Neil Ewen

Team GB, or No Team GB, That Is The Question: Olympic Football and the Post-War Crisis of Britishness

This article explores the furore surrounding the proposed creation of a ‘Team GB’ football team for the London 2012 Olympics, contextualizing it historically within the post-war crisis of Britishness.

‘The 90s are officially over’: Generation X celebrity break-ups.

In this piece we consider the intersection of relationships, nostalgia, and generational identities as struc- turing elements in celebrity culture, through a small sample of high-profile Gen X examples.

John Terry and the Predicament of Englishness: Ambivalence and Nostalgia in the Premier League Era.

This article examines media discourse surrounding the Chelsea and England footballer John Terry and argues that his iconicity embodies multiple anxieties about Englishness and English football in the era of neoliberalism. In a nostalgic culture in search of ‘traditional’ English heroes, Terry is celebrated for his physicality and traditionally ‘English’ style of play; yet his off-field behaviour is seen to be both emblematic and symptomatic of a celebrity culture considered to betray the values coded as English in football history. Taking Terrys dilemma as a starting point, this article historicizes the rise of footballers as celebrities; examines widespread anxiety about the loss of the typically English, noble working-class footballer; and interrogates the problems of thinking about sporting icons of Englishness without recourse to the dominant nostalgic mode.

Friends Reconsidered: Cultural Politics, Intergenerationality, and Afterlives

With the passing in 2014 of the twentieth anniversary of its debut episode, the iconic millennial sitcom Friends retains a rare cultural currency and remains a crucial reference point for understanding the concerns of Generation X. This special issue, therefore, interrogates the contemporary and historical significance of Friends as a popular sitcom that reflected and obfuscated American fin de siècle anxieties at the time, and considers the lasting resonance of its cultural afterlife. Its abiding impact as millennial cultural touchstone can be seen in its persistent ability to find new generations of viewers and its manifest influence on myriad extratextual phenomena.

If I Don’t Input Those Numbers . . . It Doesn’t Make Much of a Difference: Insulated Precarity and Gendered Labor in Friends

This article examines the middle-class work culture of Friends, reading it as a text imbued with both Restorative and Reflective Nostalgia. I argue that the “insulated precarity” of Friends’ protagonists, and their seeming nonchalance about work, marks out the show as a prime example of a Clinton-era “boom” text and as a one that struggles with rising anxiety inherent in neoliberalism. I focus on the role of Chandler Bing, who quits his nondescript office job to follow his dreams, before realizing he does not know what they are, and ends up in advertising. I argue that while Friends’ self-reflexive comic mode facilitates sympathetic treatment of Chandler as a “New Man,” his perpetual crisis of masculinity (his infertility, his periodic reliance on his wife’s income, and the constant questioning of his sexuality) is related to the lack of purpose in his career and, thus, the changing work culture that characterized the period.

Australian celebrity dossier: introduction

The Cultural Report section of Celebrity Studies is home to dossiers of original short articles that interrogate cultures of celebrity which have yet to receive adequate critical attention. Each dossier is framed geographically with the aim of highlighting heterogeneous forms and functions of celebrity in different national contexts and thus expanding the international horizon of celebrity studies as a field. Following previous reports on Nordic celebrity in volume 7 (3), Korean celebrity in volume 8 (1), and non-western celebrity politics and diplomacy in volume 8 (2), this Cultural Report comprises four original articles on contemporary celebrity in Australia which suggest together that interrogating the production of fame is a productive way into thinking about, and critiquing, simplistic notions of (Australian) national identity. The articles highlight structural inequalities in the country’s mediascape and enduring and problematic identity discourses in its public sphere. Within a global context in which ethno-chauvinism is (again) rearing its ugly head in Europe, white nationalism has (again) seeped its way into the White House, and tensions have (again) been heightened in the Middle East and the Korean peninsula, serious academic work that seeks to understand the ways media systems construct notions of national belonging and demonise those they deem non-national others takes on added importance. Interrogating notions of ‘race’, ableism, and Australianness, through the lens of celebrity, these small articles smartly and concisely focus on big issues. They also lay foundations for further study. In the first article, ‘“Grant”ing a Voice: The Representation, Activity and Agency of Stan Grant’, Celia Lam and Louise St Guillaume examine the career of the Indigenous Australian broadcaster Stan Grant, whose recent charismatic advocacy for Indigenous rights has evoked comparisons to ‘great orators and human rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela’ and heightened speculation about Grant’s own political ambitions. Through close inspection of Grant’s memoir and other personal commentary, Lam and St Guillaume position Grant’s early career as a journalist, and his struggle to resist being pigeonholed as an ‘Indigenous reporter’, against the background of Australia’s complex identity politics. They then highlight the freedom Grant felt in identifying as ‘Australian’ when he moved to Hong Kong as an anchor for CNN in 2001, finding himself ‘unconstrained by the history of Australia, racial prejudices and pre-judgements, and Australia’s race relations with Indigenous Australians’. This biographical detail provides context for understanding ‘the emergence of the advocate’ when Grant returned to Australia in 2012, which the authors argue was underpinned by a ‘merger of the public persona of the professional

