Pub Date : 2022-12-08DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2154685
Agustin Ferrari Braun
ABSTRACT This paper critically interrogates Elon Musk’s celebrity image through an analysis of Musk’s appearance in the podcast The Joe Rogan’s Experience. It shows that the billionaire’s public persona is a constitutive part of his corporate strategy, and introduces the concept of ‘celebrity management’ to theorise how the affordances of celebrity can be mobilised to create conditions for a company to operate. Combining celebrity studies with critical political economy, Musk’s stardom is situated in the context of financialised capitalism, addressing the systemic contradictions contained (and artificially solved) in his image, while also demonstrating that it is tactically deployed to further financialised logics of his companies.
{"title":"The Elon Musk experience: celebrity management in financialised capitalism","authors":"Agustin Ferrari Braun","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2154685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2154685","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper critically interrogates Elon Musk’s celebrity image through an analysis of Musk’s appearance in the podcast The Joe Rogan’s Experience. It shows that the billionaire’s public persona is a constitutive part of his corporate strategy, and introduces the concept of ‘celebrity management’ to theorise how the affordances of celebrity can be mobilised to create conditions for a company to operate. Combining celebrity studies with critical political economy, Musk’s stardom is situated in the context of financialised capitalism, addressing the systemic contradictions contained (and artificially solved) in his image, while also demonstrating that it is tactically deployed to further financialised logics of his companies.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41384377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-07DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2154686
Jeffrey A. Brown
ABSTRACT In every era, the Hollywood sex symbol signifies, in addition to the obvious trait of sexuality, a complicated matrix of social ideals, fantasies and prejudices. Central to many of the ideological issues brought to bear through sex symbols are notions of ethnicity and nationality. Actress Gal Gadot, most famous for her role as the modern Wonder Woman, consolidates and embodies specific ideas about gender and sensuality in relation to class and nationhood. Gadot is a version of the ‘Continental Exotic’, an alluring and dangerously fetishistic woman who reinforces specifically American insecurities when faced with an uncontainable other. The Continental Exotic bridges the gap between Hollywood’s tradition of whiteness as a cultural ideal of female beauty and Otherness as the domain of exciting but treacherous sensuality.
{"title":"The Continental Exotic sex symbol – Gal Gadot","authors":"Jeffrey A. Brown","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2154686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2154686","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In every era, the Hollywood sex symbol signifies, in addition to the obvious trait of sexuality, a complicated matrix of social ideals, fantasies and prejudices. Central to many of the ideological issues brought to bear through sex symbols are notions of ethnicity and nationality. Actress Gal Gadot, most famous for her role as the modern Wonder Woman, consolidates and embodies specific ideas about gender and sensuality in relation to class and nationhood. Gadot is a version of the ‘Continental Exotic’, an alluring and dangerously fetishistic woman who reinforces specifically American insecurities when faced with an uncontainable other. The Continental Exotic bridges the gap between Hollywood’s tradition of whiteness as a cultural ideal of female beauty and Otherness as the domain of exciting but treacherous sensuality.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42241614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-30DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2149346
E. Tincknell
ABSTRACT In this essay I explore two recent ‘reparative biopics,’ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019) and Seberg (Benedict Andrews, 2019), which share features found in the resurgent cycle of 1960s-set ‘back studio’ films that have appeared in the wake of feminist criticism of mainstream Hollywood. Although positioned very differently in terms of genre (as biopic and counterfactual history respectively) and in their creative engagement with the cultural and political history of the late 1960s, both are notable for the way they deal with the real female stars at the centre of their stories, Sharon Tate and Jean Seberg. While each film seems to be seeking reparation for the past, their approach ultimately recuperates the women into a mythic discourse of the ‘radical sixties’ in which masculine agency and homosocial bonds are privileged. I argue that these films rehearse familiar biopic conventions to depict the blonde female star as tragic victim, not only of history but also of her own inherent frailty.
