Jo Littler

“I feel your pain”: cosmopolitan charity and the public fashioning of the celebrity soul

Offering support for global charities has become practically part of the contemporary celebrity job description and a hallmark of the established star. Locating the expansion of this phenomenon within the post-Fordist cultural turn, this paper explores how public displays of support for “the afflicted” can be a way for celebrities to appear to raise their profile above the zone of the crudely commercial into the sanctified, quasi-religious realm of altruism and charity, whilst revealing or constructing an added dimension of personality: of compassion and caring. The paper suggests that investigating the communicative cultural flows circulating between the celebrity, their impoverished “Others” and the non-destitute, non-celebrity “ordinary” subject can tell us something both about how such power relationships are maintained and how the possibilities of change to global injustices are imagined or disavowed. To theorise these interconnections, the paper links together conceptions of the social power of celebrity with debates around cosmopolitanism, work on the mediation of distant suffering and Nietzsches conception of “the soul”.

BEYOND THE BOYCOTT : Anti-consumerism, cultural change and the limits of reflexivity

This article focuses on the possibilities and limitations of reflexivity in contemporary anti-consumerism activist discourse. Opening by noting that much contemporary anti-consumerist discourse has a fraught relationship with what was once termed ‘identity politics’, in that it often attempts to reject or negotiate with an idea of identity politics that is figured as existing in the recent past, the article suggests that one way of both understanding this preoccupation, and of broadening out the terms of discussion, is to consider the various ways in which these discourses can be understood as reflexive. The paper therefore attempts to identify how various anti-consumerist actions and texts, including Naomi Kleins bestseller No Logo, Anita Roddicks manual Take it Personally, the work of ‘culture jammers’ Adbusters, and Reverend Billys ‘Church of Stop Shopping’ position themselves reflexively in relation to social and cultural change. Its discourse analysis considers what these projects understand as ‘activism’, the ‘type’ or characteristics of (anti-) consumers being imagined, and the implied consequences for consumption and production. In doing so, it draws from a range of theories about or relating to ‘reflexivity’, in particular the work of Scott Lash, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and Bruno Latour. Following Haraway and Butler in particular, the article argues for an emphasis on the relationality of reflexivity. The more ‘relational reflexivity’ demonstrated by anti-consumerist activity, the more likely it becomes to be open to making egalitarian alliances, the article argues, and this factor needs to be included alongside affective ‘mattering maps’ and ‘chains of equivalence’ when considering the problems and potential of anti-consumerist discourse. In doing so, the article attempts to shift the study of anti-consumerist activism further away from simple celebrations of its ‘resistance’ and towards opening up a cultural economy of anti-consumerism, one which is also critically engaged with furthering its politics.

Work, Power and Performance: Analysing the ‘Reality’ Game of The Apprentice

This article addresses the relationship between the British version of the reality television programme The Apprentice and the shifting working cultures of contemporary neoliberalism. It explores how the programme enacts, through ritualized play, many skills required by the ‘flexible’ work economy: emotional commitment, entrepreneurial adaptability, a combination of team conformity and personal ambition. In particular, it highlights how newly calibrated requirements of sociality, ‘passion’, and power-as-charisma are negotiated by the programme in relation to broader emergent norms of neoliberal governmentality. However, the article simultaneously argues against overly deterministic deployments of governmentality theory, suggesting it be both supplemented by other tools (media rituals and the affective role of passion), and reoriented back towards a Foucauldian emphasis upon the instability of power. This can, it argues, both enable the programme’s appeal to be more effectively understood and help us comprehend the spaces and places where neoliberal governmentality fails, wholly or partly, to be foregrounded.

Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism: A Critical Encounter

A recent mock-article in the satirical US-based newspaper The Onion announced that ‘consumer product diversity’ the sheer number and volume of different commodities out there in the world has now replaced biodiversity. ‘In the light of the crumbling global ecology’ the parodic news story argued, ‘it is vital that we furnish the diversity of the global marketplace by buying the widest range of consumer products possible’. If we do so, ‘lush, highly developed supermarkets’ will replace the deteriorating ecosystems symbolized by fallen rainforests and melting glaciers. The tone like so much in The Onion is at once ironic, rueful and critical. Beginning from the precept that we have our head in the sand about the implications of current levels of consumption, it pastiches the right-wing, pro-corporate positions that fuel it, and, at the same time endorses the pleasurable comforts of a robustly distanced perspective that is only too acutely aware of its own lack of power. Its humour is a kind of survival strategy; it touches a sensitive cultural nerve; and it occupies a position that can lend itself to a number of political purposes. The Onion’s article is one example of a widening popular discourse on the problems of contemporary consumerism. It has a specific character, gesturing as it does toward the environmental consequences of the rise of ‘turboconsumerism’ a significant increase in the sheer volume of goods and services (Honore 2004, Lawson 2009). This phenomenon has been created from new trends like the expansion of electro-digital scrap, more ‘units’ of clothes being bought annually, a ballooning global economy in ‘cheap’ or ‘bargain’ products and services, from toys to airplane flights, and the expansion of new markets in China, for example, a new Wal-Mart is currently opening every day (Parks 2007, Ross 2004, Schor 2006, Watts 2006). If a key anxiety around consumerism of the last decade has been trained on the sweatshopped labour behind large commercial brands, as documented by Naomi Klein’s bestselling book No Logo, one of the key anti-consumer anxieties emerging in the present is the environmental consequences of the ballooning economy in ‘bargain’ and ‘cheap’ goods. (Klein 2000, Bosshart 2006). The Onion’s article also indicates something of the pronounced lack of approval of contemporary consumerism which is currently manifest in our cultural landscape in all kinds of ways, on all kinds of themes, with different forms

