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Sinha_Diss_29Jan2026
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Dissertation
THE GLAMOROUS WORKING BODY: BEING A FASHION MODEL IN INDIA
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
2025
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the labor of female fashion models in India through a combination of ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches, with particular attention to gendered precarity, health and bodily management (specifically, menstruation), and complicit participation. It traces the emergence of India’s contemporary fashion modeling economy through post-liberalization discourses of modernity and femininity, examining how vertices of aesthetic labor become institutionalized under the guise of professionalism and aspiration. It foregrounds the health risks, infrastructural gaps, and systemic disregard for worker wellbeing that are often concealed by the industry’s glamorous exterior. By showing how models navigate a highly competitive and precarious industry across different stages of their professional lives, this research intervenes in the field by arguing that their sustained and often willing participation reflects a form of strategic complicity which complicates facile understandings of industry hierarchy, professional and interpersonal dynamics, and conventional modalities of labor exploitation. Drawing from my dual position as a former fashion model and a current ethnographer, this study interrogates the embodied politics of endurance, complicity, and agency.
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Details
- Title
- THE GLAMOROUS WORKING BODY: BEING A FASHION MODEL IN INDIA
- Creators
- Arpita Sinha
- Contributors
- Clare CW Wilkinson (Advisor)Andrew AD Duff (Committee Member)Nishant NS Shahani (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Department of Anthropology
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 245
- Identifiers
- 99901356784201842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation