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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2135086
Anastasia Howe Bukowski, Junyi Lv
ABSTRACT This paper considers the posthumous celebrity of Hong Kong singer and actor Leslie Cheung, taking into account his amplified profile among fan communities following his 2003 suicide. Through a site analysis of the now-closed Hanyuan Bookstore in Shanghai, a major site of pilgrimage for his fans, our work is structured through an analysis of the bookshop space as well as a reading of the compendium of handwritten fan letters left behind and addressed to Cheung beyond the grave. To this end, we argue for the necessary queerness of Cheung’s status as celebrity. This queerness is not only the product of his sexual identity and his relationship with Daffy Tong, but due to the spatio-temporal orientation of Hanyuan. With Cheung maintaining a posthumous presence in the space, Hanyuan embodies and instantiates multiple spatio-temporal registers and offers a space for affective re-orientation in face of the everyday, creating a commensurate site of proximity between living fan and deceased star. With Hanyuan standing as a unique site of pilgrimage linking past and future and enhancing already-held parasocial relations, this paper equally considers the geographic particularities of Cheung’s posthumous celebrity status within a more complex field of contemporary Chinese-speaking popular culture.
{"title":"Reimagining Leslie Cheung through Hanyuan Bookstore: the posthumous personalities of the queer Hong Kong celebrity","authors":"Anastasia Howe Bukowski, Junyi Lv","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2135086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2135086","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper considers the posthumous celebrity of Hong Kong singer and actor Leslie Cheung, taking into account his amplified profile among fan communities following his 2003 suicide. Through a site analysis of the now-closed Hanyuan Bookstore in Shanghai, a major site of pilgrimage for his fans, our work is structured through an analysis of the bookshop space as well as a reading of the compendium of handwritten fan letters left behind and addressed to Cheung beyond the grave. To this end, we argue for the necessary queerness of Cheung’s status as celebrity. This queerness is not only the product of his sexual identity and his relationship with Daffy Tong, but due to the spatio-temporal orientation of Hanyuan. With Cheung maintaining a posthumous presence in the space, Hanyuan embodies and instantiates multiple spatio-temporal registers and offers a space for affective re-orientation in face of the everyday, creating a commensurate site of proximity between living fan and deceased star. With Hanyuan standing as a unique site of pilgrimage linking past and future and enhancing already-held parasocial relations, this paper equally considers the geographic particularities of Cheung’s posthumous celebrity status within a more complex field of contemporary Chinese-speaking popular culture.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42687423","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: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2135085
Chris Tinker
ABSTRACT Focusing on the popular music artist Johnny Hallyday in the immediate aftermath of his death in 2017, this article shows how his initial posthumous newspaper coverage in France exhibits many of the general features of celebrity news and journalism, draws a broadly positive consensus around his public persona when alive while opening up possible areas for discussion or debate and represents his memorialisation as a particular site of division.
{"title":"Posthumous celebrity, persona and memorialisation: French newspaper coverage of the popular music artist Johnny Hallyday","authors":"Chris Tinker","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2135085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2135085","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Focusing on the popular music artist Johnny Hallyday in the immediate aftermath of his death in 2017, this article shows how his initial posthumous newspaper coverage in France exhibits many of the general features of celebrity news and journalism, draws a broadly positive consensus around his public persona when alive while opening up possible areas for discussion or debate and represents his memorialisation as a particular site of division.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41949001","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: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2135082
C. Boyce, Danielle Mariann Dove
ABSTRACT This article examines the New York Times’ ‘Overlooked’ project, an online memorialising enterprise dedicated to providing ‘forgotten’ celebrities (mostly women) with retrospective obituaries. Launched on International Women’s Day 2018 with the aim of addressing the gendered and racialised inequalities inherent in obituary selection, the project attempts to rectify the NYT’s omission of notable figures from its obits section. Focusing on two case studies from the first cohort of these belated obits – Charlotte Brontë and Ida B. Wells-Barnett – this article examines how the retrospective nature of the project affects the structure, content and function of the celebrity obituary. Considering the issues at stake in remembering and reframing ‘overlooked’ lives from the past, it questions whether focusing on historically overlooked celebrities works to redress social injustice and increase diversity of representation in the present.