{"title":"Tragic blondes, Hollywood, and the “radical sixties’ myth: Seberg and once upon a time in Hollywood as revisionist and reparative biopic","authors":"E. Tincknell","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2149346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2149346","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this essay I explore two recent ‘reparative biopics,’ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019) and Seberg (Benedict Andrews, 2019), which share features found in the resurgent cycle of 1960s-set ‘back studio’ films that have appeared in the wake of feminist criticism of mainstream Hollywood. Although positioned very differently in terms of genre (as biopic and counterfactual history respectively) and in their creative engagement with the cultural and political history of the late 1960s, both are notable for the way they deal with the real female stars at the centre of their stories, Sharon Tate and Jean Seberg. While each film seems to be seeking reparation for the past, their approach ultimately recuperates the women into a mythic discourse of the ‘radical sixties’ in which masculine agency and homosocial bonds are privileged. I argue that these films rehearse familiar biopic conventions to depict the blonde female star as tragic victim, not only of history but also of her own inherent frailty.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46139198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-03DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2140565
Yektanurşin Duyan
{"title":"From sacrificing sister to star sister: the history of queer celebrity in Turkey","authors":"Yektanurşin Duyan","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2140565","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2140565","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44438132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2136008
Susanna Paasonen, Tanya Horeck
ABSTRACT This article inquires after the ethics of posthumous outing and networked forms of remembrance connected to public figures accused of, or having admitted to, sexual violence and domestic abuse. Focusing on the obituary politics surrounding the 2020 deaths of Kirk Douglas, Kobe Bryant, and Sean Connery, it explores the forms that a feminist ethics of disclosure and memorialisation might take in the #MeToo era. Contra the popular tendency of othering sex offenders as exceptional ‘monsters,’ #MeToo’s affective and discursive force lies in framing sexual violence as unextraordinary, banal, and ubiquitous. In what follows, we make a case for forms of remembrance acknowledging that a person can simultaneously be an accomplished professional, a loving parent, and a rapist, so that one aspect of one’s being and actions need not require silence over others. Reflecting on what it means to remember public figures in their totality, we flag the importance of attending to the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts that have contributed to the prominence, and subsequent remembrance of individuals. We argue that such a contextual move makes it possible to see the individual public figure within the social networks and hierarchies that have allowed, or disallowed, patterns of behaviour.
{"title":"‘Natalie Wood Day’: sexual violence and celebrity remembrance in the #MeToo Era","authors":"Susanna Paasonen, Tanya Horeck","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2136008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2136008","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article inquires after the ethics of posthumous outing and networked forms of remembrance connected to public figures accused of, or having admitted to, sexual violence and domestic abuse. Focusing on the obituary politics surrounding the 2020 deaths of Kirk Douglas, Kobe Bryant, and Sean Connery, it explores the forms that a feminist ethics of disclosure and memorialisation might take in the #MeToo era. Contra the popular tendency of othering sex offenders as exceptional ‘monsters,’ #MeToo’s affective and discursive force lies in framing sexual violence as unextraordinary, banal, and ubiquitous. In what follows, we make a case for forms of remembrance acknowledging that a person can simultaneously be an accomplished professional, a loving parent, and a rapist, so that one aspect of one’s being and actions need not require silence over others. Reflecting on what it means to remember public figures in their totality, we flag the importance of attending to the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts that have contributed to the prominence, and subsequent remembrance of individuals. We argue that such a contextual move makes it possible to see the individual public figure within the social networks and hierarchies that have allowed, or disallowed, patterns of behaviour.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47185664","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2140064
Odin O’Sullivan
ABSTRACT This article argues for the consideration of food challenge media as a mode in which the audience’s sadistic desire for the levelling of celebrities ‘through personal humiliation’ is captured and repurposed through the performative masochism of the celebrities themselves. Celebrity food challenge media, a term which I use to refer to programming such as a The Late Late Show with James Corden segment called ‘Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts’ and the YouTube show Hot Ones, exists as a space in which celebrities (who tend to typify ostentatious wealth) allow for controlled humiliation in order to diffuse legitimate anger and critique from the audience in an era of soaring inequality. This article posits that in exchange for light humiliation, such as the consumption of an ostensibly disgusting food or the pain of an incredibly spicy hot sauce, the celebrity retains the power, privilege, and income afforded to them by their celebrity status.
