Hannah Hamad

Introduction: feminism and contemporary celebrity culture

In November 2014 TIME magazine nominated ‘feminist’ in its annual ‘word banishment poll’ to identify and denounce the most overused words, phrases, diminutives and acronyms of the year; thereby pla...

‘Hollywood's hot dads’: tabloid, reality and scandal discourses of celebrity post-feminist fatherhood

This article offers post-feminism as a critical framework for understanding the phenomenon of celebrity fatherhood as it has been widely articulated through the channels of tabloid media, celebrity reality TV and the discourse of scandal. A heavily paternalised presence within the tabloid media has become increasingly central to the sustainability of a coherent public identity for innumerable male celebrities in contemporary media culture, including film and cable television celebrities, among them Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Patrick Dempsey, Jude Law, Snoop Dogg and Hulk Hogan. The post-feminist paternalisation of mediated masculinity in celebrity culture has increasingly permeated a growing arena of representational outlets, and while cinematic stardom remains one of the most visible popular cultural manifestations of this phenomenon, the popular cultural breadth and scope of these representations and personifications have expanded and converged exponentially alongside wider trends in the distribution and consumption of media texts, so that celebrity post-feminist fatherhood is widely discursively circulated in the realms of reality tv, celebrity gossip magazines and online celebrity forums and blogs. The examples of celebrity post-feminist fatherhood under the analytical purview of this paper are indicative of a major trend within the tabloid culture of the contemporary media, which increasingly function as a space for popular cultural ephemera to play out currently pertinent and discursively apposite gender concerns. For male celebrities, it has become increasingly necessary to showcase their heteronormativity through tabloid profiles that characterise their fatherhood as ‘sexy’, in order to meet the requirements of hegemonic masculinity in post-feminism, and for individuals whose celebrity is flagging to recuperate their status through revitalising and currently culturally apposite means of mediating their paternity.

I'm Not Past My Sell By Date Yet!:Sarah Jane's Adventures in Postfeminist Rejuvenation and the Later-Life Celebrity of Elisabeth Sladen

At apparent odds both with what has been highlighted as ‘the cultural invisibility of the aged’ (Wearing, 2007: 279) and with Matt Hills’ observation that ‘age and aging don’t seem to play well’ in the BBC’s rebooted iteration of iconic science fiction series Doctor Who (Hills in Jenkins, 2009), British television actor Elisabeth Sladen became one of the biggest stars of UK children’s television in her 60s. Reprising the iconic role of the Doctor’s investigative journalist companion Sarah Jane Smith that she first played in 1973, and in which she was once regularly seen by audiences numbering in excess of 11 million (Chapman, 2006: 99), Sladen experienced a quite remarkable career renaissance and resurgence of her celebrity during her seventh decade. This was such that at the time of her death in 2011, she had the distinction to be playing the longest running (albeit not continuously) character performed by the same actor on British television outside of soap opera (Mulkern, 2011: 143). Frequently during its initial broadcast run from 2007 until 2011, when the fifth and final series was unavoidably curtailed due to Sladen’s untimely and unexpected death from cancer, the Doctor Who spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures (hereafter, SJA), in which she starred in the title role as an alien-fighting journalist assisted by a small group of local teens, was the highest rated show on its host channel, CBBC.1 This was routinely the case for the episodes that comprised the first two series in 2007 and 2008, when each one topped the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board’s lists of the highest rated shows for that channel in its respective week of broadcast (BARB, 2015). Furthermore, after an apparent dip in its CBBC primacy during the third series,2 it continued to be the case for the entire run of the fourth series, and the partially completed (and posthumously broadcast) fifth series.

Contemporary medical television and crisis in the NHS

This article maps the terrain of contemporary UK medical television (TV), paying particular attention to Call the Midwife as its centrepiece, and situating it in contextual relation to the current crisis in the National Health Service. It provides a historical overview of UK and US medical TV, illustrating how medical TV today has been shaped by noteworthy antecedents. It argues that crisis rhetoric surrounding healthcare leading up to the passing of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 has been accompanied by a renaissance in medical TV; and that issues, strands and clusters have emerged in forms, registers and modes with noticeable regularity, especially around the value of affective labour, the cultural politics of nostalgia and the neo-liberalization of healthcare.

