Celebrity and New Media

Gatekeeping Success

Stephanie Patrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000580136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Feminismus & feministische Theorie

This book looks back to the early days of new and social media, to examine the potential threat that such technologies and platforms posed to the mainstream corporate media's gatekeeping, and its ability to exploit, humiliate, and even violate famous women.

Drawing on her own experiences working as part of this gatekeeping system, Stephanie Patrick argues that, in order to combat this threat, the mainstream media doubled down on gendered narratives of meritocracy that legitimized certain (male) celebrities over others. Using a range of case studies spanning "old" media sites and "new, " including Disney, Playboy, and reality television, this book demonstrates that sexual exploitation and violation could be considered constitutive of female celebrity, rather than a side effect. Patrick's case studies include some of America's most (in)famous celebrities, including Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan, Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, and Donald Trump, urging readers to question their assumptions about these figures and their public trajectories.

This nuanced exploration of patriarchal capitalism and women's ongoing sexual exploitation by the media will be an important reference for scholars and students of digital and new media, journalism, celebrity studies, and gender studies.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003268659-1

Context

Every day across America and Canada little girls decide that they want to be famous when they grow up. They see female celebrities held up as the pinnacle of women’s achievements in our society, and likely imagine that fame and fortune is one route out of the marginalization or minimization that they experience in their own lives. Imagine one such girl’s trajectory. She perhaps starts off acting in a school play or two, loves the experience, and decides to take acting lessons in her spare time. Perhaps as a young woman, after finishing university – or maybe instead of going to university – she jumps into her dream, moves to a big city, and starts checking advertisements for local casting calls. She spots one such ad, placed by an acting and modeling agency, and dials the number. She is invited to come for an “audition” and the receptionist tells her to “dress to impress” (whatever that means). The aspiring actor thinks this might be a break, so she spends her last bit of money on some new clothes and a professional hair stylist. She memorizes a scene and rehearses in her head throughout the day.

When she arrives at the agency, she sees another dozen young women just like her waiting for their own apparent “break.” She tries to chat them up, but they all look at her like she is the enemy; she is the competition after all. She’s never been so intimidated, but she tries not to let it faze her. When it’s her turn, she is greeted in the small room by three men who barely introduce themselves. They ask her for a headshot, but she has none. They inform her that she will need some, of course, but they’ll book the session for her at a low cost of $100…if they decide to take her on. The men leer at her, ask her to turn around for them. They tell her she should have worn a cocktail dress, not a pantsuit. They ask her about her acting experience and smirk when she lists all the classes she has taken. They mention she looks “ethnic” and “exotic,” which can be an advantage – or a hindrance, it really depends on the director, they say more to one another than to her. They tell her they’ll get back to her soon as they usher her out of the room. She does not even perform her scene. When they call her to let her know they are accepting her as a client, they demand $100 for the headshots, an additional $200 for more acting classes (with their own in-house instructor), and, of course, 20% of every gig “they” book for her.

Now, imagine a different system. The young woman has access to portable media technology. Perhaps she uses her camera phone to film her own auditions and upload them onto a website directly available for producers and directors to choose from. Suddenly there are no modeling agents or casting directors to filter the women and serve as gatekeepers. What if young women started writing and producing their own short movies, casting themselves and their friends (who are no longer viewed as competition) in all the roles. Suddenly there is no stream of beautiful young women for producers and directors to choose from (and/or harass and assault). What if instead of short movies, these women are producing beauty tutorials, Instagram fantasy accounts, or starring in reality television shows? What if they decided that acting – an arduous, and often sexist experience – was not nearly as exciting as “being your own boss,” producing and sharing their own media content in formats not even yet imagined?

