommodate my new flesh. It also provides a condensed summary of my journey through Wesleyan University, focusing on my relationship to Christina Cosby and to some of the scholars I read in the process of thinking through my changed body. The chapter closes with a discussion of the ways modeling's warped standards and pernicious prejudices live on in my perception, of my own body and of others'. The thesis ends with an invocation of Crosby's instruction to \"do this work in language,\" to work through these questions in writing just as Crosby grappled with her considerably-more-transfigured body in her memoir, A Body Undone. My \"writer's body\" takes over at the end of my thesis, with the hope that I will continue to uncover, in language as it were, what it means to be a bodymind shaped by the world.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Fashion","Femininity","Body image"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 23565