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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Celebrity culture'
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Marshall, P. David. "Celebrity and power : celebrity status as a representation of power in contemporary culture." Thesis, McGill University, 1992. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=39501.
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The dissertation is an investigation of modern subjectivity as it is expressed in the form of celebrities. First of all, it establishes that celebrities are linked to both the development of a democratic culture, where there is an investment in conceptions of the popular will for political and cultural legitimation, and consumer capitalism, where power and subjectivity are intimately connected to the commodity and a consumer identity that is formed through commodities. Secondly, the dissertation establishes that the significance and meaning of the celebrity in contemporary culture are linked to its dual formation by the culture industries and by the audience which embraces and remakes the meaning of the produced celebrity. A critical reading of individual celebrities that have emerged from different domains of the culture industries is conducted which integrates a hermeneutic of intention into a hermeneutic of reception. Thirdly, the work shows how the forms of public subjectivity privileged in the entertainment industries are elemental parts of the construction of the contemporary political leader.The dissertation concludes that the celebrity, along with other forms of public personalities that emerge in the public sphere, is an attempt to contain or embody a certain type of power that is difficult to sustain because of its connection to mass sentiment and supposed forms of irrationality. The celebrity then is the continual attempt to embody this affective power in contemporary political and popular culture.
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Levitt, Linda. "Hollywood Forever: Culture, Celebrity, and the Cemetery." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2008. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0002416.
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Kearney, Hemma. "The myth of celebrity." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2020. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/198025/1/Hemma_Kearney_Thesis.pdf.
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The Myth of Celebrity is a creative practice research project that undertakes a detailed analysis of American singer Katy Perry and exhibits the findings in a short documentary script. Using an interdisciplinary approach from creative industries and psychology, the research uses Perry as a sample case study to address issues of persona underpinning celebrity identity and the duality that occurs in the celebrity's public presentation to society. The research explores issues of authenticity or inauthenticity within celebrity culture.
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Thapthiang, Nuwan. "Thai celebrity culture and the Bangkok teenage audience." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/7671.
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This study explores the media reception patterns and impact of celebrity culture on identity construction of Bangkok teenagers. The hypothesis is that audiences do not necessarily decode identical media messages in the same way as encoded. Bangkok teenagers with different ages and genders are likely to read texts regarding celebrities differently. Celebrities may not influence all teenage audiences to a significant degree and, for affected teenagers, the degree of influence may differ. Celebrities may act as good or as bad role models. This study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods including (1) preliminary survey, (2) analysis of media content from quantitative and qualitative points of view, and (3) focus group discussions with different categories of Bangkok teenagers. These evolved around a selection of media items related to issues of fashion, substance abuse, and sexuality. The findings provided evidence that the meanings the young audiences derived from the celebrity coverage did not always coincide with those encoded by the media and that often alternative readings were generated alongside the preferred reading. Cultural ideologies and social environment were found to be the most significant factors impacting the text decoding. This investigation did not corroborate the popular belief that Bangkok teenagers were uncritical victims of media coverage. Data confirmed that they are critical and active media users and the extent to which their behavior is shaped by the media is relatively limited. Celebrity culture did not seem to influence Bangkok youth to an extent that can be regarded as socially harmful or culturally detrimental. On the contrary, it had certain positive effects in areas such as education, music, sports, and lifestyles. Peer groups were found to be more influential than celebrities in areas such as substance abuse and sexuality. This project makes contributions to the area of mass communication; audience reception and media effects in particular, and celebrity and youth culture studies.
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Kyllonen, Hanna. "Representations of success, failure and death in celebrity culture." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2012. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/39667/.
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Celebrity is one of the most central shaping and distorting forces in our society. My PhD thesis interrogates the nature of fame in contemporary culture that actively promotes individuality, image, consumerist lifestyles, and the constructed nature of the self. Celebrity culture is marked by a confusion of realms between public and private, talent and manufacture, and image and the ‘real self.' The thesis examines representations of success, failure and death in celebrity culture during the period between the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 and the end of year 2010. The thesis provides an analysis based on feminist thought through reading individual celebrities' narratives. The emphasis is on looking at fame as a process of success and failure, as represented in auto/biographies and the media. The thesis considers how media representations change the perception of celebrities and also how celebrities themselves affect these representations through confessional discourse, autobiographies, self-promotion, and image construction. Therefore, the thesis will analyse how success, failure and death are represented through individual celebrities' narratives, using case studies to examine both confessional and biographical/autobiographical discourses and media discourses. The emphasis is on tabloid media and an examination of the continuities between success, failure and death, revealing how representations of celebrity rely on narrative, sensationalism and the personal realm instead of facts, objectivity and the public sphere. The thesis pays particular attention to the analysis of the gendered nature of celebrity autobiographies with the aim of revealing how modern celebrity autobiographies confuse traditional gender boundaries. There is a new, decidedly negative side to celebrity culture, particularly evident in the media's emphasis on failure, scandal and death, reactions to which often take a nasty, bullying tone. The methods used by celebrities to deal with fame are varied and compelling and may offer us insights into how lives are negotiated in contemporary society.
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Swift, Jacqueline. "Secrets, shame and forgiveness in celebrity culture and literature." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2015. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/1704.
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This thesis comprises a novel written for a general readership and an accompanying essay, both of which explore secrets and lies, shame and guilt, and confession and forgiveness in relation to celebrity culture and literature.
The novel, ‘Ophelia’, explores the notion that, beneath the surface of many lives, there may be thoughts and events people are ashamed of and wish to keep hidden. The revelation of secrets can have both expected and unexpected consequences. The novel focuses on the experiences of a woman who creates different identities and lives vastly different lifestyles at different times. When exposed, she must confront her shame and loss and ask others for forgiveness. The novel depicts the effects of her concealment on a small group of characters whose identities and relationships are challenged by her revelations. It questions the role of ‘truth’ in relationships and why people lie, including to those they claim to love, and it asks whether love can exist alongside lies, and to what extent it is possible to know another person. In addition, it examines different modes of celebrity, the role of the media in exposing celebrity scandals, and audience expectation and ambivalence in response to public confession.
The essay discusses the genesis and development of ‘Ophelia’ together with critical literature relevant to its key themes—keeping secrets and telling lies; shame, confession and forgiveness; and celebrity culture, including the relationship of celebrity and fan and the role and impact of the media, especially during a scandal. The essay refers to contemporary and historical examples of celebrity scandal, fabrication and confession, including the stories of two stars from the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood.
I propose that characters in novels are not forgiven as readily as celebrities, and that cultural and sexual transgression by a female character often results in her isolation, death or both. Three novels were chosen as case studies: Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Each has a female protagonist who is or becomes a mother and who carries a burden of secrets and shame. The novels, set in different countries, published in different eras and representing different cultural contexts and expectations, nevertheless share an interest in shame as a potent form of control.
My review of selected literature and celebrity culture suggests that the act of confession is essential to an individual’s concept of self. Confession is fraught as ‘truth’ is hard to speak and to hear. Differences between guilt and shame affect the ability to confess and the likelihood of forgiveness. Guilt arises from a person’s acts, whereas shame concerns who a person is or considers themselves to be, which makes both confession and forgiveness more complex propositions. An important aspect of confession is that it links to the confessor’s desire to find or regain a place in society, although that society might also be revealed as prejudiced, superficial, paradoxical, intolerant or unjust. Novels depicting experiences of guilt and shame can serve to illuminate and interrogate identity formation together with specific cultural beliefs and practices.
