The Commodification of Aesthetic Feeling: Race, Sexuality, and the 1920s Stage Model

Abstract

Feminist Studies 40, no. 1. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 65 Elspeth H. Brown The Commodification of Aesthetic Feeling: Race, Sexuality, and the 1920s Stage Model In the transition to a consumer economy in the early twentieth century in the United States, the production of desire became central to the distribution of goods. Cultural and business historians ranging from Jackson Lears to Davarian Baldwin have charted the US transition in this period to what William Leach memorably termed the “land of desire” and have identified the cultural intermediaries—art directors , beauty entrepreneurs, advertising executives—who brokered manufacturers ’ pursuit of expanding markets.1 There has been less research, however, on the new forms of labor that emerged in the United States in the concurrent transition to a mass production economy, an economy that relied as much on the distribution and consumption of goods as on 1. See T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon , 1993). For cultural intermediaries, see also Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Goodwill,” in his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), 318–71; and Keith Negus, “The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance Between Production and Consumption ,” Cultural Studies,16, no. 4 (2002): 501–15. 66 Elspeth H. Brown their manufacture.2 The work of copy editors, window dressers, and art directors were forms of labor that required the production of specific emotional states in their audiences, commercialized feelings that were a necessary prelude to sales. Scholars working within the vein of sociology and political economy of globalization, particularly Michael Hardt and Sara Ahmed, have termed this work “affective labor”: a form of work that, Hardt argues, has recently assumed a dominant position within labor markets in a global capitalist economy.3 Yet, as is the case with so many aspects of globalization, capitalism’s dependence on affective labor is not a recent phenomenon. The shift to a mass production economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries necessitated the elaboration of new forms of labor required to expand existing markets and build new ones. This article explores one aspect of affective (and, therefore, corporeal ) labor that was a new phenomenon in the early twentieth century, but now is seemingly ubiquitous: that of the commercial model. Modeling is the quintessential occupation of a modern consumer economy, where goods and services are bought and sold through the medium of advertising and marketing; the history of modeling in the United States is deeply imbricated with the maturation of these industries in the wake of World War I. Models, whether performing live or through representational distance, as in photographic modeling, produce sales through the immaterial labor of posing for the lens or appearing with commodities in a real-time setting. Through the medium of their bodies, models coproduce public feelings whose dominant meanings are shaped by a commercial “common sense” that is naturalized by the other affective laborers of modern consumer culture: art directors, copy editors, magazine 2. Notable exceptions include Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen , Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Stephen J. Ross, Working Class Hollywood: Silent Cinema and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and the emergent scholarship on the labor economy of Wal-Mart, such as Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Nelson Lichtenstein, Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Remade American Business, Transformed the Global Economy, and Put Politics in Every Store (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). 3. Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2 (1999): 89-100; Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–39. Elspeth H. Brown 67 publishers...