Intergenerational feminism and media: a roundtable

This is the edited text of a roundtable held at City University London, UK in November 2014, organised by Alison Winch and Jo Littler. The event aimed to pay attention to the ways in which age and generation shape mediated conversation about feminist politics: to problematise the dominant media representations of intergenerational “cat fights,” or feminist bickering, while simultaneously interrogating the ways in which mediated conflicts and connections shape the potential to work together to enact feminist social change. It therefore aimed to explore a number of different questions in relation to this issue, including: what kind of shared conversations do women have across age groups, and how do these circulate in media cultures? How can intergenerational alliances be built while still remaining sensitive to differences of experience? How are feminist connections being formed by digital media, technology, and platforms? How is feminist conflict mediated, and how might it operate productively?

‘Don't let him take Britain back to the 1980s’: Ashes to Ashes as postfeminist recession television

This article interrogates postfeminism and recessionary discourse in the time-travel police series Ashes to Ashes (BBC, 2008–2010). Viewing the series as an early example of ‘recession television’, it explores how the resident gender discourse of postfeminism established in the pre-recession first series, and attendant cultural priorities, shifted over time in tandem with the onset of recession, following the 2008 global financial crisis, and in line with tendencies of emergent recessionary media culture. In early episodes it over-determines the characterization of female detective protagonist Alex Drake as a postfeminist subject, drawing her to well-worn cultural scripts of femininity. Later this gives way to the discursive centralization of her boss, Gene Hunt, already an iconic figurehead of recidivist masculinity from the earlier Life on Mars (BBC, 2006–2007), one of several gendered responses to the drastically changed economic environment in which the series was produced and received.

The One with the Feminist Critique: Revisiting Millennial Postfeminism with Friends:

In the aftermath of its initial broadcast run, iconic millennial sitcom Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) generated some quality scholarship interrogating its politics of gender. But as a site of analysis, it remains a curious, almost structuring absence from the central canon of the first wave of feminist criticism of postfeminist culture. This absence is curious not only considering the place of Friends at the forefront of millennial popular culture but also in light of its long-term syndication in countries across the world since that time. And it is structuring in the sense that Friends was the stage on which many of the familiar tropes of postfeminism interrogated across the body of work on it appear in retrospect to have been tried and tested. This article aims to contribute toward redressing this absence through interrogation and contextualization of the series’ negotiation of a range of structuring tropes of postfeminist media discourse, and it argues for Friends as an unacknowledged ur-text of millennial postfeminism.

Introduction: ‘new’ celebrity feminisms, media users’ responses to celebrity coming out narratives and the photographic celebrity memoir

In exploring the recent phenomenon of what she refers to as ‘the new celebrity feminism’ in relation to the three symptomatic and topical cultural figures of Victoria Beckham, Beyoncé Knowles and Ivanka Trump, Susan Hopkins continues the conversation about this topic that was started in 6 (1) of this journal by Hamad and Taylor (2015, pp. 127–127) and their contributors (Cobb 2015, Keller and Ringrose 2015, Weidhase 2015) in February 2015. In her related Forum contribution Hopkins here interrogates the discursive intersection of fashion, feminism and neoliberalism as it pertains to each of the aforementioned celebrities in her purview. As Hopkins states herein, this phenomenon ‘raises some interesting questions about the limits of celebrity feminism in neoliberal times.’ Next, Joseph Brennan continues important work published in this journal earlier this year by Michael Lovelock (2017) exploring the online mediation of celebrity coming out narratives. Here, Brennan conducts a qualitative content analysis of a number of comment threads in online media discussion spaces, with a view to analysing and discussing some of the discourses that were circulating among gay male users of these spaces in response to US television actor Colton Haynes’ coming out in public via celebrity oriented media and social media in May of 2016. Hannah Yelin’s contribution to this Forum adds to the increasing body of academic work in celebrity studies that holds up twenty-first century pop star and cultural icon Lady Gaga as an object of critical scrutiny. Engaging with related work published elsewhere in this journal by Lucy Bennett (2014), Yelin’s intervention is in interrogating the cultural politics and meanings of this figure as she is viewed through the lens of what the author refers to as ‘autobiographical self-representation’ in the form of the (photographic in this case) celebrity memoir. Yelin argues that notwithstanding what she calls the ‘confrontational stance’ that heretofore characterised Gaga’s inhabitation of her celebrity persona, the memoir ultimately serves to resituate her within an existing social order with its attendant gendered power relations.