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Buckley, Kelly. "'Keeping it real' : young working class femininities and celebrity culture." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2011. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/54207/.
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Through a discourse analysis of several celebrity gossip texts, this thesis argues that the discourses within celebrity culture are highly ‘classed’ and highlights that the little empirical research on female audiences of celebrity gossip magazines does pay significant attention to the category of class. Therefore, this research seeks to explore how young working class women not only negotiate and interact with the ‘classed’ discourses of celebrity culture, but also the role these discourses play in young working class women’s everyday lives and lived experiences. The empirical data demonstrates
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Mole, Thomas Seymour. "Byron's romantic celebrity : industrial culture and the hermeneutic of intimacy." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1983/36823ff2-0435-43b5-be8e-fcc88fdc179b.
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This thesis argues that modern celebrity culture took shape in the Romantic period, and that Byron should be understood as one of its earliest examples and most astute critics. It investigates the often strained interactions of artistic endeavour and commercial enterprise, the material conditions of Byron's publications, and the place of celebrity culture in the history of the self. It understands celebrity as a cultural apparatus structured by the relations between an individual, an industry and an audience, which emerged at a distinct historical moment. In the Romantic period, it contends, industrialised print culture overcrowded the public sphere with named individuals and alienated cultural producers and consumers. Celebrity tackled the surfeit of public personality by branding an individual's identity to make it amenable to commercial promotion, and palliated the sense of alienation by constructing a hermeneutic of intimacy. The thesis investigates Byron's engagement with industrial culture, showing how it empowered and embarrassed him. It considers how changes in his sense of audience while writing Childe Harold's Pilgrimage led Byron to construct the hermeneutic of intimacy in 'To lanthe'. Byron's celebrity included an important visual dimension, which he fostered in his Turkish Tales. The thesis therefore studies the circulation of his image, in authorised and appropriated versions, and the resulting advantages and anxieties for Byron. It argues that when he tried to move his poetry in a new direction with Hebrew Melodies, his attempt was compromised by generic constraints and publishing practices. The legal wrangles of 1816, it contends, made the hermeneutic of intimacy unsustainable. When he returned to Childe Harold, Byron experimented with alternative models of writing and reading. The thesis concludes by considering Don Juan, examining Byron's reading of Montaigne and arguing that the importance of celebrity culture in normalising the modern understanding of subjectivity has been underestimated.
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Leflay, Kathryn. "Consuming football celebrity : the global culture industry, interactive media and resistance." Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 2015. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/20743/.
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This thesis aimed to develop a new framework for exploring football celebrity. Drawing upon and developing Lash and Lury's (2007) model of the global culture industry, it critically explored the extent to which football celebrity can be conceptualized as a commodity image that circulates free from the human being on which it is based (Potolsky, 2006). A commonality and key weakness of studies in the area of sport celebrity is that despite evidence to the contrary, they continue to treat 'celebrity' as a human being with higher status, rather than the commercial entity that it is (Cashmore, 2002). Through the analysis of football celebrity representation and consumption, the study critically investigated the various ways in which the football celebrity commodity is drawn upon as a cultural resource. Amidst discussions about the democratisation of media and assumed levels of audience agency, it particularly interrogated how power is played out in increasingly complex ways in both online and off-line environments (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998).In order to account for the contingency and ambiguity of celebrity, the study used a novel methodological approach, dubbed by Lash and Lury (2007) as 'tracking the object'. Given that this method has not been used previously in the sociology of sport, its use is considered to be a unique contribution to literature. Specifically, this methodological and epistemological approach involved a detailed and critical media analysis of football celebrity in both grass roots and corporate media, including: tabloid and broadsheet newspapers; the documentary Being Liverpool; the social networking site Twitter and alternative fan sites; and Not Just a game and Kickette. In critical response to Beer's (2008) assertion that it is also important to consider the intersection of mediated engagement and its integration into the socio-scape, the researcher also conducted four focus groups in order to explore the ways that football celebrity is drawn upon to make sense of salient social issues and debates. In line with trends within the third generation of audience studies, the thesis aimed to investigate the place of football celebrity in everyday life. This focused specifically on the ways in which the audience drew upon football celebrity as a cultural resource and to what extent their consumption could be considered a form of resistance to dominant discourses of capitalism, gender, race and sexuality. It was argued that there were contradictions in both the representation and consumption of football celebrity. It is demonstrated that, characteristically, it is these contradictory elements that constitute an important aspect of the appeal of the football celebrity resource. It was evident that in the analysis of corporate media in particular, there were clear examples of audience labour as the audience were coopted to create content that could be used for various corporations to make a profit. The analysis of grassroots media did however highlight instances where the audience were clearly active and capable of creating potentially culturally resistant texts. It was suggested that future research should therefore seek to critically analyse texts produced by both grassroots and corporate media.
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Burke, Eliza 1973. "Celebrity anorexia : a semiotics of anorexia nervosa." Monash University, School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies, 2003. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/7602.
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Crewe, Thomas James. "Political leaders, communication, and celebrity in Britain, c1880-c1900." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2016. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.709506.
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Warner, Helen. "'Perfect fit' : industrial strategies, textual negotiations and celebrity culture in fashion television." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2010. https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/32253/.
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Kennedy, Melanie. "Bratz, BFFs, princesses and popstars : femininity and celebrity in tween popular culture." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2012. https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/45684/.
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The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in media output aimed at “tweens” (preadolescent girls), and the expansion more broadly of tween popular culture. This exclusively female preadolescent consumer demographic is seen to emerge alongside a heightened visibility of girls within popular culture since the mid-1990s, and continuing anxieties about girlhood in this intensely mediated environment. However, this burgeoning field has yet to be matched in academic attention. This thesis offers a timely examination of mainstream tween films, television programmes, celebrities and extra-texts from 2004 onwards, including “princess” narratives The Prince & Me (2004, 2006, 2008, 2010) and A Cinderella Story (2004, 2008, 2011), and Disney Channel programming and Original Movies, Hannah Montana (2006-2011) and Camp Rock (2008, 2010). It forges a dialogue between postfeminism, film and television, celebrity, and the figure of the tween, in order to examine how the tween is both constructed and addressed by the films and television programmes that make up tween popular culture. Tweenhood is a discursive construction emerging in the mid-1990s and coming to cultural prominence in the early twenty-first century. The tween is understood to be defined by her transitional status, her “becoming”-woman; as such, the texts that make up tween popular culture can be seen to guide the tween in her development of an “appropriately” feminine and (post)feminist identity through a rhetoric of “choice”. Such identities are predicated on revealing and maintaining an “authentic” self. The need to develop an “appropriately” feminine and (post) feminist identity whilst remaining “authentic” requires the tween to be the ideal selfsurveilling, transforming subject of neoliberalism. Celebrity plays a central role in tween popular culture, articulating the parallels between “becoming”-woman and “becoming”-celebrity. Through a combination of textual analysis, and broader discursive and contextual analysis, this thesis highlights the centrality of femininity and celebrity to the tween as a figure constructed by the texts that make up tween popular culture. It analyses the ideal tween consumer as projected by the texts. This thesis draws attention to the culturally and academically devalued subject of the construction of tweenhood within a gendered, age-specific popular culture.
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Dodd, Alan. "From stars to celebrities : Hollywood stardom in the age of celebrity culture." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2010. http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=167617.
