Work! A Queer History of Modeling

LGBTQ Studies is pleased to cordially invite you to their second talk of the year-long lecture series QueerCurrent. Prof. Elspeth Brown discusses her recent book Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University Press). Work! traces the queer history of modeling from the rise of photographic modeling in the early 20^th century to the rise of the supermodel in the early 1980s. The book shows how the modeling industry has been shaped by queer sensibilities since its origins, and how black models– in their very insistence on black glamour—have challenged whitestream hegemony.

Elspeth Brown is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Her research concerns queer and trans history; the history and theory of photography; the history of US capitalism; and oral history. She is also the author of The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (2005). She is co-editor of Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014, with Thy Phu), “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014), and Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006). She is the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a five-year digital history and oral history public, digital humanities collaboration.

Charles E. Young Research Library (YRL), Presentation Room 11348

Light refreshments
Please RSVP by January 17
Contact Claudia Defaz at cdefaz@humnet.ucla.edu for any questions.