Chapter 3 Helen Gurley Brown: Prototypical Celebrity Feminism, Cultural Intermediaries, and Agency (original) (raw)

Postfeminism™: celebrity feminism, branding and the performance of activist capital

Feminist Media Studies, 2021

This article contributes to postfeminist media debates by interrogating an emerging configuration of celebrity feminism; one in which authenticity, entrepreneurial subjectivities and intersectionality mark the uneasy contours of a new political subject. Coining the term “activist capital”, this paper moves beyond the impasse of celebrity feminism debates (where branding and commerce = bad, grassroots organising = good) to establish the uneven conditions through which celebrity feminist activisms are accepted, even deferred to, in media and activist accounts. Drawing on an illustrative case study of the high-profile Amber Rose SlutWalk (2015–2018), a Los Angeles-based monetised and branded edition of an existing political movement against sexual violence, this paper employs a discourse analytical approach to argue that celebrity and activist cultures condition each other. Aided by digital media, a celebrity activism nexus is now emergent that is mediated by practices of individualised consumer capitalism and oriented by explicit social justice frameworks, troubling dominant narratives of depoliticised postfeminist sensibilities. These ambivalences, where commodification no longer holds the power of disavowal it once did, and where grassroots activism and celebrity culture collide, condition the emergence of new activist arrangements in this late capitalist moment.

'Game Changers': Our Pop Culture Icons in Feminism

Emma Watson is often regarded as a 'game-changer' in modern feminism, and an icon for the movement within our pop-culture. However, upon further inspection, we learn that her strides in the realms of feminism have been short-sighted. In this paper, I take a look at her HeForShe campaign. I also take a close look at other icons in modern feminsim, including Beyoncé, Roxanne Gay, and bell hooks.

Who Run the World? Feminism and Commodification in Beyoncé's Star Text

Grounded in the field of celebrity studies and analyzed through an intersectional lens, this paper untangles the seemingly incongruent discursive knot that constitutes Beyoncé’s feminist identity. I claim that the divergent discourses circulating through her star text tell us something about the state of feminism today. As such, she does not merely display the tension within her own star text, but, as celebrity feminists perforce do, also the tension within the (post-)feminist debate in American society.

'"Celebrity chav": Fame, femininity and social class', Bruce Bennett and Imogen Tyler

European journal of cultural studies, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 375-393, 2010

There is nothing new about celebrity culture. It is an intrinsic feature of a world structured by digital and mechanical reproduction. However, what has been visible over the last few years in Britain is a modulation of representations of celebrity figures in entertainment and news media through reality TV series, newspapers and gossip magazines. In a somewhat cynical turn, certain celebrities have been depicted increasingly as exploitative, aspirational parvenus whose public performances we should respond to not with desire, admiration or benign interest, but rather with a pleasurable blend of contempt, envy, scepticism and prurience. This shift of representational emphasis involves the oppressive and punitive foregrounding of class, whereby selected celebrities are understood to be ineluctably anchored to an essential class identity regardless of the extent to which their social and financial circumstances have been transformed as a result of their conspicuousness or notoriety.