Download or read book The Politics of Fame written by Eric Burns and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrities can come from many different realms: film, music, politics, sports. But what do all these major celebrities have in common? What elevates them to the status of household names while their equally talented peers remain in relative obscurity? Is it just a question of charisma, or does fame depend more on the collective fantasies of fans than the actual accomplishments of celebrities? In search of answers, cultural historian Eric Burns delves deep into the biographies of some of the most famous figures in American history, from Benjamin Franklin to Fanny Kemble, Elvis Presley to Gene Tierney, and Michael Jordan to Oprah Winfrey. Through these case studies, he considers the evolution of celebrity throughout the ages. More controversially, he questions the very status of fame in the twenty-first century, an era in which thousands of minor celebrities have seen their fifteen minutes in the spotlight. The Politics of Fame is a provocative and entertaining look at the lives and afterlives of America’s most beloved celebrities as well as the mad devotion they inspired. It raises important questions about what celebrity worship reveals about the worshippers—and about the state of the nation itself

Download or read book Celebrity Politics written by Mark Wheeler and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new book, Mark Wheeler offers the first in-depth analysis of the history, nature and global reach of celebrity politics today. Celebrity politicians and politicized celebrities have had a profound impact upon the practice of politics and the way in which it is now communicated. New forms of political participation have emerged as a result and the political classes have increasingly absorbed the values of celebrity into their own PR strategies. Celebrity activists, endorsers, humanitarians and diplomats also play a part in reconfiguring politics for a more fragmented and image-conscious public arena. In academic circles, celebrity may be viewed as a ‘manufactured product’; one fabricated by media exposure so that celebrity activists are no more than ‘bards of the powerful.’ Mark Wheeler, however, provides a more nuanced critique contending that both celebrity politicians and politicized stars should be defined by their ‘affective capacity’ to operate within the public sphere. This timely book will be a valuable resource for students of media and communication studies and political science as well as general readers keen to understand the nature and reach of contemporary celebrity culture.

Download or read book Celebrity as Cultural Authority written by Katherine Margot Bell and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fame is a powerful source of cultural authority in early 21st-century media culture. Celebrities, and celebritizing discourses, are a staple of sanctioned knowledge and an important point of intervention in the study of representation and identity. This project asks how celebrity as a phenomenon frames social issues and how it intersects citizenship and consumer life. Using examples of celebrity philanthropy and activism, it looks at the ways in which the media create and sanction expertise and how celebrity as cultural authority is shifting in the era of new media. One premise of this study is that while celebrity is inevitable, it is also dynamic. I look at how the entertainment, political and media industries work together to produce celebrity and how online media expand the reach and possibilities of mediatized fame. I take on three thematic cases: two explore the use of culture industry celebrity on the "distant" problems of Africa; a third looks at how online media users produce a celebritized cultural authority regarding the domestic issue of homophobic bullying. I employ a cultural studies analysis on campaign publicity and media coverage of these cases. Industry celebrities, from Matt Damon to Madonna, deploy their fame on global problems such as poverty and AIDS; their charitable work, (re)produced unproblematically in the mainstream media, constructs Africa as primitive, exotic and passive. Celebrity is also a commercial transaction; I study Bono's Product RED campaign as a site of branded activism. People buy African-themed items, and the campaign markets the continent and its peoples to consumers as a lifestyle. Yet new media production enables a cultural authority that is not entirely beholden to the blazing spectacle of Hollywood fame. The It Gets Better campaign against homophobic bullying represents a flatter, more dispersed celebrity intervention. It is no less an expression of consumer capitalism, but Web 2.0 celebritization can be deployed to ends not wholly subsumed within the culture industries. This study demonstrates the problematic nature of culture industry celebrity intervention. It suggests that online media celebrity produce problematic discourses as well, yet they have potential to enable a progressive collectivized authority.

