A Companion to Celebrity

P. David Marshall, Sean Redmond

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781118474921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Companion to Celebrity presents a multi-disciplinary collection of original essays that explore myriad issues relating to the origins, evolution, and current trends in the field of celebrity studies.

• Offers a detailed, systematic, and clear presentation of all aspects of celebrity studies, with a structure that carefully build its enquiry
• Draws on the latest scholarly developments in celebrity analyses
• Presents new and provocative ways of exploring celebrity's meanings and textures
• Considers the revolutionary ways in which new social media have impacted on the production and consumption of celebrity

1
Introduction

P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond

CELEBRITY INTERSECTIONS

Road, Paths, Fields, and Landscapes

From first sentence to last, the writing and editing of this book has taken over 18 months to complete. We have traveled down numerous scholarly roads during this period, making the book stronger, tighter, and more relevant as we did so. Where you start is never exactly where you end up: thinking, drafting, reviewing and revising takes you on different paths, in this instance magnified by the fact that 26 authors have been going through this shimmering, shape-shifting process with us. Celebrity culture doesn't stand still and neither did the volume as we responded to these delirious transformations as they took place while the book was being developed.

One can compare the journey of a collection like this to the trajectory of a young celebrity, seeking to make the right career decision, taking different turns to achieve that singular end. One can compare the development of a collection like this to the mindset of its editors, both of whom come from different academic traditions and who see celebrity culture intersecting in distinct and divergent ways. We have assembled a companion that speaks to academic journeying, that takes seriously the vibrant pulse of celebrity culture, and which addresses in fresh and dynamic ways those celebrity intersections that we see as important and necessary, as they manifest historically and in the folds and flows of the contemporary cultural landscape.

Our introduction is built out of these intersections: we take different turns on what the volume does, and where it might be placed within the fertile fields of celebrity. We hope you enjoy and are stimulated by this companion to celebrity.

P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond

CELEBRITY IN THE ACADEMY

On a very basic level, this is bound to be a fascinating book. After all, the object of study – celebrity – clearly fascinates. The media, in its various guises, are absolutely filled with stories of the famed and celebrated. Online culture in all its many mobile and social media structures continues to use celebrity as the “click-bait” to draw attention and guide the searching user through all manner of content and stories. At the same time, all this activity, all these vignettes on stars and the notorious have generally been seen by cultural critics and audiences alike as the ephemera of culture and history, the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary culture that, like a piece of sea-glass, attracts the eye but we know that in its origins had only a momentary utility that led to its current state as a discarded and forgotten fragment of an object. Celebrity is often then flashy, but in its flashiness – its very “glamour” as Gundle expresses it (2008) – it betrays its temporality in terms of value.

And yet, for a very long time, a culture of celebrity has proclaimed its significance and – though the personalities change – it endures as a remarkable social, cultural, economic and, perhaps surprisingly, political phenomenon. Celebrity circulates through our cultures. It migrates or more accurately invades, sometimes without any resistance by borders and languages. Thus, in 2014 the name Justin Bieber was equally known in China as it was in his native Canada. Celebrities connect to our own identities and our own sense of selves and thereby inhabit an inner-sense of meaning and, occasionally for fans, an outer-sense of proclamation of their personal and collective significance(Redmond 2014). Celebrities are sometimes the conduit for comprehending our world or for someone trying to comprehend cultural values around gender, youth, or class and how these are re-presented through celebrities. Indeed, celebrities operate as a transcendence of categorization in their obvious display of their uniqueness, their singularity and their public visibility and thereby serve as the locus of debate about all forms of cultural codes, etiquette and discussion of what is “normal” and acceptable.

This dialectic of ephemera and very clear value is intriguing and perhaps this puzzling conundrum has operated as a stimulus for the growth of the study of celebrity by academics and intellectuals as much as by popular pontificators. The entirety of this book has been written by university-related academics. They have approached its study from a wealth of directions and disciplines that further identify the impact of celebrity culture. Before we further reveal the contents of this book, it is worthwhile to identify how celebrity has migrated into academic study and how this Companion has led to a collection of the most innovative and current scholarship on a phenomenon that is enduringly fascinating.

Universities and Celebrities: A Long Historical Association

Celebrity culture had invaded many aspects of politics and culture long before academics actually began studying the phenomenon with any degree of intensity, and indeed had invaded the academy by the mid-twentieth century if not earlier. A remarkably understudied area of celebrity study is how universities began using the famous for their own ends. On a basic level, universities have always been in an industry obsessed with impact: they want their individual location to be noticed, their impact and prestige to be recognized and their “work” valued, and thus they have consistently wanted to be attached to those who were most visible in many domains of public activity. Thus, for centuries they have been the place for the provocative lecture and the site of invitation to the most famous literary or performing arts star. Moreover, the drive for fame at universities of the highest level has been collecting winners of prestigious prizes such as Nobel Laureates. Admittedly these attempts at creating attention and fame by universities were couched in other educational, social and cultural values; nonetheless, universities along with many institutions of business, culture, entertainment and politics played in the same arena of a sophisticated attention economy and worked very hard at building prestige and impact through the personalities they associated with it as an institution. Their actions in inviting recognized figures from other professions and other walks of life was a simple and basic form of celebrity cultural production in and of itself as it pulled the person from their place of skill or achievement and into the orbit of the individual university for a celebration and not something directly related to their work or achievement.