I myself once had the dream of working in the media industry and succeeded. I worked as a casting associate: the one choosing which women could audition for which role, often judging them by their beauty alone (via headshot – even for voiceover roles!), telling their agents to send them to us “dressed to impress.” I had to ask young women – for they were almost all under the age of 30 – what lengths they were willing to go to for the role: nudity, kissing, sex scenes. I had to listen and nod when they said they would do all of the above, even if only for a bit part in a small movie that no one would ever see. I wanted them to refuse. I wanted them to not need me, to not need to be there in that small room trying to seduce the camera. I wanted more for these women than to be scrutinized, rated, and at the mercy of the men in the room and on set. I wanted to see other kinds of women that weren’t thin, “beautiful,” young, and white (or “exotic”-looking). I decided one day to not be a part of that system anymore. I hope every woman can make that decision eventually; numerous technological advancements have made that more possible than ever. However, those same technologies have often served to humiliate, punish, and undermine women’s efforts to escape this system.

Media is not just a realm of entertainment and make-believe. It is increasingly intertwined with our entire selves: socially, politically, and economically. We can now build online profiles for both dating and job sites. We can “promote” our favorite products to our friends and to groups of total strangers. We can use our webcams and Zoom accounts to connect with loved ones and with potential employers. We can film our pets or kids being silly, and we can film ourselves showing off our make-up skills to others who want to learn. We can argue with our racist uncle on Facebook and we can produce our own podcast where numerous racist uncles come to argue about “cancel culture.”

However, certain uses of technology are deemed improper and worthy of disdain or even punishment, particularly when women are the users. The now-pejorative sense of the term “influencer” speaks precisely to these double standards. When women monetize the online audience they have built for themselves, there is a collective mourning for traditional conceptions of “talent” and “work.” When women show up crying and drunk on our television screens, we blame them – and not the producers who put them there – for the “dumbing down” of our culture. When women take “sexy” selfies, they are vain, superficial, and naïve and not merely conforming (and adapting) to centuries of conditioning to perceive themselves as sexual objects (Berger 1973). When her nude photos are stolen and shared without her consent, it is the woman that is using technology improperly and not the person who violated her trust and privacy.

On the surface, the connections across these issues may seem tenuous: the success of some women depending on them being willing to invest in a system that objectifies, harasses, and exploits them is a separate issue from the ways in which violence is used to humiliate, police, and punish women’s use(s) of technology. This book argues otherwise. Not only are these issues intimately intertwined, but they are also part of a much longer legacy of patriarchal domination and capitalist exploitation that extends beyond the invention of media – and now new media –technologies. A woman’s success in a capitalist society is not only dependent upon her willingness to sell her labor and her sexuality (if she is privileged enough to be considered “desirable”), but also her willingness to settle for receiving only a small portion of the profits that her labor and sexuality generate. When neoliberal capitalism opens up new ways for women to profit from their labor and sexuality, sexual violence steps in to remind them of their “proper” place.

Much like sexual violence functions to police and punish women’s behaviors more broadly, image-based or technology-based sexual violence works to police and punish women’s behaviors in networked and (new) media environments. As noted by numerous feminist scholars, sexual violence – whether physical or mediated – is a tool of patriarchal and white-supremacist control and domination (Davis 1983; Collins 2000; Guillaumin 1995; Harding 2015; Plaza 1981; Projansky 2001). It targets women across all levels of privilege and serves as a reminder that women are always vulnerable to having their bodies and sexuality weaponized against them. Furthermore, and crucially, mediated sexual violence serves as a reminder to women that they are under constant threat of real physical, sexual violence (Guillaumin 1995, 196–200). Yet, as argued eloquently by Karen Boyle (2019, 67–68) in relation to the #MeToo movement and Harvey Weinstein, sexual violence is not only about power and control – it is also, often, about sex and desire. The dichotomy insisting that rape and sexual violence must be separated from desire and (hetero)sexuality has been helpful in feminist critiques of rape culture (particularly the crucial insistence that there is a meaningful distinction to be made between consensual heterosex and coercive sex), but it does not adequately account for the ways in which female sexuality is frequently bartered for power, capital, and visibility in contemporary culture.