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This thesis examines the changing nature of Hollywood stardom and how this is informed by an emergent celebrity culture. Through several case studies this study augments older forms of analysis with Bourdieu’s concept of capital to create a new model of stardom that can accommodate recent cultural developments. In chapter one four key forms of capital are identified. After contextualising this new model within the history of classic Hollywood and older academic approaches to stardom in chapter two, the analysis of Nicole Kidman’s star text in chapter three shows how her image has evolved to combine all forms of cultural capital and as such exemplifies an entirely new formulation of the Hollywood film star. Chapter four applies this analysis to the small screen, with the case studies of Michael J. Fox and Sarah Jessica Parker showing how some performers are able to accrue cultural capital by simultaneously working in film and television, establishing television as a legitimate site for Hollywood stardom and its associated capital. In chapter five a case study of Brand Beckham shows how the capital of contemporary celebrity can be effectively deployed in order to generate a similar allure to that of the classic Hollywood star and with it a similar level of Hollywood power. The final chapter examines the simultaneous unravelling of one brand and the creation of another in light of the increasing power of the fan within celebrity culture. A detailed study of Britney Spears’s presence on perezhilton.com highlights the involvement of the audience as producers of her image and demonstrates how new technologies can be used to create an entirely new form of fame for the gossip columnist, which in turn has been appropriated by the Hollywood system as the next site for legitimate fame.
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Goldman, Jonathan E. "The modernist author in the age of celebrity /." View online version; access limited to Brown University users, 2005. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit/3174610.
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Horrall, Andrew James. "Music-hall, transportation and sport : up-to-dateness in London popular culture, c.1890-1914." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1997. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/272587.
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Schwartz, Laurel. "#FLAWLESS: The Intersection of Celebrity Culture and New Media in the Modern Feminist Movement." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2015. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/701.
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People have organized around gender equality in modern America for the last century. However, with the advent of new technology, people largely organize in around social movements in online spaces. This thesis explores the ways in which new media expands a popular understanding of the Feminist movement.
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Vermorel, Fred. "Biography & identity, celebrity & fanhood : researching intersections of avant-garde and popular culture." Thesis, Kingston University, 2011. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/22495/.
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This PhD by publication critically reviews the background, context, and reception of work published from 1978-2008. The work surveyed, comprises popular music biography, texts on art school influenced bohemia and counterculture, and on celebrity and fan culture. The social and cultural context of the work is mapped and methodological and stylistic issues addressed. The origins of the punk aesthetic through the Sex Pistols is charted. The turn in celebrity studies towards a "fan culture" based approach is demonstrated by the publication of 'Starlust' in 1985. Subsequent work on "fan culture" is discussed. Issues relating to researching and theorising popular culture and cultural and design history are debated. Extracts from the publications cited are provided.
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Newman, Sarah Louise. "The celebrity gossip column and newspaper journalism in Britain, 1918-1939." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:30cc8c66-d243-4134-b891-2eb84ce7de2b.
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This thesis analyses the content, tone, form and authorship of the national newspaper gossip column 1918-1939, as a new means through which the qualities of the popular press in this period can be more closely defined. Often dismissed as an example of the sensational, Americanization of early twentieth-century popular culture, the celebrity gossip column has been loosely grouped with the friendly, informal language and bolder formatting of the ‘New Journalism’ of the late nineteenth century and the development of the dramatic ‘human-interest’ stories of ‘everyday life’ in the interwar period (LeMahieu, 1988; Wiener, 1988). Through a comparative study of six newspapers including the Daily Express, Daily Mail and News of the World, I analyse the changing representation of the celebrity subject, and, originally, the shifting character and persona of the gossip columnist. Whereas some historians have analysed the content of newspapers without considering the questions of the newspaper’s production, I analyse newspaper employment records, gossip columnists’ memoirs and their unpublished letters and diaries to define the specific economic, social and cultural circumstances which, I argue, influenced their public portrayal. Also, in examining the unpublished correspondence between editors, proprietors and columnists and the burgeoning print culture of journalistic training manuals and professional memoirs, I provide a history of the press’s professionalization in this period. The national popular press has often been used as a historical source to define national character and national identity in the interwar period (Bland, 2008; Kohn, 1992). By scrutinizing the content and production of the gossip column and particularly the class, behaviour, interactions and subject matter of the columnist, I argue that the gossip column presented a version of ‘Britishness’ that was not so inward-looking and domesticated as so many accounts of interwar Britain suggest.
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Keightley, Keir. "Frank Sinatra, hi-fi, and formations of adult culture, gender, technology, and celebrity, 1948-62." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq25911.pdf.
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Campbell, Alasdair James Islay. "Myth ascendant : issues of culture, media, and identity in the celebrity career of Glenn Gould." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6b53c88e-d9e7-4227-9144-bad890a0d3fc.
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This thesis applies a sociological framework to the North American celebrity career of Canadian pianist and broadcaster Glenn Gould (1932-1982) to account for Gould's iconic status as an artist in modern musical culture. Despite the persistent cultural fascination with Gould, as evidenced in the seemingly endless supply of biographies, films, novels, and fan texts which narrate and celebrate his life and work, modern Gould scholarship has consistently neglected issues relating to his artistic reception. This thesis proposes that the modern Gould phenomenon is productively analysed in terms of the contexts of its historical production in North America, where it first originated. Focusing on the circumstances of Gould's career during his lifetime, it identifies three areas of overlapping conceptual interest that provide the basis for an explanatory account of his modern mythology: i) Gould's relationship to the culture of his time, particularly in Canada; ii) Gould's relationship to the mass media; iii) Gould's relationship to his own artistic identity. This approach is refined through the application of Stuart Hall's 'Circuit of Culture' model, which yields an understanding of Gould's celebrity in terms of the processes of its representation, production, regulation, and consumption. Against this theoretical backdrop, and consistent with the premise of my thesis, I ask some key questions: what was Gould's relationship to Canadian cultural nationalism and, specifically, a nationalist discourse of public broadcasting? How did media institutions brand his image, and for what commercial purposes? How did Gould mobilise understandings of his genius and Canadian identity through his artistic discourse and experimental media self-representations as a 'Northerner' and a technologist? Based on this analysis, the thesis concludes that Gould continues to fascinate because of the unique ideological work performed by his cultural identities, and because of the highly mediated nature of his celebrity. The ubiquity of his image on video-sharing websites and social media platforms is a vindication of his radical belief in the validity of a musical career pursued primarily through the electronic media.
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Serizawa, Molly M. "Dialectic of Celebrity Politics: Identifying Public Personalities and Political Performers in Twenty-First Century America." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2013. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/254.
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‘Celebrity’ has become a growing field of critical inquiry and cultural interest in twenty-first century society. Celebrities embody a host of meanings and engender larger ideological and discursive practices, in which they articulate expressions of social, cultural and political power that attach meaning to public individuals. Beginning with the late-twentieth century, celebrities have come to occupy spaces that exist beyond popular culture platforms, most notably in politics and international diplomacy. In spite of its typical association with superficial discussions of gossip and cheap entertainment, celebrities have become the site of anxiety in a capitalist society. To come to terms with these growing anxieties concerning celebrity and its accoutrements, this thesis explores the embedded complexities and consequences of the celebrity system within the framework of what has dubiously been called ‘celebrity politics.’ Through a detailed examination of this phenomenon, this thesis explores the coalescing spheres of Hollywood and the White House, where ‘celebrity’ and ‘politician’ have become interchangeable monikers. In addition to examining the historical conditions that have given rise to the phenomenon, this study examines contemporary articulations of the ‘celebrity politician,’ focusing on Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn and President Barack Obama. Discussion of these figures is framed by critical theory and media studies to better understand their location within the contemporary Western landscape.