Download or read book Claims to Fame written by Joshua Gamson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving from People magazine to publicists' offices to tours of stars' homes, Joshua Gamson investigates the larger-than-life terrain of American celebrity culture. In the first major academic work since the early 1940s to seriously analyze the meaning of fame in American life, Gamson begins with the often-heard criticisms that today's heroes have been replaced by pseudoheroes, that notoriety has become detached from merit. He draws on literary and sociological theory, as well as interviews with celebrity-industry workers, to untangle the paradoxical nature of an American popular culture that is both obsessively invested in glamour and fantasy yet also aware of celebrity's transparency and commercialism. Gamson examines the contemporary "dream machine" that publicists, tabloid newspapers, journalists, and TV interviewers use to create semi-fictional icons. He finds that celebrity watchers, for whom spotting celebrities becomes a spectator sport akin to watching football or fireworks, glean their own rewards in a game that turns as often on playing with inauthenticity as on identifying with stars. Gamson also looks at the "celebritization" of politics and the complex questions it poses regarding image and reality. He makes clear that to understand American public culture, we must understand that strange, ubiquitous phenomenon, celebrity.

Download or read book RuPaul s Drag Race and the Cultural Politics of Fame written by John Mercer and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the connections between drag stardom and contemporary sexual and cultural politics in the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise. With Drag Race alumni achieving fame in fields such as music, fashion, theatre and beyond, this edited collection interrogates the relationships between gender, sexuality, performance, identity and celebrity culture that lie at the very heart of the show. RuPaul’s Drag Race has recently completed its 15th season after having won 26 Emmys. The show is a popular culture phenomenon, broadcasting drag into the homes of middle America, spawning spin off shows and an ever-expanding international franchise. Its success has made global stars of its host, guest judges and contestants alike. This edited collection explores the connections between drag stardom and contemporary sexual and cultural politics that RuPaul’s Drag Race stages and dramatizes. Alumni of Drag Race have gone on to become globally famous. Adore Delano and Sharon Needles have launched music careers. Violet Chachki is the first drag model to become the face of Bettie Page Lingerie whilst Jinkx Monsoon has achieved success as a Broadway star. In 2017 RuPaul was named as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. Above everything else RuPaul’s Drag Race is a show about celebrating the glamour, artifice and the labour of fame. Whilst Drag Race has already attracted scholarly attention (Brennan & Gudelunas eds. 2017) the relationships between gender, sexuality, performance, identity and celebrity culture that lie at the heart of its dynamic and appeal remain to be explored. RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Cultural Politics of Fame will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Media and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Performing Arts, Media and Film Studies, Communication Studies and Sociology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Celebrity Studies.

Download or read book Celebrities heroes and champions written by Simon James Morgan and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrities, heroes and champions explores the role of the popular politician in British and Irish society from the Napoleonic Wars to the Second Reform Act of 1867. Covering movements for parliamentary reform up to and including Chartism, Catholic Emancipation, transatlantic Anti-Slavery and the Anti-Corn Law League, as well as the receptions of international celebrities such as Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi, it offers a unique perspective on the connections between politics and historical cultures of fame and celebrity. This book will interest students and scholars of Britain, Ireland, continental Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, as well as general readers with an interest in the history of popular politics. Its exploration of the relationship between politics and celebrity, and the methods through which public reputations have been promoted and manipulated for political ends, have clear contemporary relevance.

Download or read book Political Fame written by Rose Ellen Temple and published by . This book was released on 1847 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Celebrity Capital written by Barrie Gunter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrities attract the attention of commercial interests and other public figures. They receive payments from sponsors to endorse brands. They are sought out to appear with politicians during election campaigns. They are used to promote health messages. In other words, celebrities are often perceived to possess qualities that give them special value or what we will refer to here as 'celebrity capital'. This means that celebrities are regarded as being able to add premium value to specific objects, events, and issues and hence render these items more valuable or effective. Employing an interesting and new approach to the growing scholarly interest in celebrity culture, Barrie Gunter uses the idea of value as expressed through the term 'capital'. Capital usually refers to the monetary worth of something. Celebrity capital however can be measured in economic terms but also in social, political and psychological terms. Research from around the world has been collated to provide an evidence-based analysis of the value of celebrity in the 21st century and how it can be systematically assessed. Including further reading for students, key points and end of chapter discussion questions, Gunter creates the first methodology to assess the value of fame.

