Mapping the Stars: Celebrity, Metonymy, and the Networked Politics of Identity
Autor Claire Sisco Kingen Limba Engleză Paperback – 26 iul 2023
Often dismissed as trivial or even “trash,” celebrity culture offers a unique way of considering what it means to be human. In Mapping the Stars, Claire Sisco King shows how close analysis of the complex and sometimes contradictory forms of celebrity culture can challenge dominant ideas about selfhood. In particular, as a formation that develops across time, mediums, and texts, celebrity is useful for demonstrating how humanness is defined by relationality, contingency, and even vulnerability. King considers three stars with popular and controversial personas: Norman Rockwell, Will Smith, and Kim Kardashian. Working in very different contexts and with very different public images, these figures nonetheless share a consistent, if not conspicuous, interest in celebrity as a construct. Offering intertextual readings of their public images across such sites as movie posters, magazines, cinema, and social media—and deploying rhetorical theories of metonymy (a linguistic device linking signifiers by shared associations)—King argues that these stars’ self-reflexive attention to the processes by which celebrity is created and constrained creates opportunities for reframing public discourse about what it means to be famous and what it means to be a person.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258804
ISBN-10: 0814258808
Pagini: 262
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.37 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814258808
Pagini: 262
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 30 mm
Greutate: 0.37 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“One of the book's most noteworthy aspects is the author’s investment in ‘the politics and pleasures of conjecture’ and the joy one may experience ‘as an audience member and fan of media culture.’ … The book's organization is highly effective, switching between new frameworks for looking at celebrity culture and deep analyses of the ways these frameworks can be applied to visual and print media as well as popular cultural texts. …Fun to read and a powerful addition to scholarship in the field. … Summing Up: Highly recommended.” —L. M. D’Amore, CHOICE
“Mapping the Stars is as much about subjectivity as it is about celebrity. King engages in a serious, critical, and extraordinarily creative version of the Kevin Bacon game, drawing out a web of interconnected associations between films, star personae, gossip, and paratexts to build meaningful metonymic articulations between and across different celebrity networks and help subjects make sense of their intersubjective world.” —Casey Ryan Kelly, author of Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood
Notă biografică
Claire Sisco King is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Chair of the Cinema and Media Arts Department at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema.
Extras
Norman Rockwell, Will Smith, and Kim Kardashian—occupy very different spaces in the landscape of celebrity, but each figure offers a unique vantage point for mapping the operations of fame and its implications for understandings of subjectivity in US culture. Although Rockwell, Smith, and Kardashian may seem to have little in common with one another, their bodies of work share an explicit interest in the concept of celebrity itself. Self-reflexivity about their own fame makes these public figures valuable for considering how networked forms of celebrity can promote productive ways of thinking about selfhood in US culture. As my analysis reveals, these celebrities have more in common with one another—and with a host of others to whom they are all directly linked, including Trump, O. J. Simpson, and Andy Warhol—than might have been obvious. What links Rockwell, Smith, and Kardashian is their conspicuous interest in image-making—by which I mean both the making of images, or pictures, and the crafting of public images, or personae.
Each of these figures has built a brand that conspicuously blurs the boundaries between their public image and their allegedly authentic selves. They are quintessential creators of what Banet-Weiser calls “self-branding,” in which the “authentic and commodity are intertwined.” Rockwell focused his art on his own community, often using friends, family members, and neighbors as models. He was also his own subject in self-portraits, including ones of him in the act of making images. Smith often collaborates with family members, borrows autobiographical details for fictional works, and has claimed at times that he is not acting but just “playing himself”—as illustrated by the fact that his character in his first television role, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, shares his name. As a celebrity working primarily in the realms of reality television and social media—and whose fame first emerged from the leaking of a supposedly private sex tape—Kardashian has built her brand on promises of access to her “real” life and family. As Anita Brady argues, few other stars “so readily embody the deliberate curating of self for the lenses of the world’s media” as Kardashian and her clan.
