Misha Kavka

‘I Guess A Lot of People See Me as a Big Sister or a Friend’: the role of intimacy in the celebrification of beauty vloggers

Abstract With an impressive 11 million subscribers, Zoe ‘Zoella’ Sugg is among the most popular of the young adults who have recently obtained fame (and fortune) by posting videos to YouTube. She figures prominently in the beauty group, one of the fastest-growing and most overtly feminized subsets of the YouTube community, creating videos on lifestyle, fashion and beauty-related topics. However, to a greater extent than many of her peers, Sugg supports her product-oriented videos with vlogs that offer behind-the-scenes, intimate access to her life(style). In so doing, Zoe’s videos encourage intimacy not simply between her viewers and the ‘big sister’ persona she adopts on-screen, but also between her audience and the commodities she associates herself with. This article argues that the success of the YouTube ‘influencer’ economy, both in terms of its gender predispositions and celebrity effects, depends on processes of commodification through intimacy, which Zoe Sugg mobilizes in exemplary fashion.

Hating Madonna and loving Tom Ford: gender, affect and the ‘extra-curricular’ celebrity

In a recent article on the widespread media practice of ‘hating Madonna’, Naomi Wolf takes issue with the many vitriolic film reviews of Madonna’s film W.E., arguing that Madonna is punished by the press ‘whenever she steps out of her pretty-girl-pop-music bandwidth’. To make her point that there is an unspoken gender bias in the treatment of Madonna as artist, Wolf briefly compares W.E. with A Single Man, the film directed by designer Tom Ford, which received rapturous reviews. The comparative reception of these two films offers rich terrain for thinking not only about gender in relation to codifications of celebrity, but also the role of sexuality and nationality, the valuation of culture industries, and the overlapping of contemporary with historical celebrity. This paper addresses these layers of celebrity studies through the trope of the ‘extra-curricular celebrity’ who functions as a celebrity auteur. While Madonna and Tom Ford are celebrities from two different culture industries, music and fashion, their respective films are also affectively charged by historical celebrity: the ongoing negative celebrity of Wallis Simpson in W.E. and the literary celebrity of Christopher Isherwood, who wrote the novel A Single Man. In both cases, one can trace a complex set of semi-autobiographical links from film protagonist to historical celebrity to extra-curricular director that supports the starkly affective valuations of these works.

Introduction: Transnational gender cultures and reality TV:

Having gained a global foothold in popular culture, reality TV offers to explicate, regulate and manipulate the social scripts we live by. This issue makes the claim that a transnational approach to reality TV provides a rich context for interrogating the international variability of gender cultures. As the analyses that are presented in this Special Issue indicate, while gender formations may operate according to globally patriarchal scripts, the manifestations, manipulations and resistances to such a script take locally specific forms, as shaped by the social, political and industrial histories of each particular place but with broader bearing on more ‘worldwide’ concerns, such as hegemony, patriarchy and capital.

Crying on YouTube: Vlogs, self-exposure and the productivity of negative affect

In this article, we challenge dominant perceptions of social media as an archive of endlessly positive self-documentation by examining two subgenres of YouTube vlogging predicated on the expression of negative affect. Through analysis of the crying and anxiety vlogs of YouTubers ZoeSugg, Trisha Paytas and Nicole Klein, we recognize the productivity of negative affect, charting the translation of the mediated tears, sobs and struggles of these young female vloggers into affirmations of authenticity, (self-)therapy and strengthened ties of intimacy with followers. While these negative affect vlogs work outside of YouTube’s consumer economy, their popularity points to a booming economy of affective labour, where the exchange of tears for sympathetic ears is in consistently high demand.