'"Celebrity chav": Fame, femininity and social class', Bruce Bennett and Imogen Tyler (original) (raw)
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It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments we...
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Media and Class: TV, Film and Digital Culture, 2017
In this chapter, we want to interrogate the ways in which the terms of labour are deployed in the literature around ‘reality’ celebrity. It begins by outlining the structural changes within the media industries that have facilitated the rise of ordinary celebrity, and how reality television and social media in particular have generated new labour models and forms of exploitation. It then considers how, in broader cultural narratives, reality celebrity is seen as both responsible for and emblematic of the moral decline of the working classes, and in particular as having destroyed a traditional ethic of what in British English is known as ‘graft’ (or ‘hard work’ in the US) . It moves to review the academic literature, where reality celebrity labour has most often been analysed via the reality television text; we argue that in order to adequately theorise its labour relations we must also pay attention to the time and investments of workers as well as the organisational structures that pre-exist and circulate beyond the text. We then consider examples of reality celebrity work in order to suggest that this allegedly superficial and contentless activity is both a form of ‘immaterial’ labour and that it involves forms of mental and corporeal toil that connect it with older, more conventional forms of industrial labour, both through the time-investments of its workers and the tolls it takes on the working-class body. We conclude with a general plea for more sustained and situated investigation into the labour politics, practices and organisation of ordinary celebrity.
Young people's uses of celebrity: class, gender and ‘improper’ celebrity
In this article, we explore the question of how celebrity operates in young people's everyday lives, thus contributing to the urgent need to address celebrity's social function. Drawing on data from three studies in England on young people's perspectives on their educational and work futures, we show how celebrity operates as a classed and gendered discursive device within young people's identity work. We illustrate how young people draw upon class and gender distinctions that circulate within celebrity discourses (proper/improper, deserving/undeserving, talented/talentless and respectable/tacky) as they construct their own identities in relation to notions of work, aspiration and achievement. We argue that these distinctions operate as part of neoliberal demands to produce oneself as a ‘subject of value’. However, some participants produced readings that show ambivalence and even resistance to these dominant discourses. Young people's responses to celebrity are shown to relate to their own class and gender position.
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