Korea celebrity dossier: introduction

This Cultural Report dossier comprises four original essays on celebrity culture in Korea. The first three essays focus on different forms and functions of celebrity in the highly urbanised, developed and open Republic of Korea (commonly known as South Korea), while the final one examines particular aspects of the relatively unknown and obscure celebrity culture within the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), especially pertaining to its authoritarian current leader Kim Jong-un. Together, these essays examine the two main drivers of celebrity across the peninsula: K-pop (a hugely popular music genre, largely produced and controlled centrally by record labels that recruit, finance, train and market artists); and low budget Reality Television and DIY web content. Both are key parts of the wider Korean Wave of popular culture that has proliferated around the world since the dawn of the Social Media age (Yoon 2010). In the first essay, ‘“Food Porn” or Intimate Sociality: Committed Celebrity and Cultural Performances of Overeating in Meokbang’, Glen Donnar examines Meokbang, a phenomenon which features ‘broadcasting jockeys’ who gain celebrity status by sitting in front of webcams, ‘live-streaming their consumption of vast quantities of food’. Donnar argues that while ‘Moekbang certainly facilitates a sexualised, voyeuristic gaze’, his subtle reading gestures towards how these broadcasts of DIY celebrity ‘navigate cultural and economic tensions, anxieties and passions specific to Korean society and culture’ and how it ‘engenders divergent audience affects and ambivalent modes of viewing, including pleasure, desire, longing, horror, disgust and shame’. Donnar’s careful exploration therefore places the phenomenon within a national, cultural, and historical specificity that serves to problematise hegemonic representational stereotypes of, and assumptions about, Asian culture that are repeatedly elaborated in English language media. In the second essay, ‘Just Beautiful People Holding a Bottle: The Driving Forces Behind South Korea’s Love of Celebrity Endorsement’, James Turnbull begins by noting that advertising in South Korea is saturated by celebrity endorsements, featuring figures who are also omnipresent in other types of primetime television programming, and DIY web content such as ‘making of’ videos. ‘To overseas observers’, Turnbull writes, ‘it is difficult to convey how ubiquitous such celebrities consequently become in...Korean daily life, and [how] extraordinary it is that consumers do not rapidly tire of them’. While these celebrities are often represented in typically flattering lights in advertising and commercials, their appearances on television