Download or read book Becoming Brands written by Jackie Raphael and published by Waterhill Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Becoming Brands: Celebrity, Activism and Politics explores how celebrities form their brand identities and employ them to enact political, social, and economical change. The book examines the intricate interrelations between power, persona, activism, philanthropy and feminism. Key questions examined by the authors are: how celebrity personas are deployed in on-and-off screen contexts; how on-and-off screen activity impacts on celebrity brand identities; and how consistent messages are conveyed. These questions are explored through case studies including global celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Miley Cyrus, Emma Watson, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Clint Eastwood, Freddie Mercury, and Paul Newman. Additionally, national perspectives are included through exploration of Polish rock-star-turned politician Pawel Kukiz, and feminist Turkish character Driver Nebahat. The aim of this book is to investigate the co-dependent relationship of fame and activism. Whether it is celebrities bringing attention to activism or activists gaining fame, their brand identities can make a difference.

Download or read book Celebrities in American Elections written by Richard T. Longoria and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-09-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a case study approach, Celebrities in American Elections contends that celebrities have the talent, fame, and resources to succeed in electoral politics. These factors account for the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Fred Grandy, Sonny Bono, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Franken, and Donald Trump. However, the author argues that these items are insufficient without a favorable political environment; as many celebrities have lost elections as have won them. They lose because their persona does not match the politics of their time, or they represent the minority party in a one party dominated district or state, or they advocate for unpopular policies. Among those that won, nearly half were elected by a plurality – not a majority – of voters. This does not suggest overwhelming public support for celebrity candidates despite their many advantages. With a few exceptions, celebrities that won tended to also win the fundraising battle, while celebrities that lost tended to raise less than their opponent – the normal laws of politics still apply. The celebrity factor, while helpful, does not fully explain why celebrities win or lose elections.

Download or read book The Performance of Celebrity Creating Maintaining and Controlling Fame written by Amber Anna Colvin and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the study of celebrity across a variety of academic disciplines and time periods, with an emphasis on the ways fame is understood and controlled in the celebrity-audience relationship.

Download or read book Star Power written by Lauren Wright and published by . This book was released on 2019-07 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Are celebrity politics the spice of American public life or a pox on policy progress? This book identifies and measures the attributes of celebrities that make them well-equipped to win campaigns and yet poorly prepared to govern effectively. The framers of the US Constitution worried about the propensity of an undereducated public to elect unqualified entertainers rather than fit characters to government positions. Celebrities have come to play an increasingly central role in the American political process as fundraisers, surrogates, and as candidates themselves, yet remain a sorely understudied topic in political science. Through a multimethod approach that includes qualitative analysis, novel public opinion surveys, and survey experiments, this book assesses whether Americans are more likely to vote for celebrities than well-known traditional politicians and the implications of these preferences for democracy in the US. Perfect for students, scholars, and interested citizens, Star Power looks at the contemporary American political landscape through new lenses of research as well as popular appeal"--

Download or read book Political Fame By Rose Ellen Hendriks afterwards Temple written by FAME and published by . This book was released on 1847 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Celebrity and Power written by P. David Marshall and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The celebrity is an ambiguous figure in contemporary culture. Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, stars represent not only the embodiment of success, but also the ultimate construction of false value. They are a peculiar form of public subjectivity that negotiates the tension between a democratic culture of access and a consumer capitalist culture of excess. Celebrity and Power examines this dynamic, questioning the cultural forces behind our need to become endlessly embroiled with the construction and collapse of celebrities.Through detailed analysis of figures from Tom Cruise to Oprah Winfrey to the commercial pop music sensation New Kids on the Block, author and cultural critic P. David Marshall investigates the general public’s desire to associate with celebrity. He examines various kinds of stars, questioning the needs each type fulfills in our lives and relating these needs to particular entertainment media. Marshall asks why enigmatic, distant stars populate the silver screen while television constructs approachable “everyman” figures and popular music features audience-identified celebrity personalities. He looks at the significance of stars who amass cultlike followings as well as those who appear to prompt outright rejection.Celebrity and Power identifies the forces that have enveloped the development of democratic culture and their partial resolution through a redefined public sphere populated by celebrities. Marshall argues that the new concern with the masses that characterizes modern capitalism promotes figures who can be seen as part of the crowd but who are articulated as individuals. As such, they provide a model of self-differentiation that furthers an economy in which product consumption is thought to bestow individualism and personality.Bridging the fields of media studies, film studies, communications, and popular culture, Marshall’s volume is a unique resource for students and researchers in all of these disciplines as well as for the general reader.P. David Marshall is director of the Media and Cultural Studies Centre in the Department of English, University of Queensland in Australia.

