Celebrity. Andrea McDonnell
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to issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Stories about celebrities have, since the nineteenth century, shaped notions of admirable, even enviable identities and warned us about those to be avoided. Today, in the United States and Britain, celebrity narratives continue to emphasize stars who are white, heterosexual, and female, despite the fact that fans identify across lines of gender, race, and sexuality. In addition, young women continue to be the main subject of celebrity gossip, and its target audience.
Nonetheless, there are major pleasures for female consumers of celebrity gossip. As Andrea McDonnell has argued in Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines, here “women take center stage”—especially women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, with the magazines investigating and celebrating “women’s triumphs and challenges, all narrated from a female point of view.”81 Unlike the mostly male political public sphere, where government policies and current events are debated, this female-centered intimate public sphere foregrounds what is marginalized as unimportant elsewhere in the news: marriage, relationships, childbirth, motherhood, divorce.82 Celebrity culture offers an alternative realm to the mostly male-dominated news in the mainstream press. Women and girls are absolutely central to this world—they matter symbolically and economically. Women—which ones are to be admired and which ones loathed—are the drivers of celebrity journalism. They are the ones who propel the magazines off the racks. Corporate profits rest on them. Take the Kardashians: they challenge the patriarchal family; it’s the mother and the sisters who run the show and keep the dollars flowing in. Unlike schoolteachers, daycare workers, or secretaries, these women are not paid less than they’re worth, but more than they’re worth. And unlike in the precincts of Congress, families and children are of utmost importance. Women in this realm work long hours and are still able to have families because they have the support to do so.83
For young women in the early twenty-first century who have been told that they have to be supergirls, celebrity gossip magazines and sites serve as important primers. How to be sexy but not overtly sexual? How to have a career and a family? How to have success and male approval? In an age of collapsed courtship rules and “hooking up,” how to find a guy and have a long-term relationship? These are the questions about combining femininity and success that, week in and week out, celebrity gossip dramatizes. And who else to provide the right answers than female stars who seem to have cracked the code?84
But these pleasures come at a price. Because from the blogs and vlogs (video logs) to fashion and gossip magazines, the primary focus of these is not the famous female’s latest professional accomplishment, but rather her personal life, her appearance, emotions, and relationships: her life events. The central beat of celebrity journalism is emotion: love, hate, heartbreak, despair, joy. As McDonnell found in her analysis of celebrity magazines, the top five cover story topics, in order, were relationship troubles or breakups; pregnancy; stories about celebrities’ weight, bodies, or plastic surgery; weddings or engagements; and dating and romances.85
Celebrity magazines and their TV and online counterparts serve as persistent primers on what constitutes successful femininity, and what does not. Female celebrities are under relentless, withering, microscopic scrutiny. And their faces and bodies, as opposed to their talents, their smarts, and their inner lives, are where their true “selves” are located. Su Holmes and Diane Negra argue that when it comes to celebrity scandals, the media treat women differently and more critically than they do men. They see a persistent framework in which female celebrities are somehow poised between emotional and relational chaos and happiness, serenity, and control over their lives. Will this relationship, this marriage, this friendship work out this time or lead yet again to betrayal and heartbreak? “[We] are invited to play a ‘waiting game’ to see when their hard-won achievements will collapse under the simultaneous weight of relationships, family and career.”86 In this way, they personify most women’s struggles for work-life balance, especially when it comes to juggling having a job with raising a family. More to the point, when female celebrities fail, it legitimates the notion that, for women, achieving such a balance is in fact not possible. We see this push and pull activated in three main narratives that swirl around famous women: the quest for physical perfection, the adherence to norms of decorum and social acceptability, and the maintenance of idealized domesticity in the form of a heterosexual marriage plot and the attainment of selfless motherhood. If they don’t conform to—and bolster—the standard conventions of successful femininity, they will pay. They are the “train wrecks,” out-of-control women who fail to uphold, and even rebel against, traditional, even retrograde, gender norms.
As public figures, the bodies of famous women are constantly on display, extolled as the height of physical beauty and success. “Hot bodies” are a form of cultural capital that allow famous women to secure movie roles, magazine covers, and the attention and adoration of the public. Bodies that do not conform are singled out for ridicule. Women are supposed to be extremely thin and fit. With a few exceptions, being overweight is cause for derision. One magazine told Kate Moss (!) to “tone up her midsection,” while the National Enquirer sniped that “Rosanna Arquette has a beach ball for a belly,” and that “Queen Latifah doesn’t deprive herself—and it shows!” Reese Witherspoon, at the beach with her kids, was pictured with a yellow circle drawn around her stomach and a caption that tells her “it’s time to hit the gym!”
Being too thin is also bad, but a cause for shock and concern instead of ridicule. “Shocking Trend: Stars Flaunt Their Stick Figures” blares In Touch, with yellow circles drawn over the offending parts like “twig shoulders,” “bony back,” and protruding “ribs.” “Stars used to show off their cleavage,” complained the magazine. “Now they show off collarbones.”87 “SKINNY S.O.S!” brays the cover of the Star; “Star’s Scary New Affliction—Foodophobia and It’s Contagious!” “BARES BONES!,” the magazine screams, pointing out celebs whose “collarbones are more concave” and “stomach skin hangs looser.”88
Famous women also come under scrutiny for their actions, and no social taboo is too minor for ridicule or condemnation. Nothing is more important than self-regulation and serious self-monitoring—of your figure, face, hair, outfits, behavior, sexuality, and maternal practices. You also need to manage your career well, but that seems secondary to everything else. Ideal women here are both independent—they have their own professions, money, and sources of success—and yet completely reliant on the love and approval of men. And they get that approval because their economic independence is tempered by their hyperfemininity.89 So you better be a good judge of character, in potential boyfriends or husbands, and in friends, who are also crucial to success and happiness. If you chose wrong, you could end up with one of those numerous celebrity husbands who is discovered to be screwing your nanny on the side.
Proper consumption is of the utmost importance. Celebrity gossip magazines glorify consumerism and have become a showcase for various products, nearly all of them pitched to women. Product placement is ubiquitous and we learn which lipstick, workout clothes, low calorie snacks, nail polish, handbags, headphones, lamps, basinets, vacation resorts, and the like various celebrities swear by. Stars who know exactly which outfit to wear, which restaurant to patronize, and which smoothie to sip gain cultural capital and enhance their influence as marketers. Gossip narratives often revolve around products, presented as a solution to every possible woe. Social media stars, minor and A-list alike, make a living peddling everything from gadgets to sneakers to cosmetics. By purchasing what they love and recommend, you can be a little like them too. Ad pages seek to mimic such features, with banner headlines like “Hollywood Summer Trends” or “Fun in the Sun Celebrity Favorites” introducing readers to perfume, “high fashion” backpacks, and “interactive jewelry.”90
Some of these stories are geared at teaching middle-class people how to consume like the stars, but at a fraction of the cost, thus gaining access to the good life. Others, like Life & Style’s “Money I$ No Object,” present the good life as totally inaccessible, showing “diva” Mariah Carey sporting $1,500 Tom Ford sandals, a $5,600 minidress, and a thirty-five-carat diamond engagement ring estimated at $10 million.91 While these stories revel in conspicuous consumption and make hierarchies based on wealth seem perfectly legitimate, even exciting and deeply enviable, they also stoke our resentments about income inequality. Especially galling are the features about how much celebrities spend on clothes and jewelry