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Stewart, Cori Anne. "The culture of contemporary writers' festivals." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2009. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/31241/1/Cori_Stewart_Thesis.pdf.
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This thesis examines the culture of contemporary writers’ festivals in an international context. In the last five decades writers’ festivals have emerged in cities across the world, and during this time they have expanded their literary discussions and debates to include numerous other topics of broad interest to society. To examine the expanded popularity and function of writers’ festivals, this thesis establishes a new vantage point for theorising the content now typically generated by these events using concepts in urban festivals and public culture research. Importantly, the new vantage point addresses the limitations of current commentary on writers’ festivals which routinely claim they trivialize literature, and more generally, contribute to the decline of public culture.
The thesis presents two case studies: one on the Brisbane Writers Festival in Australia and the other on the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, Canada. The first case study, which focuses on the 2007 Brisbane Writers Festival, illustrates the many overlapping and often conflicting discourses as well as opinions productively discussed and debated at writers’ festivals. Key topic discussed and debated at the Festival include local topics about the host city—its history, literature and politics, as well as broader literary, political and celebrity culture topics. The diversity of topics discussed at the 2007 Brisbane Writers Festival is typical of the majority of writers’ festivals similarly located outside the largest geographic centres of global literary production and circulation, and designated as ‘peripheral’ festivals in this research.
The second case study on Toronto’s International Festival of Authors examines the ways in which the 2006 Festival almost exclusively focussed on literary and celebrity culture discourses, and promoted itself on these terms. The 2006 International Festival of Authors’ discussion and debate of a narrow range of topics is typical of the few writers’ festivals located in global centres of literary production and circulation, and unlike ‘peripheral’ festivals they are not experiencing the same growth in number or popularity. The aim of these ‘international’ Festivals is not to democratise their elite literary beginnings, but rather to promote ‘literature’ as a niche brand for quality writing that is valid on a global scale. This thesis will assert that while all writers’ festivals are influenced by the marketing desires of publishing companies, the aim of international writers’ festivals in marketing to a virtually and globally connected elite literary audience makes them more susceptible to experiencing declines in audience and author participation.
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Marturano, Eric. "Glory-Seeking: A Timeless and Puzzling Craving of the Human Soul." Thesis, Boston College, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/3865.
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Thesis advisor: Christopher ConstasPhilosophers throughout the ages have grappled with the concept of glory-seeking and have offered many different references, analyses, insights, and explanations. Three great thinkers in particular stand out above the rest: Plato, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Paul Sartre. While these three minds span from circa 420 BC all the way up to 1980 AD, they all would agree that glory-seeking certainly matters – they would most likely argue over the following: In what way? For Plato, glory-seeking is an inherent part of the human soul. It matters because it is an essential part of our being. Plato’s model for the soul found in The Republic as well as a comparable illustration in the Phaedrus expresses this claim most thoroughly. Additional support for the idea of glory-seeking being an existing precondition of humanity can be found in other ancient works as well, most notably Homer’s Iliad. A current example is professional athletes in the NFL risking their earning potential in order to play injured. For Hobbes, glory-seeking is a tool to be used for social advantage. It matters because it can be used it for advantage and power. Chapters X and XIII in The Leviathan most critically highlight this sentiment. Further support for the idea of glory-seeking being a weapon in the self-made man’s arsenal can be found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. The largest modern-day example is celebrity culture: the news and entertainment factory so woven into current American culture, which is particularly embodied by the public behavior and lyrics of hip-hop artist Kanye West. For Sartre, glory-seeking provides an answer to existential angst. It matters because it helps us believe that we matter. The Sartre’s philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, as well as his existential novel, Nausea, provide ample evidence of this notion. More support for the idea of glory-seeking as a method of coping with the awareness one’s own existence can be found in Søren Kierkegaard’s The Present Age. Contemporary manifestations include the incessant self-promotion and self-presentation found on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. The goal of this work is to first investigate glory-seeking for Plato, Hobbes, and Sartre and analyze what each thinker has to say on the matter. After that, modern examples and additional input from other relevant philosophers will be assessed within the overall context of glory-seeking for Plato, Hobbes, and Sartre. Finally, after everything has been considered, I will attempt to synthesize all that has been presented thus far while answering the question: Why does glory-seeking matter?
Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2014
Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: College Honors Program
Discipline: Philosophy Honors Program
Discipline: Philosophy
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Cornish, Yvonne. "George Robert Fitzgerald (1748?-1786) and the nature of eighteenth-century celebrity culture : an analysis of the language, character and representation of late eighteenth-century celebrity drawn from literary sources." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.670130.
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Lester, Isabel T. "The Power of Media in the Criminal Justice System: How Celebrity Culture has Affected the Prosecution of Professional Athletes." Scholarship @ Claremont, 2015. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1077.
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This thesis studies the explanation for the media fascination surrounding domestic violence criminal cases of professional athletes, and the reality of the power that the media has on the criminal justice system.
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Patrick, Stephanie. "Leaked Sex and Damaged Goods: News Media Framing of Illicit and Stolen Celebrity Images." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/39372.
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New media technologies are changing the ways that we not only go about our day-to-day lives, but also the ways that we sell and exchange our labor within the capitalist economy. These technologies are shaping how we represent and perceive ourselves and others, as well as the ways in which, as we move about the world, our images are taken and circulated with neither our explicit permission, nor sometimes our knowledge (Dovey, 2000; Toffoletti, 2007). Despite the fact that we can no longer viably opt out of visual or technological culture, there remains a strong rhetoric of personal responsibility when such images are used in ways that are unexpected and sometimes extremely damaging (C. Hall, 2015). The growth in incidences of what Clare McGlynn (2017) calls “image-based sexual violence” cannot be divorced from the economic and cultural shifts that are both challenging and reifying dominant power relations in the early 21st century.
This doctoral thesis examines the economic and social discourses underpinning news reporting on sexual privacy violations in relation to new media technologies and shifting forms of female celebrity. Using empirical methods to collect and sort U.S. and Canadian news articles at a macro level as well as discourse analysis of news reporting at the micro level, I focus on two particular sites wherein new media celebrity, sexual violence/violation, and political economies converge: the celebrity sex tape scandal and the stolen celebrity nude photo. I examine sexuality and privacy violation in an exemplary economic context, looking at how the “leaked” sex tape or image functions in the gendered sexual economy to undermine claims to meritocratic capitalist success. I focus on two moments of crisis: firstly, the pop culture crisis of 2007-2008, coinciding with the global economic recession as well as the growth in new media technology and social media usage, wherein several high-profile female celebrities undergo dramatic and very public “breakdowns” in proper femininity, ranging from the fairly banal “scandal” surrounding a then-15-year-old Miley Cyrus posing semi-nude for Vanity Fair to the more severe and illegal acts of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton (both of whom were arrested for driving under the influence across this time period). Secondly, I examine the moment of crisis signaled by the 2014 iCloud hacking incident wherein hundreds of female celebrities’ personal private nude photos were stolen and circulated online. I analyze the sex “scandals” that are both discursively constructed by, and circulating through, the news at these moments.