Nordic celebrity dossier: introduction

The raison d’être of this section of Celebrity Studies is to bring into focus cultures of fame that remain relatively obscure within the field – despite its vast growth in recent years. As such, it is somewhat ironic that the final touches to this dossier on Nordic celebrity were made on the same day that Sweden hosted Denmark in a high-profile UEFA European Championship qualifier. Here were two national teams, full of familiar faces, playing in front of a worldwide audience of millions. Obscure the top level of Nordic soccer is not. The familiarity of these particular Nordic stars is clearly produced by the saturated worldwide media coverage of football. This is also the case in other global media sports where Nordic figures are, or have been, key historical figures, such as in tennis (Björn Borg) and in golf (Annika Sörenstam). Behind the blanket coverage of the most prominent sports, however, exist others that enjoy their own specific histories, cultures, and celebrities. Two of the contributions to this dossier examine historical figures emanating from sports that may not enjoy the mass television audiences of soccer, tennis, or golf, but whose importance to Nordic culture(s) is no less important. Peter Dahlén’s contribution is based on research undertaken for his forthcoming biography of Bertil Gustafsson Uggla (1890–1945), a prominent figure in early twentiethcentury Sweden: first, as a gymnast, pentathlete, track and field athlete, and fencer; then, as a writer and broadcaster on education and sport. By focusing on three separate magazine profiles of Uggla, Dahlén sheds light on Uggla’s development from his aristocratic roots as an ascribed celebrity to his achieved celebrity as a sports star and cultural commentator, arguing that Uggla is a key figure in understanding those traditional forms of masculinity and Swedish nationalism that defined the period. ‘Uggla’, Dahlén writes, ‘belongs to that category of people who were great and significant in their time, but whose ideals and ideas largely became obsolete in the post-war period’. In her article, Mona Pedersen explores the same milieu – and the dramatic cultural changes wrought by the Second World War – through an examination of Sonja Henie (1912– 1969), a Norwegian who dominated figure skating from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s before becoming one of Hollywood’s highest paid actors. Pedersen argues that, during both of her careers in Norway and in the USA, Henie became a cipher for discourses of Norwegianness that manifested in complicated forms. Henie, in Pedersen’s reading, emerges as a prime example of the ways famous figures have the potential to ‘[feed] existing ideas by offering a celebrity persona with complex

The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal, by Orin Starn, Duke University Press, 2011.

A review of The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports on Golf, Race, and Celebrity Scandal, by Orin Starn, Duke University Press, 2011.

Marxism, cultural studies and sport, edited by Carrington, B. and McDonald, I.

Ben Carrington and Ian McDonald’s anthology Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport – the eighth volume in Routledge’s admirable Critical Studies in Sport series – successfully addresses all three of the aims outlined in the series editors’ preface. The introduction, which provides ‘a brief historical overview of the development of Marxist approaches within Sport Studies and the subsequent growth of a Marxist inflected Cultural Studies of Sport’ (p. 1), along with Part One, which comprises a chapter each by Carrington and McDonald arguing for the relative merits of orthodox (but not reductive, economist) Marxist and Cultural Studies approaches, in the words of the editors, ‘attempt to sketch the broad parameters of the debates (the thesis and the antithesis, we might suggest) between and within Marxist and Cultural Studies approaches to sport, which the following chapters then, and in true dialectical fashion, work through’ (p. 7). Even on their own, they are enough to satisfy the first aim: ‘to introduce students to the richness and relevance of Marxist and Marxist-inflected Cultural Studies approaches to studying contemporary sporting cultures’ (p. xii). The subsequent chapters– divided into three further sections: Part Two (Political Economy, Commodification and Sport), Part Three (The Sporting Poetics of Class, Race andGender) and Part Four (Key Concepts, Critical Theorists) – successfully address another aim: to ‘advance discussionsoncriticalsocial theorywithinSportStudiesand toattempt to insert sportasanobject of study intomainstreamdebateswithinMarxist scholarship andCultural Studies’ (p. xii). Each chapter iswritten by an established academic (some fromwithinSport Studies, some fromother disciplines) and provides authoritative analysis alongside a wealth of footnotes. These include Anouk Bélanger’s examination of ‘The Urban Sport Spectacle’ and the importance of largescale sporting events to the political economies of nation-states in a chapter that is extremely timely in light of the London2012Olympics andEngland’s unsuccessful bid for the 2018FIFA WorldCup;GarryWhannel’scriticalanalysisof thedevelopmentofCulturalStudiesalongsidea consideration of ‘Media Sport’; and Rob Beamish’s reading of Coubertin’s Olympic project through the concept of ‘alienation’. The final aim – to provide ‘a provocation to radical and critical scholars in Sport Studies to connect their research and analysis to the transformative potential of sport’, to address ‘the problematic of intervention’ and to ‘question . . . what it actually means to be engaged in radical theory and social research’ (p. xii) – is also met, albeit with some reservations. Carrington and McDonald make clear in their introductory chapter that the volume as a whole exhibits ‘no “party line” as to how Marxism is understood and its relationship to Cultural Studies approaches to the study of sport’, and suggest that the ‘collection’s strength lies precisely in the polyvocality of differing authors, from distinct disciplinary backgrounds, addressing the core themes of the book in their own disciplinary-specific yet rigorous way’ (p. 7). This evaluation is a fair one: over the course of the book, theories are International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2011, 301–304