At the same time, these celebrities’ works depict the contingent, mimetic, and collaborative processes with which people—both famous and nonfamous—construct and present their images, troubling the very notion that any “authentic” self even exists. In contrast to assertions that their public and private selves are the same, Rockwell’s, Smith’s, and Kardashian’s bodies of work abound with fictionalized versions of themselves and self-reflexive considerations of the nature of fame itself, and many of these rather “meta” works attend to the Frankensteinian processes by which celebrity personae are assembled and animated. For example, in addition to Rockwell’s famous self-portrait of his self-portrait, his oeuvre is replete with images of people looking in mirrors, getting dressed or applying makeup, preparing for auditions or performances, or considering their own images in relation to those of famous people. Many of Smith’s works center on image makeovers, including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the films Six Degrees of Separation, Men in Black (1997), Hitch (2005), and Hancock (2008)—all of which feature men who, under the guidance of a Pygmalion-like mentor, change their appearance and manners of speaking in order to adopt a new persona and gain entry into a new (largely white) social world. Kardashian has pioneered the genre of the selfie and structured her career around behind-the-scenes access to her image-making processes, including consistent depictions of makeup sessions, wardrobe fittings, and cosmetic and medical procedures. She has also repeatedly imitated other celebrities, including Madonna, Cher, Jackie Kennedy, Aaliyah, and Toukie Smith.
Each of these figures has built a brand that conspicuously blurs the boundaries between their public image and their allegedly authentic selves. They are quintessential creators of what Banet-Weiser calls “self-branding,” in which the “authentic and commodity are intertwined.” Rockwell focused his art on his own community, often using friends, family members, and neighbors as models. He was also his own subject in self-portraits, including ones of him in the act of making images. Smith often collaborates with family members, borrows autobiographical details for fictional works, and has claimed at times that he is not acting but just “playing himself”—as illustrated by the fact that his character in his first television role, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, shares his name. As a celebrity working primarily in the realms of reality television and social media—and whose fame first emerged from the leaking of a supposedly private sex tape—Kardashian has built her brand on promises of access to her “real” life and family. As Anita Brady argues, few other stars “so readily embody the deliberate curating of self for the lenses of the world’s media” as Kardashian and her clan.
At the same time, these celebrities’ works depict the contingent, mimetic, and collaborative processes with which people—both famous and nonfamous—construct and present their images, troubling the very notion that any “authentic” self even exists. In contrast to assertions that their public and private selves are the same, Rockwell’s, Smith’s, and Kardashian’s bodies of work abound with fictionalized versions of themselves and self-reflexive considerations of the nature of fame itself, and many of these rather “meta” works attend to the Frankensteinian processes by which celebrity personae are assembled and animated. For example, in addition to Rockwell’s famous self-portrait of his self-portrait, his oeuvre is replete with images of people looking in mirrors, getting dressed or applying makeup, preparing for auditions or performances, or considering their own images in relation to those of famous people. Many of Smith’s works center on image makeovers, including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and the films Six Degrees of Separation, Men in Black (1997), Hitch (2005), and Hancock (2008)—all of which feature men who, under the guidance of a Pygmalion-like mentor, change their appearance and manners of speaking in order to adopt a new persona and gain entry into a new (largely white) social world. Kardashian has pioneered the genre of the selfie and structured her career around behind-the-scenes access to her image-making processes, including consistent depictions of makeup sessions, wardrobe fittings, and cosmetic and medical procedures. She has also repeatedly imitated other celebrities, including Madonna, Cher, Jackie Kennedy, Aaliyah, and Toukie Smith.
These stars’ bodies of work demonstrate conspicuous attention to not only what fame means but also how. Having become famous, at least in part, by addressing what it means to be famous, these celebrities have created space for considering the citational and performative aspects of all forms of self-making.
Cuprins
Introduction Chapter 1 Six Degrees of Subjectification: Theorizing and Practicing Metonymy Chapter 2 American Queerer: Norman Rockwell and the Art of Queer Feminist Critique Interstitial 1 A Chapter on AIDS Chapter 3 Terms and Conditions: Reflections on and of Black Fame in the Case of Will Smith Interstitial 2 The Eyes Have Had It Chapter 4 Emotional Icons: Digital Culture, Networks of Affect, and Kim Kardashian Epilogue
Descriere
Examines the public images of Norman Rockwell, Will Smith, and Kim Kardashian across mediums and deploys a rhetorical study of celebrity to challenge normative ideas about selfhood.