Modeled Bodies : Biopolitics, Gender, and Futurities in Digital Fashion Media

This thesis uses an analysis of Condé Nast’s app Vogue Runway to locate the construction and dissemination of idealized bodies within digital and platformed media. Tracing the interwoven histories of medicalized quantification practices and queer subjectivity, this thesis links bioplitical regimes to digitality and contends that rigidly gendered and sexed norms are propagated and metricized through fashion aesthetics. A Deleuzian framework enables this reading and foregrounds the imbrication of control and corporate marketing practices that subtends mediated fashion imagery. To combat this serpentine control, I put forth a queer analytic that combines reparative methods as theorized by Eve Sedgwick and José Esteban Muñoz. These strategies look to futurity as a source for political economic and socio-cultural praxis. Ultimately this thesis seeks to ground contemporary media practices within a historical framework and promulgate generative methodologies for reclaiming the potential of expressive fashion media.