Introduction: farming fame, memorialising Amy Winehouse, and recuperating Salman Khan

In this issue of the Forum, Mike Goodman and Michelle Phillipov make an intriguing intervention in the field by offering up the figure of the celebrity farmer as an underexplored and increasingly culturally noteworthy iteration of contemporary celebrity. In their contribution ‘The Celebrification of Farmers: Celebrity and the New Politics of Farming’ they situate such figures alongside similarly food-related figures such as the celebrity chef – explored and discussed elsewhere in this journal by David Bell and Joanne Hollows (2011) and Nemeschansky et al. (2017) – the celebrity winemaker, and the celebrity food writer, pointing to the US journalism academic and author of the wellknown crossover non-fiction volume The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan (2006) as an emblematic example. Writing in 2009, Guardian celebrity culture columnist Marina Hyde (2009, p. 212) wrote presciently, in response to a particularly vicious letter to readers by Closer magazine editor Lisa Burrow, that ‘If Amy Winehouse dies, Lisa will fart out some leaden prose about how no-one could help her, even though her magazine did its best by paying the photographers who hound Amy every minute of her miserable life’. Following the ill-fated Winehouse’s subsequent death in 2011, celebrity gossip media and mainstream media more broadly engaged in precisely this kind of conveniently selective retrospection of Winehouse’s life, career, and the decline in her health. Hannah Andrews hence interrogates celebrity culture’s practices and politics of post-mortem memorialisation by analysing Asif Kapadia’s 2015 biographical documentary Amy in her contribution ‘From Unwilling Celebrity to Authored Icon: Reading Amy’. She thus makes a welcome addition to conversations about the memorialisation of deceased celebrities staged elsewhere in the journal by, for example, Richard Howells (2011) and Gil-Egui et al. (2016). Upon its release in July 2016, the Bollywood film Sultan (Ali Abbas Zafar), which at that time was the latest vehicle for Bollywood megastar Salman Khan, broke a number of records, becoming, to cite just one example, the film with the highest numbers of advance bookings in India ever, as well as one of the top-10 highest netting Bollywood films of all time (Tartaglione 2016). There are a number of reasons why the global boxoffice success of this film can be considered extraordinary and fascinating, one of which is that it is indicative of the enduring appeal of this star, notwithstanding, as discussed by Amber Shields in her contribution to this Forum ‘Salman Khan: Counteracting

Introduction: transgender celebrity, celebrity political endorsements, and the practice of celebrity public relations

The publication of the July issue of Vanity Fair magazine on 1 June 2015 announced the first sanctioned mainstream media appearance of post-transition Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic decathlete and Keeping Up with the Kardashians (E!, 2007–) reality TV celebrity, heretofore known as Bruce, who made public her identity as a transgender woman in a 20/20 (ABC, 1978–) interview with US television journalist Diane Sawyer in April that year. This cover story, and the media buzz it generated, arguably constituted the celebrity flashpoint of 2015. Its cover image, taken by A-list celebrity photographer Annie Leibowitz, featured Jenner sitting crossed legged on a stool with her hands behind her back, dressed in a strapless white corset, and was accompanied by the strapline ‘Call me Caitlyn’, officially marking the endpoint of her public gender transition (Bissinger 2015). This preceded the inaugural network airing that began the following month of I Am Cait (E!, 2015), a reality documentary series charting the aftermath of Jenner’s transition. Also, it followed the rise to prominence of the celebrity status of transgender former reality TV star Laverne Cox, whose path-breaking role as a post-transition inmate of a women’s prison in serial comedy-drama Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–) led to her becoming the first publicly transgender celebrity to feature on the cover of TIME magazine in May 2014. She thus became the public face of a cultural moment and movement for the transgender community that the strapline labelled ‘America’s next civil rights frontier’ (Steinmetz 2014). Undoubtedly, therefore, 2014–15 have been watershed years for the media visibility and discursive cultural prominence of transgender celebrity – and hence for the cultural visibility of transgender people and the currency of issues pertaining to both lived experiences and imagery of transgender identities across the spectrum of popular media. Anita Brady’s entry in this, the first Celebrity Studies Forum of 2016, engages with this flashpoint, arguing that key texts in the early media coverage of Jenner’s transition ‘reconstitute a gendered paradigm of “earned” celebrity by positioning the integrity of Jenner’s fame in opposition to the feminised superficiality of [the Kardashians]’. Brady thus joins Mara Dauphin (2015), in issue 6(2) of this journal, in interrogating some of the meanings of celebrity through the lens of transgender identities, and Alexandra Sastre (2014) in issue 5(1–2) in recognising the powerhouse presence and socio-cultural significance of the Kardashian phenomenon to the contemporary celebrity mediascape. Elsewhere in celebrity (and political) culture, as the Obama era draws to a close and the US media goes into overdrive in its coverage of the presidential primary campaign trail, the timeliness of Matthew Atkinson and Darin DeWitt’s consideration of the efficacy of celebrity political endorsements comes into clear view alongside the advent