The tension between the growing opportunities for (certain) women to barter their sexuality for power, capital, and visibility and the threat of violence used to contain how and when women use those opportunities is exhibited in the debates that unfold when women’s images are stolen and circulated without their consent. Is this an issue of privacy (the body as private property) or of sexual violence (the female body as site of ongoing gendered violence)? Is it reasonable to expect women not to use technology, even in their private, sexual lives? What about in cases where a woman’s livelihood is dependent upon presenting a sexualized image to the world? This book examines some of the power struggles implicated in these debates: what relations between capital, the body, and female sexuality do new media technologies produce? How are these relations embedded in larger systems, such as neoliberal capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy?

Female celebrity is an ideal site in which such tensions could be explored. The celebrity has long been at the center of debates over what is and is not public/private property: does the public have the “right” to access a celebrity (take a photo, approach for an autograph) whenever and wherever they like? When a celebrity sells their body, their image, and their sexuality in exchange for massive amounts of visibility, money, and privilege, do they lose all right to privacy and autonomy? What might new forms of entrepreneurial celebrity in the neoliberal era reveal about the terms of success, and how are those terms gendered, racialized, and classed? In order to think through these questions, I draw on some key insights from feminist materialist analysis, specifically the relations between gender oppression and capitalist oppression (under an increasingly neoliberal regime). I also draw on post-structural theory to unpack certain common, everyday terms that are taken for granted, such as talent, work, scandal, and success.

This book tells a small part of a story that is still unfolding. It is a story of technological developments that, at the very least, destabilize but also potentially democratize the corporate media industry. Yet, technological change does not unfold in a vacuum: there are social, cultural, economic, and political shifts that enable and respond to new technologies. Such contexts are central to this book. Choosing a focal point to this story, however, was not an easy task: particularly as the roots of this story extend back decades, if not centuries, to the origins of both patriarchy and capitalism. While some of those roots are traced in section two of this Introductory chapter, the particular part of the story that this book is telling starts in 2007 and begins with both the fall and rise of two key female celebrities: Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.

I see 2007 as a critical time in America: economically, politically, and culturally. In February of 2007, Illinois State Senator Barack Obama announced his candidacy for presidency of the United States. In 2008, with his election, Obama became the first African American President in U.S. history; the racist backlash against such apparent “progress” would shift the course of American politics for the next decade (and into the foreseeable future). In the fall of 2008, the U.S. stock market crashed after the housing bubble collapsed, sparking a recession with catastrophic effects that are still being felt, particularly amongst the working classes and post-Baby Boomer generations. The economic trends since then have only exacerbated wealth disparity, job insecurity, and growing poverty. Globalization, automatization, deregulation, the “new”/sharing economy and, more recently, a global pandemic have all drastically changed what working itself looks like, let alone who has access to home ownership, security, benefits, and any hope of class mobility in contemporary America and Canada.

Already, in 2007, technological developments were changing our consumption of and engagement with media. In 2007, Facebook and Twitter had recently emerged as popular social media platforms, affecting not only social relations, but also the structures and consumption of celebrity. YouTube, launched in 2005, was not only part of a broader shift in television production and consumption, but was also key in “democratizing” media distribution and star-making, while being at the center of numerous battles over ownership, copyright, and fandoms that continue to plague pop culture (see Jenkins 2006). 2007 was the year the iPhone debuted, and though it was neither the first smart phone, nor the first phone with a two-way facing camera,¹ it signified a broader shift in everyday communication and participatory culture.

However, there were also significant shifts happening in the media more broadly, many of which we are only beginning to have the hindsight to analyze. In 1996, the United States passed the Telecommunications Act: one example of the broader push across Western democratic nations in the 1980s and 1990s to deregulate media companies, allowing for mergers, buyouts...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• PART 1: Old Media, Girl Power
• PART 2: New Media, Old Power
• Appendix
• Index