The findings point to several notable trends in the contemporary political climate. Firstly, they illuminate the tensions and contradictions in the media’s attempt to reconcile post-feminist sexual “empowerment” narratives with the broader imperatives of neoliberalism, surveillance, and self-commodification. Secondly, this thesis provides a timely analysis of the gendered pathways to success and the gatekeeping that is conducted both within and by the (news) media, which are themselves invested in narratives of meritocracy. Finally, the cynical, meta-commentary circulating in the news reporting on celebrity content – reporting that is increasingly beholden to corporate interests – contributes to the broader erosion of trust in mainstream media. In today’s media environment in particular, studies of heirs-turned-reality stars such as Paris Hilton (whose trajectory is eerily similar to that of U.S. President Donald Trump), are particularly urgent, as are studies that connect the seemingly disparate yet increasingly converging fields of celebrity, journalism, feminism (and sexual violence), and neoliberalism.
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Cirucci, Angela Marie. "FIRST PERSON PAPARAZZI: A SYSTEMATIC ANALYSIS OF IDENTITY AND REALITY IN SOCIAL MEDIA AND VIDEO." Master's thesis, Temple University Libraries, 2011. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/140923.
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Mass Media and CommunicationM.A.
Video games are often thought of as a type of social media, yet social media are not often thought of as a type of video game. Due to the fact that both are media that arguably play a large role in identity formation and perception of reality, this paper argues that social media should be looked at as providing a type of video game experience. While the study is not limited in its scope to teens, they play an important role. This paper explores identity as being social and interactive and also affected by media. The relationship between representation and reality is also explored and applied to the current celebrity culture. Social media and video games are explored through their similarities, including their goals of becoming a hero/celebrity, exemplified in social media through users acting like their own paparazzi. A systematic analysis is conducted to compare research regarding identity and reality in social media and video games since 2005. While similar themes emerged, the way that these themes are studied within video games and social media differ. These gaps in research lead me to four new research area suggestions for social media: mirrors, stereotypes, immersion and definitions. Through these new research areas, I propose five possible future studies.
Temple University--Theses
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Andersson, Jonas. "Pop-culture icons as agents of change? : The roles and fucntions of celebrity activists in peace- and development related global issues." Thesis, Växjö University, School of Social Sciences, 2007. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:vxu:diva-1710.
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The purpose of this study is to examine the possible theoretic and (f)actual role(s) of pop-culture icons in peace and evelopment-related global issues, using the qualitative research methods of text- and discourse analysis. Do pop-culture icons have a role to play at all in this field? If so, what is that role? What are these celebrity activists currently saying and doing on the international development scene and what are their analyses like? What are their current and historical functions? There is support in the academic literature suggesting that celebrity activists can possess vast power resources (scope of influence), (soft) power and (charismatic) authority, which in turn enables them to influence the attitudes and values of (especially young, receptive) people. The findings also show that the most successful celebrity activists have a global reach, as well as access to the international arenas of political power (e. g. the G8 and the World Economic Forum). Celebrity activists seem to be able to "sell" messages in a way that the politicians and officials of today cannot. When they speak, people listen. They further employ a two-level outreach, as they connect with political and economical elite groups as well as with the masses of world citizens in a way that politicians and officials, whose influence is more often limited by traditional nation state boundaries, cannot. I argue that the celebrity activists should be seen as a complement to the civil society and the work of NGO's and INGO's, since it is by further enhancing their work and strengthening their agendas that most of them act.Celebrity activists offer an alternative to the political establishment, which is viewed by suspicion by large groups of citizens, and can play a role in empowerment, inspiration, education, information, awareness raising, fundraising, opinion building and lobbying and function as diplomats, spokespersons, ambassadors, entrepreneurs, convenors and heroic voices.
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Teresa, Carrie. "Looking at the Stars: The Black Press, African American Celebrity Culture, and Critical Citizenship in Early Twentieth Century America, 1895-1935." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2014. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/279172.
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Media & CommunicationPh.D.
Through the development of entertainment culture, African American actors, athletes and musicians increasingly were publicly recognized. In the mainstream press, Black celebrities were often faced with the same snubs and prejudices as ordinary Black citizens, who suffered persecution under Jim Crow legislation that denied African Americans their basic civil rights. In the Black press, however, these celebrities received great attention, and as visible and popular members of the Black community they played a decisive yet often unwitting and tenuous role in representing African American identity collectively. Charles M. Payne and Adam Green use the term "critical citizenship" to describe the way in which African Americans during this period conceptualized their identities as American citizens. Though Payne and Green discussed critical citizenship in terms of activism, this project broadens the term to include considerations of community-building and race pride as well. Conceptualizing critical citizenship for the black community was an important part of the overall mission of the Black press. Black press entertainment journalism, which used celebrities as both "constellations" and companions in the fight for civil rights, emerged against the battle against Jim Crowism and came to embody the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. The purpose of this project is to trace how celebrity reporting in the black press developed over time, distinct from yet contemporaneous with the development of yellow journalism in the mainstream press, and to understand how black journalists and editors conceptualized the idea of "celebrity" as it related to their overall construction of critical citizenship. The evidence in support of this project was collected from an inductive reading of the entertainment-related content of the following black press newspapers over the time period 1895-1935: Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, Cleveland Gazette, Kansas City/Topeka Plaindealer, Savannah Tribune, and Atlanta Daily World. In addition, the entertainment content of Black press magazines The Crisis, The Messenger, The Opportunity and The Negro World was included.
Temple University--Theses
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Sherwood, Dana Whitney. "Integration by Popular Culture: Brigitte Bardot as a Transnational Icon and European Integration in the 1950s and 1960s." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20196.
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This thesis explores the history of European integration in the 1950s and 1960s from a popular cultural perspective anchored to a central figure from the era, Brigitte Bardot, in order to demonstrate that the peoples of Western Europe were engaged in processes of Europeanization that helped legitimize economic and political unions. Yet, official EU policy’s privileging of one (outdated) mode for understanding culture has handicapped alternative interpretations of a common European cultural heritage, failing to embrace a shared popular culture. Bardot is a suitable icon through which to begin an exploration into the diversity and significance of an integrating postwar European popular culture because she was a microcosm of several broad, transnational trends in postwar Europe including the rise of mass mobility, a major shift in European fashions, new gender constructions, and the explicit politicization of popular culture. Her films, career, lifestyle, and representation(s) provide key axes from which one can pivot into interrelated areas of European culture and societies in this era—pop culture; consumer culture; youth culture; mobility culture; media culture; political culture; and gender relations—demonstrating a widely integrating European popular cultural sphere. Within this context, Bardot was representative of broad postwar societal changes, served as a mass diffusion tool in relating these changes to the people of Europe, and functioned as a driving force in creating new transnational popular cultural forms. In addition, Bardot is a figure useful in understanding the relationship between Europe and the United States, while also demonstrating that economics is not separate from culture and popular culture. The Treaty of Rome, ostensibly about economic integration, further enabled the many circulations apparent in Bardot's career—people, goods, information, and ideas—that were already taking place. Furthermore, popular culture was not irrelevant to, or separate from politics and it helps to explain how the escapism and narcissism of European popular consumer culture could generate a rebellious, but sophisticated political consciousness. Western Europe does indeed have a distinct history of shared popular culture, which should be a factor in discussions of ‘Europeanization’ and the legitimacy of the European Union. It is necessary to explore the roots of this shared popular culture so that it does one day form the basis of a longstanding shared popular culture and can become a recognized element supporting the legitimacy of identities in the European Union in more fluid, dynamic ways.
