Elizabeth Wissinger
Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies
Borough of Manhattan Community College and the Graduate School and University Center
City University of New York
Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies
Borough of Manhattan Community College and the Graduate School and University Center
City University of New York
Elizabeth Wissinger is a Professor of Sociology and Liberal Studies at City University of New York, Graduate Center, and BMCC, where she teaches Liberal Studies, Fashion Studies, and Sociology. Her research focuses on technology, fashion, and embodiment. She has lectured on topics related to gender and race, media, bodies, and work in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Europe. Her current work takes up the issue of how wearable technology genders bodies, research through which she is affiliated with the think/do tank Data & Society.
Wissinger is the author of This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour (New York University Press, 2015), in which she explores what she terms "glamour labor" e.g. the work to make one’s physical presence resemble one’s highly filtered and edited presence online. From a case study of fashion models, Wissinger shows how glamour labor expands beyond the confines of high fashion and becomes a work/life requirement for everyone working in developed countries in the digital age. This argument has been featured in discussions in The Guardian, The Conversation, Cyborgology, Interface, Culture Digitally, PETRIe Inventory, and The Globe and Mail. Currently, Wissinger is working on a monograph exploring the cultural clash between the worlds of fashion and technology, exposed when wearable technology genders bodies.
Wissinger is also the co-author of the edited volume, Fashioning Models: Image, Text, and Industry (Berg, 2012) with Joanne Entwistle, author of The Fashioned Body. Wissinger has also published articles on cultural, aesthetic, and affective labor, celebrity culture, and wearable technology. Her research has earned several grants and awards, including Mellon Fellowships in both the Humanities and Science Studies, and her work appears in fashion, sociology, business, and political journals in both the US and Europe.