Fourth worlds and neo-Fordism: American Apparel and the cultural economy of consumer anxiety

This article examines the strategies of the ‘sweatshop-free’ clothing company American Apparel in the context of ongoing debates over the cultural turn and cultural economy. American Apparels key selling point is that it does not outsource: it manufactures in Los Angeles, California, pays ‘good’ wages and provides health care, yet the workers are not unionized and the migrant labour it depends upon is often temporary. These same employees are used in promotional material to create its brand identity of an irreverent, hip and quasi-sexualized ‘community’ of consumers and workers. A design- and brand-led company that nonetheless does not see itself as a brand in any conventional sense, and markets itself as ‘transparent’, the companys ethos turns on consumer anxiety towards the socio-economic injustices of post-Fordism. Indeed, it marks a partial return to Fordist modes of production by aiming to manufacture everything under one roof, whilst deploying modes of informality (and technology) stereotypically associated with the post-Fordist creative industries. This paper considers the complex dynamics of American Apparels emergence in a reflexive marketplace (in relation to what Callon has termed an ‘economy of qualities’) and discusses its problematic negotiations with ‘fourth worlds’, or the zones of exclusion Castells terms ‘the black holes of informational capitalism’.

CELEBRITY AND SCHADENFREUDE : The cultural economy of fame in freefall

This paper explores the popularity of contemporary expressions of delight in celebrity downfall, or Schadenfreude towards celebrity culture, and questions to what extent they can be understood as cultural critiques of economic inequality. For just as the economy has its own parables, so do ‘cultural’ expressions contain parables of normativity about economic life. We argue that Schadenfreudes relationship to ‘equality’ can be read in terms of social, cultural and economic blockages, and investigate some of the history to this feeling by exploring different arguments over the meaning and status of ‘equality’ in modern and post-modern societies. This survey of its contested meanings highlights the distinctions which have been made and elided between property and identity, the economic and the cultural, and the political and the private. These geneaologies are used to interpret Schadenfreude, and to highlight the tension between two different aspects of contemporary subjectivity: ‘integrity’ and marketability of the self. By drawing on these contested genealogies and theories of equality, we are also arguing that Schadenfreude toward celebrity in its most common contemporary form cannot be seen merely as a superstructural phenomenon of a neo-liberal base but rather as stitched into and as of a piece with this neo-liberal culture. We argue that whilst Schadenfreude is able to be articulated in different directions, it overwhelmingly works to express irritation at inequalities but not to change the wider rules of the current social system, and its political economy often actually entails it fuelling inequalities of wealth. In these terms, Schadenfreude can be perceived as being intimately related to autistic economic culture and as being able to be perpetuated by coasting on its own status as an autistic response.

Celebrity Ecologies: Introduction

Out of the efforts of environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to raise their profiles amidst frenetic global mediascapes, the construction of celebrity in a dispersed post-Fordist promotional landscape, the continual mainstreaming of ecological concerns, the commodification of anxiety and the celebritisation of politics, a particular breed of ‘charismatic megafauna’ has emerged, blinking, into the daylight: the ‘environment-saving’ star. It can sometimes seem that every celebrity, from global megastars to Z-listers, is in the business, whether as the face, voice or embodiment of concerns about climate change, clean water, deforestation and over-fishing, of getting us to think, care and do differently in order to ‘save the planet’. Dedicated websites exist to catalogue and share the environmental, charity and humanitarian efforts of celebrities of all stripes. LooktotheStars.com reveals that Greenpeace is supported by 58 different celebrities, and tells us what other causes they are associated with or support (looktothestars.com 2013). Koerner, writing for Ecorazzi.com (which details green celebrity lifestyles), provides an insight into the clothing choices of actress Helen Hunt, who wore a ‘simple navy blue strapless ecofriendly gown designed by H&M’ and the textile recycling NGO Global Green, on the red carpet at the 2013 Oscars. As Koerner states, ‘There’s nothing like taking a risk on one of the biggest red carpets of the year and doing it in an eco-friendly way’ – because, according to Hunt, the combination of celebrity and environmentalism is ‘[W]in, win, win!’ (Koerner 2013). But is the marriage between celebrity and environmental issues always win, win, win? Popular scepticism and some of the research in this issue indicate not. Perhaps we should ask instead: is celebrity – with its individualised mode of power, its concentration of wealth, its imbrication in systemic profit-making – the exact opposite of what biodiversity and the environmental crisis needs: participation, co-operation, regulation against exploitation and systemic political change? There are many persuasive factors that could be mobilised to support this strand of argument. Celebrity tends most often to appear as part of latecapitalist consumer culture, tied to the ideology of economic growth, to be deployed as a resource to sell more and more stuff, with the lives of its D-and Z-list ‘celetoids’ (Rojek 2001) both proliferating and becoming more fleeting, just like the products built around planned obsolescence that they are sometimes paid to promote (Turner 2010).