{"title":"‘Spill your guts or fill your guts’: Performative celebrity masochism and audience sadism in food challenge media","authors":"Odin O’Sullivan","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2140064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2140064","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article argues for the consideration of food challenge media as a mode in which the audience’s sadistic desire for the levelling of celebrities ‘through personal humiliation’ is captured and repurposed through the performative masochism of the celebrities themselves. Celebrity food challenge media, a term which I use to refer to programming such as a The Late Late Show with James Corden segment called ‘Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts’ and the YouTube show Hot Ones, exists as a space in which celebrities (who tend to typify ostentatious wealth) allow for controlled humiliation in order to diffuse legitimate anger and critique from the audience in an era of soaring inequality. This article posits that in exchange for light humiliation, such as the consumption of an ostensibly disgusting food or the pain of an incredibly spicy hot sauce, the celebrity retains the power, privilege, and income afforded to them by their celebrity status.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42367159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2135080
C. Boyce, D. Dove
On 16 August 2021, the rapper, singer, and songwriter Anderson .Paak shared an image of his latest tattoo on Instagram. The tattoo, situated on his forearm and consisting of nine lines of text printed in block capitals, forbids the release of any posthumous music. ‘Those were just demos and never intended to be heard by the public’ the inscription reads. Functioning as an embodied and indelible addition to any potential last will and testament, .Paak’s tattoo both underscores his personal preferences and calls into question the ethical motives attached to the production and dissemination of posthumous albums. Such questions are justified. At the time in which .Paak posted the image, debates had been taking place within the music industry surrounding the legacy of the American R&B singer Aaliyah (1979–2001), whose posthumous album Unstoppable (2022) was recently released by her estate prompting mixed responses from fans and cultural commentators. Pop Smoke, Juice Wrld, and Mac Miller are among other more recently deceased celebrities whose deaths have likewise signalled new and profitable phases in their respective music careers. For Ruth Penfold-Mounce, celebrity careers are often subject to startling posthumous extensions and/or resurrections. ‘Death’, she argues, ‘opens up new avenues through which posthumous careers can thrive, even for people whose celebrity status is not rooted in film, television or music’ (2018, p. 29). The evidence for these lucrative extended careers can be found in the Forbes’ ‘Top Earning Dead Celebrities’ list (p. 22), but beyond the commercial successes of such posthumous ventures, Penfold-Mounce also claims that ongoing careers enable the celebrity dead ‘to wield agency to the extent that they can speak and keep working after death’ (p. 36). For fans of .Paak, however, the tattoo appears to embody only the inherently unethical, capitalistic, and financially exploitative nature of the kinds of posthumous work it seeks to reject. On Twitter, for instance, one poster who shared the image commented ‘You know the music industry is f*cked up when artists tattoo these type [sic] of things’ (@filipneuff, 17 August 2021). Other tweets similarly expressed concern for .Paak, with several grimly predicting that record labels, alert to the pecuniary advantages of releasing posthumous material, would no doubt forge ahead with the release of the artist’s unfinished demos, perhaps even using the image of his tattoo as the artwork for the album cover.
