Eccentric Feelings: Little Girls’ Pleasures on the Feminist Fashion Set

Abstract

In the face of commercial fashion photography's contribution to the shaping of the gendered public fantasy of the child, this article quarries, through a perspective shaped by queer affect theory, the kinds of figurations that in independent fashion magazines have stimulated alternative ways of thinking and feeling in relation to children. The case study, or scene, through which this analysis is conducted is ‘Juweeltje,’ a fashion editorial spread shot by feminist photographer Cornelie Tollens for Dutch magazine in 1995. In the midst of a controversial period dominated by collective media anxiety and moral panic around child pornography, and underpinned by conservative sentimentalising efforts to safeguard the Child, Dutch, an independent fashion magazine published between 1994 and 2002, grappled with such discourses by forging a visual trajectory for rethinking childhood through a queer affective prism. This article ultimately seeks to animate discussions around queer childhood and expand the current affective taxonomies associated with the child by unearthing the rich affective scenarios enacted by feminist fashion photography.

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