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Charlotte Herzog’s essay, “Powder Puff Promotion: The Fashion Show-in-Film,” isn't the most fascinating text of the week, but it has a couple of great moments when she defines a model's facial expression (or lack thereof) and her walk. Herzog describes "the frosty and detached snobbishness" of model-ness, the "indifferent, aloof stance," as well as the "contrapposto stance," which is the posing with the hip and shoulder tilted in an S-curve. The effacing of affect from the model's face, or anyone's, is of course an affect in and of itself. The face is inherently too complex to ever truly be blank. Yet it is very capable of conveying blankness without being blank. And the model's feigned affect-less-ness, "so as not to detract from the clothes" (p. 138), seems to get very close to its even less animated kin: the synthetic mannequin. A good fashion dummy, the sculptural piece, was recently described by Harold Koda, the head of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, as "once abstract enough to carry the imagery of a variety of signature designer styles, but specific enough to present a compelling physicality to the clothing." (See the great NY Times article on Bonaveri's factory of mannequins here.) No surprise that the human model, the mannequin and the star would all be after a similar goal: to stoke desire, which will lead to a purchase -- or many. But if the performed blankness allows for other women to easily picture themselves inside the clothing, what does it guarantee for the heterosexual male gaze (internalized by men, women, and anything that is alive) to have a frozen frame of a female on display -- to not allow for "it" to move about unexpectedly?

This performed blankness of the face relates to my ongoing work on the ways in which queer(able) men represent their bodies, or limbs, online. The logic, in the runway and on Manhunt.net, is similar: if the face doesn't commit to a particular affect or "type," it is more likely to lend itself to the whatever-fantasy-of-the-other. Compare this non-committal relationship to any particular affect in the face, in order to sell clothing or horny bodies in (cyber)space, to the very specific "prissy walk" of the pageant children in "Toddlers and Tiaras." In one of the episodes, a teenage pageant coach teaches a toddler how to do the "prissy walk," which is something like a stylized skipping with a Little Red Riding Hood of porn frozen smile and a finger on the chin. There is no blankness to this face. It very clearly suggests both defenseless innocence and a sassy come-on that reads "touch me," maybe even "manhandle me." As the teenage coach asks the little girl about what she wants to be when she grows up: "You wanna be a trophy wife? Yeah!".

While the Toddlers and Tiaras walk is faster than the model's, they are both just as controlled, rhythmic, and predictable. But the "prissy walk"'s accompanying face doesn't perform blankness, it very clearly commits to a specific expression. Still, blank or innocent-cum-sexy, the expression is just one. The toddler may have no couture to sell and, therefore, no need to guarantee "the female viewer"'s ability to imagine herself in her outfit. What is left, through the frozen face, is perhaps what the heterosexual male "viewer" wants.

What's behind the anxiety that the fluidity of movement and the lively spontaneity of the (female) face produce?