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Rämä, Hanna-Mari. "“Busted!” “...And He's Got a Helluva Explanation for Why” : The Language Use in U.S. Based Online Celebrity Journalism." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Journalistik, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-35550.
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Holmes, Catherine Jane. "Aerial stars : femininity, celebrity & glamour in the representations of female aerialists in the UK & USA in the 1920s and early 1930s." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/27074.
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Female solo aerialists of the 1920s and early 1930s were internationally popular performers in the largest live mass entertainment of the period in the UK and USA. Yet these aerialists and this period in circus history have been largely forgotten by scholars. I address this omission by arguing these stars should be remembered for how they contributed to strength being incorporated into some stereotypes of femininity. Analysing in detail Lillian Leitzel, Luisita Leers and, to a lesser extent the Flying Codonas, I employ a cross-disciplinary methodology unique to aerial scholarship that uses embodied understanding to reinvigorate archival resources. This approach allows me to build on the wider scholarly histories of Peta Tait, drawing important conclusions about the form including how weightlessness is constructed and risk is performed. In the introduction I re-evaluate the nostalgic histories of circus to establish circus’ and aerialists’ popularity in this period, before exploring how engagements shaped careers. Chapter 1 considers the difference in experiencing aerialists in the USA and UK by bringing together previously unrelated data on circus, variety and vaudeville venues. Aerialists made good celebrities because their acts, located above audience members’ heads, challenged the conventional relationship between ticket prices and sightlines. Chapter 2 explores how the kinaesthetic fantasy evoked by experiencing aerial action created glamour and how glamour had the power to reframe femininity in the 1920s. Glamour and celebrity have often been confused and Chapter 3 distinguishes the two before considering what characterises aerial celebrity. Reconfiguring Joseph Roach’s public intimacy as skilful vulnerability allows me to analyse how risk was gendered and performed in relationship to skill. The gendering of risk leads me to consider what in society contributed to aerial stardom by drawing upon Richard Dyer’s argument that celebrities embody a cultural ambiguity. Female aerialists reframed their femininity in a similar way to women who aspired to the modern girl stereotype in wider society. In the final chapter I expand on the activity of the modern girl, comparing strategies used by young exercising women to female aerialists. This enables me to draw conclusions about how witnessing these stars tapped into national ideas of citizenship, and to designate aerialists as the first to use the power of glamour to make muscular femininity acceptable.
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Petersen, Theodore G. "Documenting Dylan : how the documentary film functions for Bob Dylan fans." [Tampa, Fla] : University of South Florida, 2007. http://purl.fcla.edu/usf/dc/et/SFE0001902.
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King, Andrew Stephen. "Marriageability and Indigenous representation in the white mainstream media in Australia." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2007. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/16654/1/Andrew_King_Thesis.pdf.
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By means of a historical analysis of representations, this thesis argues that an increasing sexualisation of Indigenous personalities in popular culture contributes to the reconciliation of non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australia. It considers how sexualised images and narratives of Indigenous people, as they are produced across a range of film, television, advertising, sport and pornographic texts, are connected to a broader politics of liberty and justice in the present postmodern and postcolonial context. By addressing this objective the thesis will identify and evaluate the significance of 'banal' or everyday representations of Aboriginal sexuality, which may range from advertising images of kissing, television soap episodes of weddings, sultry film romances through to more evocatively oiled-up representations of the pinup- calendar variety. This project seeks to explore how such images offer possibilities for creating informal narratives of reconciliation, and engendering understandings of Aboriginality in the media beyond predominant academic concerns for exceptional or fatalistic versions.
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King, Andrew Stephen. "Marriageability and Indigenous representation in the white mainstream media in Australia." Queensland University of Technology, 2007. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16654/.
Full textAbstract:
By means of a historical analysis of representations, this thesis argues that an increasing sexualisation of Indigenous personalities in popular culture contributes to the reconciliation of non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australia. It considers how sexualised images and narratives of Indigenous people, as they are produced across a range of film, television, advertising, sport and pornographic texts, are connected to a broader politics of liberty and justice in the present postmodern and postcolonial context. By addressing this objective the thesis will identify and evaluate the significance of 'banal' or everyday representations of Aboriginal sexuality, which may range from advertising images of kissing, television soap episodes of weddings, sultry film romances through to more evocatively oiled-up representations of the pinup- calendar variety. This project seeks to explore how such images offer possibilities for creating informal narratives of reconciliation, and engendering understandings of Aboriginality in the media beyond predominant academic concerns for exceptional or fatalistic versions.
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Hopkins, Susan. "Pop heroines and female icons : youthful femininity and popular culture." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 1999.
Find full textAbstract:
The thesis suggests much feminist theorising on girls' and young women's relationship to popular culture is limited by a 'moral-political' approach which searches for moral and
political problems and solutions in the consumption of popular images of femininity. The thesis offers a critique of such 'moral-political' interpretations of the relationship between youthful femininity and popular culture. Following thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and
Jean Baudrillard, the thesis opposes the political preoccupation with 'reality' and 'truth'. The study follows Nietzsche's and Baudrillard's notion of the 'Eternal-Feminine' which accepts the necessity of illusion, deception and appearances. Through a close textual
analysis of magazines, films, television and music video, this study offers an aesthetic appreciation of popular culture representations of femininity. The thesis comprises six essays, the first of which explains my Nietzschean inspired aesthetic approach in more detail. The second essay looks at images and discourses of supermodels and model femininity in women's magazines. The third looks at image-based forms of 'girl power' from Madonna to
the Spice Girls. The fourth essay examines the 'Cool Chics' of the pay TV channel TVJ,from Wonder Woman to Xena: Warrior Princess. The fifth essay, 'Gangster Girls: From
Goodfellas to Pulp Fiction' considers the 1990s model of the femme fatale, the bad girl who thrives on moral chaos. The final essay 'Celebrity Skin: From Courtney Love to Kylie
Minogue' suggests some of the most powerful feminine role models of our time have built their careers not on notions of authenticity and truth but rather on the successful management of illusion and fantasy. The essay argues that our social world has outgrown the traditional
moral-political approach which aims to lead girls and young women from 'deceptive''immoral' appearances to moral, 'authentic' 'reality'. The pleasures of popular culture, Isuggest, cannot always be linked to deep meanings but may be drawn from superficial appearances and beautiful surfaces.
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Lighty, Shaun Chandler. "The Fall and Rise of Lew Wallace: Gaining Legitimacy Through Popular Culture." Connect to this document online, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1130790468.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2005.Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [1], ii, 93 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-93).
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DeLouche, Sean. "Face Value: The Reproducible Portrait in France, 1830-1848." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405798734.
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Lindgren, Ida, and Linnea Magnusson. "Influencer marketing i ett modeföretag : En studie om rollen av influencer marketing i ett modeföretags varumärkeskommunikation utifrån ett företags- och konsumentperspektiv." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Företagsekonomi, 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-38627.