{"title":"Death and celebrity: introduction","authors":"C. Boyce, D. Dove","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2135080","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2135080","url":null,"abstract":"On 16 August 2021, the rapper, singer, and songwriter Anderson .Paak shared an image of his latest tattoo on Instagram. The tattoo, situated on his forearm and consisting of nine lines of text printed in block capitals, forbids the release of any posthumous music. ‘Those were just demos and never intended to be heard by the public’ the inscription reads. Functioning as an embodied and indelible addition to any potential last will and testament, .Paak’s tattoo both underscores his personal preferences and calls into question the ethical motives attached to the production and dissemination of posthumous albums. Such questions are justified. At the time in which .Paak posted the image, debates had been taking place within the music industry surrounding the legacy of the American R&B singer Aaliyah (1979–2001), whose posthumous album Unstoppable (2022) was recently released by her estate prompting mixed responses from fans and cultural commentators. Pop Smoke, Juice Wrld, and Mac Miller are among other more recently deceased celebrities whose deaths have likewise signalled new and profitable phases in their respective music careers. For Ruth Penfold-Mounce, celebrity careers are often subject to startling posthumous extensions and/or resurrections. ‘Death’, she argues, ‘opens up new avenues through which posthumous careers can thrive, even for people whose celebrity status is not rooted in film, television or music’ (2018, p. 29). The evidence for these lucrative extended careers can be found in the Forbes’ ‘Top Earning Dead Celebrities’ list (p. 22), but beyond the commercial successes of such posthumous ventures, Penfold-Mounce also claims that ongoing careers enable the celebrity dead ‘to wield agency to the extent that they can speak and keep working after death’ (p. 36). For fans of .Paak, however, the tattoo appears to embody only the inherently unethical, capitalistic, and financially exploitative nature of the kinds of posthumous work it seeks to reject. On Twitter, for instance, one poster who shared the image commented ‘You know the music industry is f*cked up when artists tattoo these type [sic] of things’ (@filipneuff, 17 August 2021). Other tweets similarly expressed concern for .Paak, with several grimly predicting that record labels, alert to the pecuniary advantages of releasing posthumous material, would no doubt forge ahead with the release of the artist’s unfinished demos, perhaps even using the image of his tattoo as the artwork for the album cover.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"485 - 489"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46363575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2135083
H. Fletcher
ABSTRACT This article uses Gothic studies to examine the preoccupation with death in Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych. Drawing on the Gothic convention of the decaying portrait, I argue that Marilyn Diptych communicates a wider tension between immortality and death at the heart of American celebrity culture in the 1960s. The decaying portrait is a traditional motif within the Gothic novel, but this article explores how the portrait itself embodies Gothic qualities of decay. While Warhol’s Electric Chair has been previously analysed within a Gothic framework, I uncover the Gothicness of the celebrity portrait and situate Marilyn Diptych in the context of Marilyn Monroe’s death and the wider culture of mediatised disaster in the 1960s. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how Marilyn Diptych epitomises the landscape of celebrity in the 1960s. As a period of technological modernity dominated by television, the 1960s is a media-saturated image culture that enables the creation and preservation of new kinds of celebrities. However, the period is also tainted by relentless global and domestic crises, within which high-profile celebrity deaths feature strongly. This overwhelming culture of death problematises media immortality by exposing celebrities as fragile Gothic bodies prone to decay.
{"title":"The death of the star: celebrity decay and the Gothic portrait in Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych","authors":"H. Fletcher","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2135083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2135083","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article uses Gothic studies to examine the preoccupation with death in Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych. Drawing on the Gothic convention of the decaying portrait, I argue that Marilyn Diptych communicates a wider tension between immortality and death at the heart of American celebrity culture in the 1960s. The decaying portrait is a traditional motif within the Gothic novel, but this article explores how the portrait itself embodies Gothic qualities of decay. While Warhol’s Electric Chair has been previously analysed within a Gothic framework, I uncover the Gothicness of the celebrity portrait and situate Marilyn Diptych in the context of Marilyn Monroe’s death and the wider culture of mediatised disaster in the 1960s. Ultimately, this article demonstrates how Marilyn Diptych epitomises the landscape of celebrity in the 1960s. As a period of technological modernity dominated by television, the 1960s is a media-saturated image culture that enables the creation and preservation of new kinds of celebrities. However, the period is also tainted by relentless global and domestic crises, within which high-profile celebrity deaths feature strongly. This overwhelming culture of death problematises media immortality by exposing celebrities as fragile Gothic bodies prone to decay.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"524 - 537"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46734535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2135084
B. Nygaard
ABSTRACT The death of Elvis Presley in August 1977 unveiled a field of contested interpretative and emotional positions regarding his public persona and its wider cultural implications. Closely studying the particular repercussions of such contestations in Denmark, using the totality of available source material, this article analyses a historically specific complex of temporal sediments and contested cultural norms and emotional expressions in connection with international celebrities and their fans and detractors. In more general terms, this study can contribute to the ongoing endeavours to historicise approaches to celebrities and the webs of significance surrounding their deaths.
