Staging queer feelings: the affective economy of fashion photography at the turn of the twenty-first century
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Date
30/11/2020Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
30/11/2021Author
Filippello, Roberto
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Abstract
“Staging Queer Feelings: The Affective Economy of Fashion Photography at the Turn of the
Twenty-first Century” tracks the circulation of queer feelings, moods and atmospheres in
alternative fashion magazines in the 1990s and 2000s. It explores, in particular, how Dutch
magazine (1994-2002) challenged the aesthetic conventions of mainstream fashion imagery
and normative understandings of the body, by suggesting alternative ways to perform
masculinity and femininity and imaging queer ways of inhabiting the world. My case studies
are fashion editorial stories depicting post-teenage grunge anomie, working-class “obscenity”
and intergenerational intimacy. The dissertation argues that through the staging of
ambiguous sexual scenarios and styles of bodily performance previously unseen in fashion
imagery, magazines like Dutch advanced visual discourses on sexuality, affect, and social life
aimed at the dissolution of heteronormative representational conventions in the visual
culture of fashion at the turn of the century. In addition to contesting beauty standards and
norms of decorum, alternative fashion magazines provoked the readers to question their own
sensibility and moral positionings, in this way establishing a new mode of spectatorial
engagement among fashion magazine readers. Based on extensive analysis of fashion
editorial spreads circulated in the alternative press, the dissertation develops the argument
that the fashion photographic image since the mid-1990s has functioned as an interface for
the creation of queer world possibilities and the formation of fashion magazine
counterpublics. In contrast to other scholars who have used semiotics or psychoanalysis for
the study of fashion images, my dissertation employs queer affect theory as a magnifying lens
for tackling issues of intimacy, emotional life, and inequality in collective human experience.
The project ultimately unsettles dominant (heterosexual, upper and middle-class) histories of
fashion imagery and identifies fashion photography as a rich, under-investigated archive for
contemporary queer and affect scholarship.