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The use of the social media platform Instagram has increased the fastest and has given the opportunity for the phenomenon of influencer marketing to grow in the fashion industry. The increase of influencer marketing has led marketers to understand that a change of focus is needed. Much of the previous research done in the field has focused on what distinguishes or does not distinguish effective use of influencer marketing for a company. Therefore, it is interesting to study the actual role of influencers in a fashion company’s brand communication and this by studying the fashion companies’ choice of influencers and the way consumers perceive the role of influencers in a fashion company. To operationalize the study, a semiotic analysis has been applied where images have been analyzed to answer the purpose of the study from a business perspective. The results from this are the basis for the design of a qualitative method which is then followed up by a quantitative method for answering the purpose from a consumer perspective. The data was collected through the themes formulated with the support of previous research and theories. These were consumption, the consumer’s approach to influencers and belonging to a group and identity. Within the framework of these themes, the study’s findings showed that influencer marketing is beneficial to use for a company in some areas and in others not. The semiotic analysis showed with certain deficits in the match that the companies choose influencers based on the respondents’ preferences and wishes.Användningen av det sociala mediet Instagram är den plattform som idag ökar snabbast och har gett möjlighet för fenomenet influencer marketing att växa fram främst inom modebranschen. Ökningen av influencer marketing har lett marknadsförare till att förstå att det behövs ett fokusskifte. Mycket av den tidigare forskning som gjorts inom området har fokuserat på vad som utmärker eller inte utmärker effektiv användning av influencer marketing för ett företag. Därför är det intressant att studera den faktiska rollen av influencers i ett modeföretags varumärkeskommunikation och detta genom att studera modeföretags val av influencers och på vilket sätt konsumenter uppfattar rollen av influencers i ett modeföretag. För att operationalisera studien har en semiotisk analys tillämpats där bilder analyserats för att besvara studiens syfte utifrån ett företagsperspektiv. Resultaten från denna ligger som grund för utformningen av en kvalitativ metod som sedan följs upp av en kvantitativ metod för att besvara syftet utifrån ett konsumentperspektiv. Datan samlades in genom de teman som formulerats med stöd av tidigare forskning och teorier. Dessa var konsumtion, konsumentens förhållningssätt till influencers samt grupptillhörighet och identitet. Inom ramen för dessa teman visade studiens resultat att influencer marketing är gynnsamt att använda för ett företag i vissa avseenden och i andra inte. Bildanalysen visade med vissa brister i matchningen att företagen väljer influencers utifrån respondenternas preferenser och önskemål.
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Swayne, Holly Lynne. "Star Power, Pandemics, and Politics: The Role of Cultural Elites in Global Health Security." Scholar Commons, 2018. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7581.
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Celebrities have historically served a variety of roles in society ranging from the inspirational to the cautionary, utilizing their platforms of visibility to promote themselves, their work, as well as their social and political causes. This study focuses on celebrities as activists engaging with global health issues, with particular attention to the form this engagement takes, the publicity it receives in the mass media, and the types of global health issues that receive the most celebrity attention. An interdisciplinary approach drawing from theories of power, social movement theory, agenda-setting, and cultural studies is used to achieve greater understanding of underlying components of the framework within which this activism exists.
Guiding this research is the primary question, “How do cultural elites prominent in U.S. media impact global health security?”, where the specific subset of cultural elites examined are the most influential Hollywood celebrity actors in film. A series of secondary research questions provide insight on the multiple dimensions of celebrity influence and impact in the context of global health security. Specifically, how does celebrity activism affect global health security discourses? What “truths” are created by celebrity activism in global health? Finally, are the issues these celebrities are advocating for, the most pressing global health concerns?
Utilizing a mixed-methods approach (quantitative-qualitative-quantitative), I demonstrate the most frequent forms of celebrity engagement with their affiliated global health organizations, as well as the media attention devoted to this engagement in the most prominent U.S. newspapers. Furthermore, I offer empirical evidence of how global health engagement of the most influential celebrities compares to the most pressing global health concerns, as expressed through an analysis of the global health issues that claim the most lives globally. Results demonstrate the most effective application of celebrity resources, and determine whether celebrities can be differently situated for greater impact in global health security overall.
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Park, Sung-Kwon. "The Body in the Mirror: Re-imagining the Hyper-real Experience through Classical Sculpture." Thesis, Griffith University, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10072/366282.
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The definition of the body is uncertain within contemporary culture. This ‘body’ in question is ‘characterised’ by the pervasive and ubiquitous images of our visual culture, where mass media and advanced visual technology have created a highly simulated world. In this simulated world, the body is doubled. In this exegesis, I attempt to explore what the body means in contemporary visual culture by questioning and examining body image and its impact on our ideas of the body. I draw upon Baudrillard’s notion of ‘ hyper-reality’ and have applied it to the body image. This has resulted in my statement that contemporary (body) images in their own right, exterminating the original (body). From this, the notion of ‘the body in hyper-reality’ was formed and became a key concept for this exploration.
In my visual practice, I conceived the idea of juxtaposing the contemporary body image with the classical statue through making an analogy between Baudrillard’s critique of contemporary images and early Christianity’s prohibition of the graven image. By combining the idea with my previous research tool of ‘critical illusion/ambiguity’ (a strategy where illusion or ambiguity is systematically arranged to draw the viewer’s attention and lead them to mediating on a certain issue), I conjured up a strategic device called ‘tactical disguise’ where contemporary body images merge into classical sculptures, pretending to be them. Through this process of disguising, I attempt to place the contemporary body images in the theatrical past, attaining a critical distance, at the same time drawing out discourses arising from the ironic juxtaposition of the two.
Centreing upon this key strategy, my visual practice explored issue such as celebrity culture and idolatry, mass media and voyeurism, the ideal body, surveillance culture, simulation and the body, body image as commodity by experimenting with different types of body image as the subject for statues: images of famous, anonymous, ordinary or simulated bodies.
An attempt to evoke the notion of the body in hyper-reality through visual practice was crystallised in the work, In search of Russell Crowe. In this work, the sculptural object’s interplay with other mediums such as video, performance, and photographs, brought an experimental aspect to the work, increasing the coherence and impact of my studio practice. This at the same time opened up a potential derived from the expansion of medium employed.Thesis (Professional Doctorate)
Doctor of Visual Arts (DVA)
Queensland College of Art
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Lampiri, Maria Marisa. "Political Parody on the Cypriot Twitter. : The case of the parody account of the Minister of Justice of the Republic of Cyprus “Lady Emily Kardashian Duchess of Yiolou”." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Institutionen för konst, kultur och kommunikation (K3), 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-44753.
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This thesis examines how a female politician is being represented in a political parody account on Twitter through a thematic analysis of “Lady Emily Kardashian Duchess of Yiolou” (@edPLOgAQvtTQHJc) Tweets, satirizing the Cypriot Minister of Justice & Public Order Ms. Emily Yiolitis. The analysis of both Tweets and official media outlets, during a fixed period of time, demonstrates how a humorous and at the same time critical act of public discourse, can perform as an expression of political action and a form of activism, which can be approached as a branch of the study of anti-fandom.
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de, Windt Jassir. "Will Beauty Save the World? A historical context study of the Miss Venezuela pageant as a conceivable contributor to communication for development." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-22325.
