Su Holmes

“Reality Goes Pop!” Reality TV, Popular Music, and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol

The reality pop programs Popstars(broadcast in 2000 in the United Kingdom) and Pop Idol (broadcast in 2001-2002 in the United Kingdom) have occupied a central place in the phenomenal rise of reality TV. More specifically, with their bid to place the entire notion of stardom at center stage, they raise important methodological and theoretical issues concerning the conceptualization of fame in reality TV. A central emphasis of the article is the importance of considering how reality TV demands a more thorough engagement with existing critical and theoretical concepts if the form is to sustain long-term academic analysis. Taking the British series of Pop Idolas the primary focus, the author explores this with respect to the concept of stardom, drawing particularly on the work of Richard Dyer and John Ellis. Pop Idol also raises crucial questions about the politics of interactivity in reality TV, a power dynamic that is ultimately configured around the program’s mediation of stardom.

‘But this Time You Choose!’: Approaching the ‘Interactive’ Audience in Reality TV

The concept of ‘interactivity’ has gained increasing currency in relation to television. At the level of programming, at least, this has been made visible with the phenomenal rise of reality TV. Phrases such as ‘You decide!’ (Big Brother), ‘But this time you choose!’ (Pop Idol) and ‘If you want to have your say’ (The Salon) proliferate in contemporary television, articulating a rhetoric that insists pressingly upon a ‘new’ participatory relationship between viewer and screen. The aim of this article is to consider the political implications of this shift for existing approaches to audience-text relations in television and cultural studies. This involves a consideration of a number of broader issues which currently raise questions for the study of television and its audience, particularly the increasing criticisms made of the active/resistant audience paradigm, the relationship between television and the internet, and the status of the televisual ‘text’ in a proliferating intertextual field.

”Off guard, Unkempt, Unready?”: Deconstructing Contemporary Celebrity in Heat Magazine

A recent report on ITV1’s News at Ten (13 Sep. 2003, UK) featured the latest developments in the changing marriage plans of stars Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. The ‘expert’ used to explain the unfolding narrative was a representative from the British celebrity gossip magazine heat. For many, the mere presence of this item, and perhaps the entire concept of a celebrity ‘expert’, would doubtless speak to contemporary debates about the ‘tabloidization’ of contemporary television news which, at the level of content, has often been lamented as a prioritization of ‘the intimate relationships of celebrities’ (or the Royal family) at the expense of ‘significant issues and events of international consequence’ (Franklin, 1997, p. 4; see also Turner, 1999; Langer, 1998). Yet in terms of understanding the construction of contemporary fame, this article is precisely interested in the fact that heat should appear in a news report, foregrounding as it does the magazine’s status as a ‘popular’ but authoritative cultural perspective on celebrity. Becoming an increasingly familiar sight on contemporary British television, the discourse and ‘expertise’ of the magazine is now woven into everything from the sitcom (e.g. Absolutely Fabulous), the celebrity documentary, television coverage of Reality TV, to general entertainment or magazine programmes. Described elsewhere as ‘the bible of contemporary celebrity culture’ (Llewellyn-Smith, 2002, p. 114), in 2002 heat was the fastest growing magazine in Europe, with an increasing international circulation. This reach is indicative of the magazine’s growing cultural penetration over the last few years, and in this respect

The ‘place’ of television in celebrity studies

Despite its centrality in the production, circulation and consumption of contemporary celebrity culture, the detailed study of television fame has occupied a relatively marginal place in star/celebrity studies. Early work on television fame originated from film studies, or was generally defined ‘against’ the concept of film stardom. This meant that it was often characterised negatively: the apparent specificities or qualities of TV fame were defined in pejorative terms, and it was imagined in terms of what it was not (‘film’ stardom proper). The subsequent expansion of celebrity studies has arguably placed less emphasis on the specificity of media forms and boundaries – in part reflecting the fluid and pervasive circulation of contemporary media fame. We suggest here that this has created a conceptual context in which the real complexities of TV fame have fallen between the analytical cracks. This article thus seeks to explore the ways in which television fame has been positioned within star/celebrity studies, while also examining how a range of historical and contemporary studies can illuminate the possibilities and challenges for the future study of TV fame.

