| This dissertation examines transformations in contemporary US racial thinking and visual culture through an ethnographic study of commercial image production in the New York fashion industry. Specifically, it explores how modeling and casting agents create, evaluate, and cultivate categories of "difference" and theories of mediation in a competing context of commercial multiculturalism and "visual anxiety," or the increased awareness yet distrust of appearances. Rethinking the body as a form of media, casting as a kind of media production, and the agency of models as they become mediums through which advertising and other messages are made intelligible, this dissertation positions casting---the selection, development, and marketing of models---alongside other cultural practices and professional visions that grapple with the discursive, aesthetic, and ultimately epistemological dimensions of social difference. It examines how casting professionals acquire and pattern these new ways of seeing, highlighting the importance of talk in the production of both images and difference, and explores the political and social ramifications of these new forms as they are refracted through idioms of beauty, desirability, and justice.;Based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork across six sites, the dissertation focuses on two sites in particular: a leading casting agency and high fashion women's modeling agency. Drawing on participant observation, semi-structured interviews, collected casting images and documents, news and popular media, and audio-recorded "casting talk," it is divided into two sections: Casting and Models. The first rethinks the visual and aesthetic dimensions of casting as a set of documentary, linguistic, and spatializing practices, while the second explores how the category "model" is both figuratively and materially created through model socialization and media representations.;The goal of the dissertation is to plumb the seeming paradox of casting and model development that at once distrusts and manipulates visual markers of difference while simultaneously attempts to create more "real" ways of seeing. It uses this as a metaphor for and example of practices that play out in a context of visual anxiety and in so doing, seeks to show how new articulations of mediation, visibility, and social difference are produced in the process. |