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In recent years, old-hand development scholars, in the category of Dan Brockington, have expressed their concern over academia’s neglect of the significance of celebrities in the field. As has been the case of an outturn hereof, namely beauty pageants. In the last six decades, Venezuela has positioned itself not only as one of the world's largest exporters of oil but also as one of the leading engenderers of titleholders in international pageantry. The latter, which has resulted in Venezuelans regarding the pageant as a fundamental cultural undercurrent in their collective identity, seems to be a ceaseless manifestation in spite of the country’s worrisome current socio-economic status. Rather than adopting a condescending paradigm towards the Miss Venezuela pageant, it is precisely this vertex of ambiguity that opens the avenue for an interesting development question. After all, if celebrity beauty queens from Venezuela are deemed as part of the nation’s identity, could the pageant, in the same breath, be deemed as a contributor to communication for development? While espousing historical context as an analysing method and in pursuit of David Hulme’s Celebrity-Development nexus and Elizabeth McCall’s four strands of communication for development, this paper presents a qualitative study in which hands-on experts are given a platform. The findings show the evolution of a beauty pageant from a, nearly, nationalist device into a system that is grounded in the Millennium Development Goals and that aims to forge socially responsible beauty representatives that are competent enough to herald purposeful messages.
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Liming, Liu. "Discursive Construction of Chinese Women: Exploring the Multi-perception Discourses of the Reality Show Sisters Who Make Waves." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informatik och media, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-446358.
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This study explores the discursive construction of Chinese women in the Chinese reality show Sisters Who Make Waves, with a special focus on the discursive shifts and their relevance to the wider discourse of and about Chinese women. The analysis is carried out on two levels: the discursive construction of Chinese women in the said reality show and its recontextualisation across other discourses including in the public sphere and semi-private opinions of Chinese women. This research discusses the discursive construction of Chinese women in the Chinese media field and the discrepancy between “top-down” and “bottom-up” discourse. The project uses a multi-layer theoretical framework situated in media and society, gender and media representation, celebrity culture and digital labour to explore the discursive construction of Chinese women. The study applies to the reality show as the primary context, media perceptions as the recontextualising context, interviews with female employees in the Chinese internet industry as the secondary context. In order to investigate the arguments and discursive strategies in different contexts, this study employs a multilevel model of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The findings discover that the said reality show focuses on the topos of age and the topos of beauty. These two main topoi cause different representations of social actors in Chinese media perceptions. As the representatives of female digital labour, the female employees in the Chinese internet industry construct three discursive strategies of self and relate their self-perception to those of other women. Furthermore, the study implies the discursive shifts in the discourse on Chinese women. This thesis contributes to understanding the discursive construction of women in the Chinese context, particularly the media and gender representations in the Chinese hybrid media system. In addition, this study stands outside the Western world and expands the understanding of the topic in a non-western setting.
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Williams, Marise. "Reading O.J. Simpson everyday rhetoric as gift and commodity in I want to tell you /." University of Sydney. SEAFAM, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/713.
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The Bronco Chase and arrest of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman, and his subsequent criminal trial became one of the most captivating, mass-mediated events of the last decade of the twentieth century. Simpson's iconic celebrity status and his race as an African-American inflamed the notoriety of the crime. An insatiable spectatorial desire for Simpson and narratives concerning his alleged involvement in the Brentwood murders engulfed the American public and American culture for thirty-two months. An excessive scrutiny of his identity by the media, law and order professionals and the populace generated a racially charged discursive cacophony. The memoir Simpson published during his remand to raise funds for his defense expenses, I Want to Tell You: My Response to Your Letters, Your Messages, Your Questions, allows for a productive critical study of everyday rhetoric and the commodity fetishism of celebrity. Released in late January 1995, during the first week of the prosecution�s opening statements in the criminal trial, I Want to Tell You was Simpson's first public comment following the nationally televised reading of his suicide note and his spectacular arrest on June 17, 1994. The intercalation of Simpson�s narrative utterance with 108 of the more than three hundred thousand letters he received from June to December 1994 as Los Angeles County Jail inmate 4013970 is a practical manifestation of the use value and exchange value of fame. The reciprocity of the epistolic, the phatic demands of address, the etiquette of fan mail and hate mail, the gift of the written text, vulnerable and resonant, reveal an adherence to the symbiotic dynamic of the celebrity-fan, writer-reader, dyadic relation and its currency. Plying his trade as idol of consumption, as spectacle, as genre, Simpson capitalised on the cultural condition of his name and his face as objects of desire. The racialised flesh of Simpson's African-American male body became a site and a sight for narrative and inscription within a pay-per-view marketplace of reification, prosopopoeia, gazeability and criminality.
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Tay, Geniesa. "Embracing LOLitics: Popular Culture, Online Political Humor, and Play." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Media and Communication, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/7091.
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The Internet, and Web 2.0 tools can empower audiences to actively participate in media creation. This allows the production of large quantities of content, both amateur and professional. Online memes, which are extensions of usually citizen-created viral content, are a recent and popular example of this. This thesis examines the participation of ordinary individuals in political culture online through humor creation. It focuses on citizen-made political humor memes as an example of engaged citizen discourse. The memes comprise of photographs of political figures altered either by captions or image editing software, and can be compared to more traditional mediums such as political cartoons, and 'green screens' used in filmmaking. Popular culture is often used as a 'common language' to communicate meanings in these texts. This thesis thus examines the relationship between political and popular culture. It also discusses the value of 'affinity spaces', which actively encourage users to participate in creating and sharing the humorous political texts. Some examples of the political humor memes include: the subversion of Vladimir Putin's power by poking fun at his masculine characteristics through acts similar to fanfiction, celebrating Barack Obama’s love of Star Wars, comparing a candid photograph of John McCain to fictional nonhuman creatures such as zombies using photomanipulation, and the wide variety of immediate responses to Osama bin Laden's death. This thesis argues that much of the idiosyncratic nature of the political humor memes comes from a motivation that lies in non-serious play, though they can potentially offer legitimate political criticism through the myths 'poached' from popular culture.
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Lyons, Reneé C. "Celebrate Hispanic Culture with Pura Belpré Award Winners." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2015. https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu-works/2378.
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Fay, Sarah. "The American tradition of the literary interview, 1840-1956 : a cultural history." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1596.
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"The American Tradition of the Literary Interview 1840 - 1956: A Cultural History" is the first study to document the development of the literary interview in the United States. A handful of critics have discussed the literary interview and traced it back to various European cultural traditions; however, I argue that, like the interview, which the British journalist William Stead wrote "was a distinctly American invention," the literary interview was a particularly American form. Drawing on archival research and new readings of primary sources, this project examines the literary interview's systemic growth and formal characteristics between 1842 and 1956. I trace connections among the American press, culture, and literary marketplace to offer an as-yet unwritten history of the literary interview. During Charles Dickens's 1842 North American tour, the first literary interviews were published in written-up, or paragraph form and resembled written snapshots or sketches. As a result of the cult of domesticity and the popular scandals of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the literary interview developed into a slightly longer and more narrative form that focused on an author's surroundings and living quarters. With the rise of yellow journalism and muckraking reporting during the first decades of the twentieth century, the literary interview became a more investigative and intrusive form; yet at the same time, the first in-depth, literary conversations with American authors were published. During the interwar period, the second wave of "girl reporters" and lady interviews transformed the written-up literary interview into a more nuanced form that exhibited rhetorical and literary flourishes. With the development of the New Yorker profile and the Paris Review interview in the mid-twentieth century, the literary interview branched off into two distinct modes: the profile and the author Q & A. This history of the literary interview offers a model of reading mass media communications in terms of both content and form. In doing so, this project chges the critical frameworks that dismiss the literary interview as ancillary to literature and articulate the importance of interviews, communication, and conversation in American culture.
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Gibbs, Levi Samuel. "Song King: Tradition, Social Change, and the Contemporary Art of a Northern Shaanxi Folksinger." The Ohio State University, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1371429829.
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