‘Blindness to the obvious’? Treatment experiences and feminist approaches to eating disorders

Eating disorders are currently often approached as biopsychosocial problems. But the social or cultural aspects of the equation are frequently marginalised in treatment – relegated to mere contributory or facilitating factors. In contrast, feminist and socio-cultural approaches are primarily concerned with the relationship between eating disorders and the social/cultural construction of gender. Yet, although such approaches emerged directly from the work of feminist therapists, the feminist scholarship has increasingly observed, critiqued and challenged the biomedical model from a scholarly distance. As such, this article draws upon data from 15 semi-structured interviews with women in the UK context who have experience of anorexia and/or bulimia in order to explore a series of interlocking themes concerning the relationship between gender identity and treatment. In engaging the women in debate about the feminist approaches (something that has been absent from previous feminist work), the article examines how gender featured in women’s understandings of their problem, and the ways in which it was – or was not – addressed in treatment. The article also explores the women’s evaluations of the feminist discourse, and their discussions of how it might be implemented within therapeutic and clinical contexts.

Swivelling the spotlight: stardom, celebrity and ‘me’

Celebrity studies critiques the ways in which celebrity culture constructs discourses of authenticity and disclosure, offering the cultural and economic circulation of the ‘private’ self. Rarely, however, do we turn the spotlight on ourselves as not only scholars of stardom and celebrity, but also part of the audience. Autoethnography has become increasingly important across different disciplines, although its status within media and cultural studies is less visible and secure, not least because the emphasis on personal attachments to media forms may threaten the discipline’s still contested claim to cultural legitimacy. The study of stars and celebrities has often found itself at the ‘lower’ end of this already debased continuum, perhaps making such tensions particularly acute. Based on three personal narratives of engagements with stars and celebrities, this co-authored article explores the potential relationships between autoethnography and celebrity studies, and considers the personal, intellectual, and political implications of bringing the scholar into the celebrity frame.

Audiences for stardom and celebrity

Even if we expanded this to include the study of audiences for celebrity, the suggestion of a ‘smattering’ of work still remains largely apposite in the decade since this was written. Indeed, in Celebrity in 2001, Chris Rojek observed how previous structuralist and textualist approaches to celebrity had marginalised the ‘knowledge, desire and judgement’ of the audience (2001, p. 43), and he foregrounded how the social and cultural functions of celebrity ‘can only be concretely established through empirical investigation’ (2001, p. 92). That is not to suggest, as this introduction goes on to explore, that significant work does not exist (work which has had an important impact on the field), but only that such work has often tended to be sporadic or small scale. In turn, such texts (for example, Gamson 1994, Stacey 1994) have historically then been fetishised as examples of what all ‘audiences’ do with stars and celebrities, rather than revealing what those audiences did, in those particular research contexts. The earliest empirical studies of audience relations with star/celebrity culture are often seen to be Richard Dyer’s (1986) chapter on Judy Garland and gay men (which used letters to explore how Garland functioned as a gay icon), Jackie Stacey’s (1994) Stargazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (which used letters and questionnaires to explore women’s relations with Hollywood stars in the 1940s/1950s) and Joshua Gamson’s (1994) audience chapters in Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (which used focus groups to explore how people responded to the epistemology of the celebrity system). Yet although these works marked the advent of such investigations in an academic context, they are predated by sociological studies – sometimes industry commissioned – of film audiences, which frequently incorporated questions concerning audiences’ relations to stars (see Mayer 1948, Tudor 1974). It is not possible or necessary to give detailed attention to each and every piece of work subsequently published in star and celebrity studies, although we aim to sketch out broad themes here. For example, Stacey’s (1994) work marked the beginnings of a longer trend in examining how gender – or more specifically female gender – plays an important role in shaping audience engagement with stars/celebrities. In fact, successive work in this area includes a considerable proportion of the empirical work produced in star and celebrity studies, including Rachel Moseley’s (2002) generational study of female responses to Audrey Hepburn; Samantha Barbas’ (2001) historical exploration of fan materials emerging from Hollywood’s formative years; Joke Hermes’ (1999) investigation of readers’ perceptions of famous figures in women’s magazines; Rebecca Feasey’s (2008) focus group study on readers of heat magazine; and Linda Duits and Pauline Celebrity Studies, 2015 Vol. 6, No. 1, 1–5, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2015.995894

