Figurative Mobility: Veiling, Orientalism, and Unknowing Women in US Vogue, 1917–25
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the years of the veil’s declining popularity as a fashion accessory, the New York edition of Vogue devoted sustained attention to the garment. A series of textual meditations on its significance amounted to a minor philosophical discourse on concealment, revelation, and femininity itself. This preliminary investigation of these treatments of veiling considers its positioning vis-à-vis both the white women who were the normative subjects and imagined readers of the magazine, and orientalized women who were only spectrally present in the pages of Vogue. This paper compares the ways that veiled unknowability was figured for white women and orientalized women in the pages of the magazine, and considers the veil-as-fashion-accessory (distinct from but obliquely related to the imagined “veil-as-cultural-signifier”) as a material technology of opacity that was seen to enable a strategic positioning of white femininity in relation to power. Veiling presents a significant instance of a power-saturated relational encounter, highlighting asymmetrical points of contact between two feminine imaginaries, which hinged on questions of opacity as a conceptual analogue to feminine mystery. This reading shows that invocations of the veil frequently defaulted to translucency while remaining steeped in the language of opacity, and thus obliquely established translucency as a privileged category that allowed white bourgeois women some conceptual mobility while tying orientalized women to pure opacity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".