{"title":"Senses of an ending: Danish reactions to the death of Elvis Presley in 1977","authors":"B. Nygaard","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2135084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2135084","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The death of Elvis Presley in August 1977 unveiled a field of contested interpretative and emotional positions regarding his public persona and its wider cultural implications. Closely studying the particular repercussions of such contestations in Denmark, using the totality of available source material, this article analyses a historically specific complex of temporal sediments and contested cultural norms and emotional expressions in connection with international celebrities and their fans and detractors. In more general terms, this study can contribute to the ongoing endeavours to historicise approaches to celebrities and the webs of significance surrounding their deaths.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"538 - 556"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44172446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2135081
Samantha Pinto
ABSTRACT This article analyses two ‘famous’ dissections that go into the Black material interior of Victorian era celebrity: Sarah Baartman’s dissection by French scientist George Cuvier as it is rehearsed by press of the day and artists, biographers and historians in its aftermath and Mary Seacole’s description of her autopsy of a New Grenadian infant, a victim of cholera, in her 1857 Crimean war memoir. Both are infamous events in the spectacle of Black women’s celebrity bodies in the nineteenth century, elucidating how this celebrity is undergirded by cultures of death and, more acutely, dissection that haunt the radical rise in the classificatory scientific ‘order’ of the day. Within a historic culture of public autopsies and the pilfering of Black and poor cadavers from cemeteries to fuel medical education, this essay asks where do these famous dissections and their afterlives fit into the nineteenth-century narratives of race, science and sexuality? What can the fixation on the inside of the body tell us about the intersection of the nineteenth-century cultures of death, racial classification and celebrity? I argue that the racialised, sexualised cadaver and the act of autopsy are objects and authors of nineteenth-century Black women’s celebrity as surely as live, visual and print culture representations of the time.
{"title":"Spectacular remains: Black celebrity, death and the aesthetics of autopsy","authors":"Samantha Pinto","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2135081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2135081","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyses two ‘famous’ dissections that go into the Black material interior of Victorian era celebrity: Sarah Baartman’s dissection by French scientist George Cuvier as it is rehearsed by press of the day and artists, biographers and historians in its aftermath and Mary Seacole’s description of her autopsy of a New Grenadian infant, a victim of cholera, in her 1857 Crimean war memoir. Both are infamous events in the spectacle of Black women’s celebrity bodies in the nineteenth century, elucidating how this celebrity is undergirded by cultures of death and, more acutely, dissection that haunt the radical rise in the classificatory scientific ‘order’ of the day. Within a historic culture of public autopsies and the pilfering of Black and poor cadavers from cemeteries to fuel medical education, this essay asks where do these famous dissections and their afterlives fit into the nineteenth-century narratives of race, science and sexuality? What can the fixation on the inside of the body tell us about the intersection of the nineteenth-century cultures of death, racial classification and celebrity? I argue that the racialised, sexualised cadaver and the act of autopsy are objects and authors of nineteenth-century Black women’s celebrity as surely as live, visual and print culture representations of the time.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":"13 1","pages":"490 - 506"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46973493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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