In a much more systematic way, the relationship between celebrities and universities was built through the system of honorary degrees and doctorates where the individual university reached out beyond its borders to connect to some prominent individual. It is one of those surprisingly mundane practices of universities that made them less monastic and more “worldly” in their desires and interests. The honorary degree emerged in Oxford and Cambridge in the fifteenth century and parallel processes occurred in many of the European universities in the following centuries ( Heffernan and Jons 2007: 390). In research that explored the use of honorary degrees in Nordic universities, Dhondt explains that the practice was designed to connect the university to the nation and the community through anniversary celebrations; but its expansion in the nineteenth century then was a form of connection outward that made the event richer, particularly in relation to the royalty present. Ultimately, Dhondt explains, “the degrees also acted as relational gifts and expressions of political and cultural relationships, rather than acknowledgment of an individual's academic prowess” (Dhondt 2014: 92). And so even in universities some 200 years ago, nonacademic reasons such as cultural value and visibility were an essential part of the ceremonies that universities produced.

By the twentieth century, the conferment of honorary degrees and doctorates had become standard practice for each graduation in many universities in North America and Europe. For instance, Oxford handed out 1,487 honorary doctorates during the century (Heffernan and Jons 2007: 391). By 1950, both Cambridge and Oxford had standardized their practices and awarded eight to ten a year. What became remarkable was the emergence of stars and celebrities in the pantheon of honorary doctorates, and the practice increased over the twentieth century. Cambridge achieved some notoriety in 1962 by conferring an honorary degree on the film comedian Charlie Chaplin. But this momentary celebration of the popular in universities is dwarfed by the practices of most universities in the United States and the United Kingdom.

By the last three decades of the twentieth century, the award of honorary doctorates to popular music performers, television personalities or film stars was no longer an exception, but a rule. For example, one institution, California State University (CSU), began its practice by awarding John F. Kennedy, often considered the first celebrity politician, its first honorary doctorate in 1962. By the 1990s and 2000s, CSU was handing out awards to the chef Julia Child (2000) and film and TV stars Nicholas Cage (2001), Bill Cosby (1992) and Danny Glover (1997). Although its policy for honorary doctorates was not dissimilar to Cambridge or Oxford – it gave awards to the “distinguished” in particular fields, and the person had to be “widely recognized” – it is clear that the university was drawn to the entertainment industries to produce visible personalities for its convocation ceremonies, and the idea of “widely recognized” trumped any other value.

Some individual celebrities literally collected honorary degrees in a way that gave them the positive visibility similar to film premieres and endorsing perfume. Bill Cosby, a recipient of an honorary doctorate from CSU in 1992 along with literally dozens over his lifetime, received five doctorates between 2009 and 2014 from Marquette, Boston University, University of San Francisco, California Polytechnic, and St Paul's College. This kind of frequency of awards makes university graduations yet another prominent stop or possibility in a managed “attention economy” career. Meryl Streep, clearly an A-list star, received doctorates as early as 1983 from Yale and as late as 2009 and 2010 from Princeton and Harvard respectively: clearly the universities' reputations dovetail beautifully with the actor's credentials. Similarly, Oprah Winfrey received honorary doctorates from the prestigious Princeton in 2002 and Duke University in 2009 (Meyers 2013).

It is also not true that universities avoid controversial celebrities with somewhat dubious reputations. The boxer Mike Tyson received an honorary doctorate from the Central State University in Ohio in 1989, while the controversial cricket player and celebrity Shane Warne was awarded a doctorate for his contribution to cricket from Southampton Solent University in the UK in 2006. When one realizes that the Aerosmith lead-singer Steve Tyler, the “celefiction” (Nayar 2009) star Kermit the Frog, and Kylie Minogue (who was awarded a Doctorate in Health Sciences for her aid in breast cancer awareness by Anglia Ruskin University in the UK) have received these apparently significant honorific awards and achievements (Saunders and Thomas 2011; Douglas and Sastry 2012), it becomes evident that universities have been well aware of the meaning and significance of celebrity far in advance of their legitimizing their study in their disciplines.

Along with the practice of bestowing honorary doctorates, one can see that celebrities were given outside legitimacy in a very similar way by the state and royalty over the same period. Henry Irving was the first actor to be knighted in 1895 (The Speaker 1895), but by the mid-twentieth century, bestowing knighthoods on celebrities became an almost yearly ritual, including Paul McCartney in 1997, Alec Guinness in 1959, Laurence Olivier in 1947, Tom Jones in 2006, and Bono in 2007 (Ranker 2014). Indeed, even France's Napoleonic system of the Légion d'Honneur has been granted to the most famous domestic and international stars of entertainment.

Studying Celebrity – Seriously

In a sense, this book is recognition of the very significance of celebrity within our culture. It is a moment of contemplative reflection on the capacity of the celebrity to migrate and comfortably camp as a way of being in all sorts of dimensions of contemporary life. It is interesting that the university and the state deployed this “power” of celebrity regularly and often; but then again, those in positions of power are perhaps more aware of these different ways in which power and influence manifest and move through cultures and societies.

This book also identifies what could be described as the maturation of a field of study within the academy. The study of celebrity, as becomes apparent in reading the short biographies of our contributors, has emerged in a variety of disciplines that have adv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part One The Genealogy of Celebrity
• Part Two The Publics of Celebrity
• Part Three Celebrity Value
• Part Four Global Celebrity
• Part Five Celebrity Screens/Technologies of Celebrity
• Part Six Emotional Celebrity
• Part Seven Celebrity Embodiment
• Part Eight Celebrity Identification
• Index
• EULA