On Shimmers

Where Performance and Glamour Meet

Abstract

This writing explores glamour as a phenomenon of performance, arguing that through performance glamour becomes an epistemological impulse that creates both knowledge and remains of femininities, among other forms of identity and expression. Beginning with thorough definitions that integrate glamour and performance, this writing explores new theoretical and philosophical models that incorporate the realms of experience and eroticism in which an analysis of glamour may be approached, highlighting some of the polemics and dangers along the way. Departing from the traditional material cultural analysis of glamour that relegates it largely to patterns of consumption in the 20th century or to the Hollywoodian sphere of influence, this paper extends the temporality and influence of glamour indefinitely, taking glamour seriously an embodied practice deeply associated with the diverse forms and expressions of the feminine using Amanda Gorman’s Esteé Lauder campaign image as a closing example. Above all, this research takes glamour seriously, “calling foul on the strange anxieties about artifice, illusion, and performance, and the even more suspiciously gendered dismissal of glamour as cultural ‘fluff’ given that it is an embodied practice deeply associated with the feminine.”