Disorder or Delight? Towards a New Account of the Fashion Model Body

This article will embark on three tasks. First, it will review the literature of disorder as the most recognized literature interrogating the fashion model body and how these accounts frame this body as a “naturally” disorderly and, hence, ill-disciplined body of desire that seduces and “infects” impressionable young girls with its disorderliness. The article will then move to post-feminist accounts of the fashion model body to examine how this literature reads the model body as a body of pleasure as opposed to danger. The final task will be to show how both of these literatures work out of similar assumptions about the nature of pleasure and discipline, that is that they are necessarily oppositional. It will argue the usefulness of moving to contemporary post-structuralism (Foucault 1972) and literary criticism (Cryle 1994) to move beyond the either/or of disorder and pleasure. What follows then, is an attempt to make a case for drawing on new conceptual tools in order to better account for the embodied disciplinary (Foucault 1977) work of the fashion model in contemporary society.