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AbstractNew forms of wearable technology are blurring the lines between technology and bodies, raising questions about personhood, selfhood, and what it means to be human. Consequently, scholars are examining these iterations of body/machine interface and human machine communication from a variety of angles. While fashion scholars focused primarily on garments and celebrating potential techno‐futures, media and communication scholars more critically examined how wearable tech mediates bodies and relationships. Social scientists are concerned with issues of labor, privacy, data ownership, and value, drawing on ethnographic studies of the Quantified Self (QS) community and the phenomenon of self‐tracking more generally. This scholarship is rooted in studies and theorizations of ubiquitous computing, feminist science and technology studies (STS), and fashion and dress as both ornament and second skin. Generally, it asks how wearable technology can augment the human body, how it affects human relationships to self and other, and whether wearable technology can promote human autonomy, when it is locked into commercial and power relationships that don't necessarily have the users' best interests at heart. The essay ends by briefly outlining of directions for further research, urging further investigation into wearable tech exhibiting gendered attitudes toward "femme" women, and calling for increased attention to issues raised by wearable technology's coming merger with the growing fields of biotech and synthetic biology.

This article explores the aesthetic labor of embodying race. The author's research on fashion models in New York City uncovered a demand for aesthetic labor that differs along racial lines, namely, black models must fit themselves to a narrower set of standards, and experience their race as both an asset and a liability. This difference is evident in the context of the market for black models, where the "white gaze," and the "corporate gaze" intersect. Yet both employers' desire for workers with a particular "look," and workers' willingness to call on personal resources to style that "look" for the job foster a structural bias toward racist practices that are masked by appeals to "aesthetics." Managing one's racial appearance reveals a unique quality of aesthetic labor that emerges only when race is taken into account, arguing for its inclusion among the characteristics workers manipulate when their work is studied as aesthetic labor.

The fashion model's hold on popular consciousness is undeniable. How did models emerge as such powerful icons in modern consumer culture? This volume brings together cutting-edge articles on fashion models, examining modelling through race, class and gender, as well as its structure as an aesthetic marketplace within the global fashion economy. Essays include treatments of the history of fashion modelling, exploring how concerns about racial purity and the idealization of light skinned black women shaped the practice of modelling in its early years. Other essays examine how models have come to

This volume brings together cutting-edge articles on fashion models, examining modelling through race, class and gender, as well as its structure as an aesthetic marketplace within the global fashion economy. Essays include treatments of the history of fashion modelling, exploring how concerns about racial purity and the idealization of light skinned black models shaped the practice of modelling in its early years. Other essays examine how models have come to define femininity through consumer culture. While modelling's global nature is addressed throughout, chapters deal speciafically with model markets in Australia and Tokyo, where nationalist concerns colour what is considered a pretty face

Written by experts in interpretive sociology, this volume examines semiotic models in a sociological context. Contributors offer case studies to demonstrate how to do things with semiotics. Synthesizing a diverse and fragmented landscape, this is a key reference work for understanding the connection between semiotics and sociology

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword: What Affects Are Good For -- Introduction -- The Parched Tongue -- Techno-Cinema: Image Matters in the Affective Unfoldings of Analog Cinema and New Media -- Slowness: Notes toward an Economy of Différancial Rates of Being -- Myocellular Transduction: When My Cells Trained My Body-Mind -- Women's Work and the Ambivalent Gift of Entropy -- Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora -- In Calcutta, Sex Workers Organize -- More Than a Job: Meaning, Affect, and Training Health Care Workers -- Haunting Orpheus: Problems of Space and Time in the Desert -- Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry -- The Wire -- Losses and Returns: The Soldier in Trauma -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index