{"title":"‘Obituary, gender, and posthumous fame: the New York Times Overlooked project’","authors":"C. Boyce, Danielle Mariann Dove","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2135082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2135082","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the New York Times’ ‘Overlooked’ project, an online memorialising enterprise dedicated to providing ‘forgotten’ celebrities (mostly women) with retrospective obituaries. Launched on International Women’s Day 2018 with the aim of addressing the gendered and racialised inequalities inherent in obituary selection, the project attempts to rectify the NYT’s omission of notable figures from its obits section. Focusing on two case studies from the first cohort of these belated obits – Charlotte Brontë and Ida B. Wells-Barnett – this article examines how the retrospective nature of the project affects the structure, content and function of the celebrity obituary. Considering the issues at stake in remembering and reframing ‘overlooked’ lives from the past, it questions whether focusing on historically overlooked celebrities works to redress social injustice and increase diversity of representation in the present.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44887182","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: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2135087
P. Andrews
ABSTRACT Princess Diana is a secular saint whose fame spans generations and borders and has never dimmed. Fiction, fashion, relatability and a diverse and fervent fandom keep Diana current and relevant over 25 years since her death. In this article, I argue that Diana’s death and persisting celebrity give fans the freedom to own and play with her image and persona, and to relate to her in new ways informed by an ironic yet emotionally intense online milieu. I demonstrate that these new ways of relating to Diana prove that her digital life after death is not limited to her appearance and demise, but extends towards her attitude to social issues, rendering Diana fandom a political act. To do so, I combine analysis of Diana, digital fandom, dolls and the creation of AI animations. First, I analyse Diana’s portrayal in traditional and social media. Second, using a new creative methodology I call ‘social media reaction capture’, I create images using AI to test audience responses. Finally, I discuss how emerging technologies and cultures enable dead celebrities to live on while handing control of their image and personae to irreverent new audiences, arguing that ironic fandom and playfulness make Diana’s sainthood persist.
{"title":"‘Are Di would of loved it’: reanimating Princess Diana through dolls and AI","authors":"P. Andrews","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2135087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2135087","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Princess Diana is a secular saint whose fame spans generations and borders and has never dimmed. Fiction, fashion, relatability and a diverse and fervent fandom keep Diana current and relevant over 25 years since her death. In this article, I argue that Diana’s death and persisting celebrity give fans the freedom to own and play with her image and persona, and to relate to her in new ways informed by an ironic yet emotionally intense online milieu. I demonstrate that these new ways of relating to Diana prove that her digital life after death is not limited to her appearance and demise, but extends towards her attitude to social issues, rendering Diana fandom a political act. To do so, I combine analysis of Diana, digital fandom, dolls and the creation of AI animations. First, I analyse Diana’s portrayal in traditional and social media. Second, using a new creative methodology I call ‘social media reaction capture’, I create images using AI to test audience responses. Finally, I discuss how emerging technologies and cultures enable dead celebrities to live on while handing control of their image and personae to irreverent new audiences, arguing that ironic fandom and playfulness make Diana’s sainthood persist.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46608209","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 : 2022-09-08DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2022.2109310
J. McIntyre, D. Riggs, Clare Bartholomaeus
ABSTRACT Since the turn of the century, mainstream media representations of trans people have significantly increased, and trans celebrities have been a determining force in this cultural movement. Media interest in trans people’s lives has expanded to encompass trans children, and the trans child celebrity has become a relatively new recruit in the realm of stardom. Nevertheless, little scholarly work has attended to their specificities. Addressing this lacuna, this article examines the particularities and impacts of contemporary trans child celebrities, taking two celebrity case studies as its focus: North American trans celebrity Jazz Jennings, star of the long-running reality television programme I am Jazz; and Australian trans celebrity Evie Macdonald, who plays the central character in the Australian trans-themed children’s television series First Day. This article examines intersections of transnormativity, gender norms, and discourses of ‘childhood innocence’ as they manifest in media representations of Jennings and Macdonald. We argue that there is a problematic tendency for mainstream media to present these trans child celebrities in transnormative frames; nevertheless, evident in these representations is the potential for broader shifts from transnormative to transformative approaches to representing trans child celebrities, and therefore to how they shape public discourse regarding trans people’s lives.
{"title":"Jazz Jennings and Evie Macdonald: trans child celebrities, transnormativity, and childhood ‘innocence’","authors":"J. McIntyre, D. Riggs, Clare Bartholomaeus","doi":"10.1080/19392397.2022.2109310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2109310","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Since the turn of the century, mainstream media representations of trans people have significantly increased, and trans celebrities have been a determining force in this cultural movement. Media interest in trans people’s lives has expanded to encompass trans children, and the trans child celebrity has become a relatively new recruit in the realm of stardom. Nevertheless, little scholarly work has attended to their specificities. Addressing this lacuna, this article examines the particularities and impacts of contemporary trans child celebrities, taking two celebrity case studies as its focus: North American trans celebrity Jazz Jennings, star of the long-running reality television programme I am Jazz; and Australian trans celebrity Evie Macdonald, who plays the central character in the Australian trans-themed children’s television series First Day. This article examines intersections of transnormativity, gender norms, and discourses of ‘childhood innocence’ as they manifest in media representations of Jennings and Macdonald. We argue that there is a problematic tendency for mainstream media to present these trans child celebrities in transnormative frames; nevertheless, evident in these representations is the potential for broader shifts from transnormative to transformative approaches to representing trans child celebrities, and therefore to how they shape public discourse regarding trans people’s lives.","PeriodicalId":46401,"journal":{"name":"Celebrity Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44196977","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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：