Download or read book The Importance of Being Famous written by Maureen Orth and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vanity Fair's veteran special correspondent pulls back the curtain on the world of celebrity and those who live and die there Vanity Fair's Maureen Orth always makes news. From Hollywood to murder trials to the corridors of politics, this National Magazine Award winner covers lives led in public, on camera, in the headlines. Here she takes us close-up into the world of fame--bridging entertainment, politics, and news--and the lives of those who understand the chemistry, the very DNA, of fame and how to create it, manipulate it, sustain it. Moving from former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to Michael Jackson, the ultimate child/monster of show business, Orth describes our evolution from a society where talent attracted attention to a place where the star-making machinery of the "celebrity-industrial complex" shapes, reshapes, and sells its gods (and monsters) to the public. From divas letting their hair down (Tina Turner) to Little Gods (Woody Allen and Princess Diana's almost father-in-law Mohammed Fayed), political theater (Arnold's Hollywood hubris, Arianna Huffington's guru-guided gubernatorial quest), news-gone-soap-opera (I Love Laci), and even the Queen Mother of reinvention (Madonna as dominatrix/children's-book author), Orth delivers a portrait of an era. The Importance of Being Famous shows us the real world of the big room where the rules that govern mere mortals don't matter--and anonymity is a crime.

Download or read book Framing Celebrity written by Su Holmes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrity culture has a pervasive presence in our everyday lives – perhaps more so than ever before. It shapes not simply the production and consumption of media content but also the social values through which we experience the world. This collection analyses this phenomenon, bringing together essays which explore celebrity across a range of media, cultural and political contexts. The authors investigate topics such as the intimacy of fame, political celebrity, stardom in American ‘quality’ television (Sarah Jessica Parker), celebrity 'reality' TV (I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!), the circulation of the porn star, the gallery film (David/David Beckham), the concept of cartoon celebrity (The Simpsons), fandom and celebrity (k.d. lang, *NSYNC), celebrity in the tabloid press, celebrity magazines (heat, Celebrity Skins), the fame of the serial killer and narratives of mental illness in celebrity culture. The collection is organized into four themed sections: Fame Now broadly examines the contemporary contours of fame as they course through new media sites (such as 'reality' TV and the internet) and different social, cultural and political spaces. Fame Body attempts to situate the star or celebrity body at the centre of the production, circulation and consumption of contemporary fame. Fame Simulation considers the increasingly strained relationship between celebrity and artifice and ‘authenticity’. Fame Damage looks at the way the representation of fame is bound up with auto-destructive tendencies or dissolution.

Download or read book Fame Fortune and Fire written by Susan Estrich and published by Creators Publishing. This book was released on with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With decades of experience on the front lines of law, politics and women’s issues, nine-time author and nationally syndicated columnist Susan Estrich has seen it all. The polarization and upsets in America today rarely surprise her, often seeming like a never-ending bad reality show. But nevertheless, she is relentless in confronting those in power and demanding more from our leaders. In this collection of her 2019 columns, Estrich takes on large-scale issues such as the Mueller report, those under the Me Too microscope, the 2020 presidential race, and President Donald Trump’s impeachment, and articulates them in a personal, relatable manner. Even more impactful are her columns about life, in which she brings readers into her world with refreshing honesty and vulnerability.