Why 'intergenerational feminist media studies'?

Abstract Feminism and generation are live and ideologically freighted issues that are subject to a substantial amount of media engagement. The figure of the millennial and the baby boomer, for example, regularly circulate in mainstream media, often accompanied by hyperbolic and vitriolic discourses and affects of intergenerational feminist conflict. In addition, theories of feminist generation and waves have been and continue to be extensively critiqued within feminist theory. Given the compelling criticisms directed at these categories, we ask: why bother examining and foregrounding issues of generation, intergeneration, and transgeneration in feminist media studies? Whilst remaining sceptical of linearity and familial metaphors and of repeating reductive, heteronormative, and racist versions of feminist movements, we believe that the concept of generation does have critical purchase for feminist media scholars. Indeed, precisely because of the problematic ways that is it used, and the prevalence of it as a volatile, yet only too palpable, organizing category, generation is both in need of continual critical analysis, and is an important tool to be used—with care and nuance—when examining the multiple routes through which power functions in order to marginalize, reward, and oppress. Exploring both diachronic and synchronic understandings of generation, this article emphasizes the use of conjunctural analysis to excavate the specific historical conditions that impact upon and create generation. This special issue of Feminist Media Studies covers a range of media forms—film, games, digital media, television, print media, as well as practices of media production, intervention, and representation. The articles also explore how figures at particular lifestages—particularly the girl and the aging woman—are constructed relationally, and circulate, within media, with particular attention to sexuality. Throughout the issue there is an emphasis on exploring the ways in which the category of generation is mobilized in order to gloss sexism, racism, ageism, class oppression, and the effects of neoliberalism.

Introduction: celebrity and the transnational

Contemporary forms of globalisation are sometimes viewed as privileging the flow of goods over the flow of people, given that so-called ‘free markets’ regularly invite goods to cross borders that are not necessarily open to everybody (Morley 2000). Celebrities, it might be pointed out, are one of the exceptional groups of people in this context, being constituted as they very often are from that cadre of the privileged cosmopolitan global elite who can travel at will (just think, for example, of Brangelina travelling to Namibia to give birth). The ease of celebrity travel is, however, also precisely because they are commodities as well as people. Their images and synergies are packaged, bought and sold across national borders in much the same way as soft drinks or books, examples they also intersect with: think of Beyoncé’s promotions for Pepsi, for example, or David Beckham’s autobiography. Equally, celebrities can, of course, be glocalised and consumed differently in different places, their meanings shifting alongside their geographical context. Katz and Liebes’ famous cross-cultural study of the American TV show Dallas showed how texts can be read differently according to the national cultures they are part of, and celebrity is subject to similar cultural reframings (Liebes and Katz 1990). Furthermore, these re-framings themselves refract the larger social and political contexts to which they relate, be this imperialism, postcolonial rebellion or religious fundamentalism. For example, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis (2003) contains scenes in which western pop stars become both secret badges of rebellion for her and marks of heathen transgression for the fundamentalists who police her in 1980s Iran. Arvind Rajagopal’s work on Mother Theresa has shown that she never achieved anything like the levels of celebrity in India that she did in Europe and the United States: he argues that she functioned mainly as a neo-colonial figure of compassion and caring for the West, an exported model of individualised solutions to social problems, a figure through which India could be patronised and imperial dynamics negated (Rajagopal 1999, pp. 126–141). These examples also highlight how it is not simply in terms of audience reception that such celebrity differences are created: they are built into the production of the celebrity persona ‘itself ’. In this volume, Paul Rixon’s work focuses on exactly this process of the production and mediation of celebrities in terms of ‘national difference’, by examining the presentation of American and British celebrities in the United Kingdom during the 1950s and 1960s. Rixon’s article examines how American stars were constructed as glamorous

Spectacular environmentalisms: media, knowledge and the framing of ecological politics

Spectacular environmentalisms: media, knowledge and the framing of ecological politics Michael K. Goodman , Jo Littler, Dan Brockington and Maxwell Boykoff d Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, UK; Department of Culture and Creative Industries, City University London, UK; The Sheffield Institute for International Development, The University of Sheffield, UK; Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Colorado-Boulder, USA