‘My anorexia story’: girls constructing narratives of identity on YouTube

ABSTRACT The phenomenon of pro-anorexia (‘pro-ana’) communities has attracted extensive academic attention over the last 15 years, with feminist scholars fascinated by the political complexities of such cultures. But the internet has also enabled a range of eating disorder recovery cultures to emerge – whether organized around blogs, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube – and such spaces have been largely ignored by feminist scholarship which has fetishized the apparently more resistant and controversial discourses of pro-ana. As such, this article explores a set of videos posted on YouTube under the title of ‘My anorexia story’ which present narratives of recovery, or efforts to recover, from anorexia. Primarily produced by white, Western, teenage girls, these videos are effectively slide shows made up of written text and photographs, with selfies of the body sitting at their core. The conceptual and political significance of self-representation has been seen as central to the construction of subjectivity within the digital media landscape, with particular attention paid to the ways in which such practices compare, speak back to, or challenge the existing representational discourses of ‘dominant’ media and wider relations of social power. In this regard, this article explores questions of agency in gendered self-representation, examining what kinds of self-narratives the girls are producing about anorexia. In doing so, it examines how the stories seek to ‘author’ and regulate the meanings of the anorexic body; how these constructions intersect with dominant constructions of anorexia (such as those offered by medical discourse and the media); as well as the implications of the aesthetic strategies they employ. In considering how the narratives visualize, display and ‘expose’ the anorexic body, I draw upon a growing area of work which examines the selfie in relation discourses of surveillance, visibility and selfhood.

“Little Lena's a Big Girl Now”: Lena Zavaroni and the anorexic star

Lena Zavaroni became famous as a child star on the British TV talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1974, suffered from anorexia from age thirteen, and subsequently died from complications associated with the problem in 1999, age thirty-five. This article uses 165 press articles from 1974 to 1999 to analyse how Zavaronis relationship with anorexia was constructed in the British popular press. Existing feminist work suggests that stars with anorexia are worth studying because they make eating disorders popularly visible, with the coverage providing an occasion to analyse how the media constructs anorexia in relation to particular ideologies of femininity. But this article argues that it is important to explore how discourses on fame become intertwined with discursive constructions of anorexia, shaping how such problems are explained and gendered. Because Zavaroni appeared in the media as a child, her trajectory also dramatises how anorexia is seen to be linked not only with the role of the media, but with the development of female identity. Thus, whilst bringing stardom and celebrity into the frame, this article thus seeks to contribute to the feminist work which interrogates how popular constructions of anorexia mark out normative/disordered femininities.

Feminist approaches to Anorexia Nervosa: a qualitative study of a treatment group

BackgroundEating disorders (EDs) are now often approached as biopsychosocial problems. But it has been suggested by scholars interested in sociocultural factors that all is not equal within this biospsychosocial framework, with the ‘social’ aspects of the equation relegated to secondary factors within ED treatment contexts. Although sociocultural influences are well-established as risk factors for EDs, the exploration of whether or how such perspectives are useful in treatment has been little explored. In responding to this context, this article seeks to discuss and evaluate a 10 week closed group intervention based on feminist approaches to EDs at a residential eating disorder clinic in the East of England.MethodsThe data was collected via one-to-one qualitative interviews and then analysed using thematic discourse analysis.ResultsThe participants suggested that the groups were helpful in enabling them to situate their problem within a broader cultural and group context, that they could operate as a form of ‘protection’ from ideologies regarding femininity, and that a focus on the societal contexts for EDs could potentially reduce feelings of self-blame. At the same time, the research pointed to the complexities of participants considering societal rather than individualised explanations for their problems, whilst it also confronted the implications of ambivalent responses toward feminism.ConclusionsHighly visible sociocultural factors in EDs – such as gender - may often be overlooked in ED clinical contexts. Although based on limited data, this research raises questions about the marginalisation of sociocultural factors in treatment, and the benefits and challenges including the latter may involve.