Risk's Fraught Mediascape

2018

Platform Feminism: Celebrity Culture and Activism in the Digital Age tells the story of digital platforms' role in the feminist movement during the early 21 st century. Taking celebrity culture as a potent site at which to analyze the new visibilities of feminism and its responses to a new wave of conservative and deeply reactionary politics, I explore the ways in which networked publics coalesce around celebrity events and, in discussing, analyzing, and critiquing various actors within these events, engage in boundary work around what it means to "be a feminist." From responses to celebrity harassment to hashtag campaigns supporting celebrity feminism to critiques of imperfect feminist celebrities, this dissertation explores the contentious debates about feminism that arise around celebrity culture within digital spaces. To analyze these discourses, this project draws together literature from three often-disparate academic subfields: platform studies, feminist media studies, and celebrity studies. Using a case study approach, each chapter draws on intersectional feminist theory to examine a celebrity event from 2014-2016 that incited controversy across a variety of media platforms around issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. I track each event across online and legacy media outlets and engage in multiplatform critical technocultural discourse analysis to analyze how discussions amongst issue publics that coalesce around each event both reflect and further define contemporary feminist discourses in ways that are often distinctly shaped by the digital platforms on which they emerge (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández 2016, Brock 2016). In contrast to viii prior feminist media studies research that argues popular culture is largely postfeminist, I demonstrate that feminism, amplified by the famous voices that espouse it and the broad reach of the digital spaces in which it appears, has increased its discursive power so greatly that many aspects of popular culture no longer take for granted the gains of the feminist movement but rather feminism itself. Further, the iteration of feminism that is ideologically dominant espouses the importance of intersectionality, calling out the limitations of white liberal feminism and foregrounding the importance of a feminist platform that interrogates racial, sexual, and class differences. Overall, I argue that digital platforms have emerged as a major techno-cultural infrastructure for the dissemination and negotiation of the positions, goals, and actions of the contemporary feminist movement, which experienced a resurgence in the wake of the crisis of neoliberalism. While established media institutions continue to inform popular understandings of feminism, it is the recirculation, re-mediation, and conversations around print, film, and television media images and discourses on digital platforms that are driving the ongoing shifts in the feminist movement. More specifically, I contend that celebrity culture is a potent site at which the very category of "feminism" is being challenged in these digital spaces. Together, digital platforms and celebrity culture form a crucial discursive arena where postfeminist logics are unsettled, opening up the possibility of a more radical, intersectional, and activist popular feminism.

Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016

Cardozo Arts & Ent. LJ, 1991

The celebrity image is imbued with multiple meanings, mined for its symbolic resonances and, simultaneously, a floating signifier, invested with libidinal energies, social longings, and political aspirations. The celebrity is authored in a multiplicity of sites of discursive practice, generating unauthorized both for the celebrity and for her diverse authors. The law produces the means by which unauthorized identities are both engendered and endangered and existing personality rights do not justify the extent to which these rights are protected. Various examples are explored, showing how subaltern groups rewrite media imagery in subversive but politically expressive fashions. These practices function in an all-encompassing contemporary democracy that recognizes-as political practice-dialogic cultural activities of articulating the social world and authoring politically salient forms of difference.

Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016

Cultural Politics: An International Journal, 2010

Celebrities are a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary Western culture. Although the phenomenon of celebrity itself predates the twentieth century, the rise of the modern mass media-popular newspapers, cinema, radio, and television, and more recently the Internet and other digital communication technologies-has done much to promote and circulate public knowledge of celebrities during the last 100 years. The presence of multi-channel digital television, radio, and the World Wide Web in Western households at the turn of the twenty-fi rst century has not only increased the number of places in which celebrities can be seen and heard, but has also required media producers to compete with each other and with alternative leisure activities for the attention of fragmented audiences, an increasingly precious commodity. The rise of celebrity culture is inextricably linked to developments in media systems that operate within capitalist systems of commodity exchange. Most obviously, celebrities provide a well-proven route to attracting and retaining audiences, helping to offset the risks inherent in cultural production. They also play out a fantasy of the individual simultaneously performing within public and the private DR.

Celebrity Studies, 2023

Cultural Politics, 2010

This article looks at the development and utility of celebrity among high-profi le political interviewers. Offering the revised description "public inquisitor," the article presents an overview of the rise of the political interviewer as a celebrity form of the "tribune of the people" (Clayman 2002). It focuses on the UK-based journalists and broadcasters Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys, and looks at the expansion of their professional activities and their attendant construction as media personalities. It argues that the forms of celebrity presented by Paxman and Humphrys draw upon discourses of integrity and authenticity associated with practices of advocacy, and suggests that their extension beyond the formal political realm into media genres traditionally excluded from the established political domain might work to consolidate the > public inquisitor as a discursive fi gure. Therefore, while acknowledging that this depends on the effective management of individual media profi les, the article proposes a critical reappraisal of the place of the celebrity personae in political communication in order to account for the possibility of constructive modes of media performance.

Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 2005

Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016