Greer Lankton
Modeling, Doll-Making, Transfemininity, and Biopolitics in the 1980s East Village
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8133237 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Francesca Granata (0000-0002-6939-1009, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 1-23 |
| Publication date | 2026-02-13 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Fashion Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1362-704X • E-ISSN: 1751-7419 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1362704x.2026.2621496 |
| OpenAlex | W7128786937 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
The article examines the work of Greer Lankton (1958-1996), an artist associated with the 1980s East Village, whose practice spanned categories of performance, sculpture, fashion, and craft. It does so through a combination of methods: archival research, visual and material analysis and oral history. The article foregrounds the ways in which Lankton engages with fashion modeling and fashion dolls as sites of biopolitical formation of ideal femininity and bodily norms. Lankton’s work not only highlights the historical connection between fashion dolls and modeling but also lays bare how they both produce femininity, which can be differently produced to include and foreground transfemininity. The article starts by examining Lankton’s modeling career and placing her within the milieu of 1980s American fashion, thus expanding the narratives that have discussed Terry Toye as the sole trans model in 1980s New York. It interrogates the ways in which modeling is part of the biopolitical construction of an ideal femininity, which has historically foregrounded whiteness, thinness, and cisnormativity and the ways Lankton’s modeling negotiated this ideal. Finally, the article will interrogate the relation between Lankton’s modeling and doll-production. It will place her doll-making within the history of dolls and fashion dolls in particular and highlight the ways fashion dolls overlapped with the history of modeling but also how fashion dolls were a central component in creating and upholding discourses of ideal femininity and bodily norms in part by being central to the development of standardized sizes. Similarly to her modeling, Lankton’s dolls were thus negotiating and rewriting these ideals.
Biopower · East Asia · North east · Cinema and Media Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |