Journal articles on the topic 'Famous face naming'

Object It has been hypothesized that specific brain regions involved in face naming may exist in the brain. To spare these areas and to gain a better understanding of their organization, the authors studied patients who underwent surgery by using direct electrical stimulation mapping for brain tumors, and they compared an object-naming task to a famous face–naming task. Methods Fifty-six patients with brain tumors (39 and 17 in the left and right hemispheres, respectively) and with no significant preoperative overall language deficit were prospectively studied over a 2-year period. Four patients who had a partially selective famous face anomia and 2 with prosopagnosia were not included in the final analysis. Results Face-naming interferences were exclusively localized in small cortical areas (< 1 cm2). Among 35 patients whose dominant left hemisphere was studied, 26 face-naming specific areas (that is, sites of interference in face naming only and not in object naming) were found. These face naming–specific sites were significantly detected in 2 regions: in the left frontal areas of the superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyri (p < 0.001) and in the anterior part of the superior and middle temporal gyri (p < 0.01). Variable patterns of interference were observed (speech arrest, anomia, phonemic, or semantic paraphasia) probably related to the different stages in famous face processing. Only 4 famous face–naming interferences were found in the right hemisphere. Conclusions Relative anatomical segregation of naming categories within language areas was detected. This study showed that famous face naming was preferentially processed in the left frontal and anterior temporal gyri. The authors think it is necessary to adapt naming tasks in neurosurgical patients to the brain region studied.

The current investigation measured the effects of increasing stimulus duration on listeners′ ability to recognize famous voices. In addition, the investigation studied the influence of different types of cues on the naming of voices that could not be named before. Participants were presented with samples of famous and Unfamiliar voices and were asked to decide whether or not the samples were spoken by a famous person. The duration of each sample increased in seven steps from 0.25 s up to a maximum of 2 s. Voice recognition improvements with stimulus duration were with a growth function. Gains were most rapid within the first second and less pronounced thereafter. When participants were unable to name a famous voice, they were cued with either a second voice sample, the occupation, or the initials of the celebrity. Initials were most effective in eliciting the name only when semantic information about the speaker had been accessed prior to cue presentation. Paralleling previous research on face naming, this may indicate that voice naming is contingent on previous activation of person-specific semantic information.

Three experiments examined whether famous faces would be affected by the age at which knowledge of the face was first acquired (AoA). Using a multiple regression design, Experiment 1 showed that rated familiarity and AoA were significant predictors of the time required to name pictures of celebrities’ faces and the accuracy of producing their names. Experiment 2 replicated an effect of AoA using a factorial design in which other attributes of the celebrities were matched. In both Experiments 1 and 2, several ratings had been collected from participants before naming latency data were collected. Experiment 3 investigated the accuracy and latency of naming celebrities without any prior exposure to the stimuli. An advantage for naming early acquired celebrities was observed even on the first presentation. The participants named the same celebrities in three subsequent presentations of the stimuli. The effect of AoA was not significant on the fourth presentation. The implications of these results for models of face naming and directions for future research are discussed.

It has recently been suggested that patients with semantic breakdown may show the phenomenon of so-called “naming without semantics”. If substantiated, this finding would clearly have a major impact on theories of face and object processing, all of which assume that access to semantic knowledge is a prerequisite for successful naming. In order to investigate this issue, we studied recognition, identification (the ability to provide accurate information), and naming of 50 famous faces by 24 patients with mild to moderate dementia of Alzheimer type (DA T) and 30 age-matched controls. The DA T group was impaired in all three conditions. An analysis of the concordance between identification and naming by each patient, for each stimulus item, established that naming a famous face was possible only with semantic knowledge sufficient to identify the person. Our data support the hypothesis that naming is not possible unless semantic information associated with the target is available. Naming without semantics, therefore, did not occur in patients with DAT. By contrast, there were 206 instances (17% of the total responses) in which the patients were able to provide detailed, accurate identifying information yet were unable to name the person represented. The implication of these findings for models of face identification and naming are discussed.

Tests of word and face processing were given to patients with complex partial epilepsy focussed on the left or right temporal lobe, and to non-epileptic control subjects. The left TLE group showed the greatest impairment on object naming and on reading tests, but the right TLE group also showed a lesser impairment relative to the normal control subjects on both tests. The right TLE group was selectively impaired on distinguishing famous from non-famous faces while the left TLE group was impaired at naming famous faces they had successfully recognized as familiar. There was no significant difference between the three groups on recognition memory for words. The implications of the results for theories of the role of the temporal lobes in word and face processing, and the possible neural mechanisms responsible for the deficits in TLE patients, are discussed.

Burton and Bruce's (1992) model of face naming predicts a “fan effect”, in which naming of famous people about whom many descriptive properties are known should be slower than naming of celebrities about whom few properties are known. An experiment is reported that showed that, contrary to this prediction, knowledge of many descriptive properties facilitated face-naming latency. An alternative architecture for an interactive activation model is proposed in which descriptive properties are represented in separate pools of units for each domain of information and in which names are represented by a separate pool of lexical output units. Computer simulations showed that this model could simulate the previously available empirical data as effectively as Burton and Bruce's (1992) original model. However, the proposed model could also simulate the effect of the number of known descriptive properties upon face-naming latency observed in the experiment reported. The new architecture also has the advantage of being more compatible with current models of speech production, and it allows preserved access to unique semantic properties in the context of impaired face naming as reported in the neuropsychological literature.

Children aged between 5 and 10 years were shown photographs of familiar TV personalities, presenters, and celebrities for immediate recognition (naming). The pictures were of whole faces, outer features only (hair, chin, ears), or inner features (eyes, nose, mouth). Only the oldest group (9–10 years) resembled adults in recognising these familiar faces more efficiently from internal than external parts. In the youngest children (5–6 years) there were some indications that the outer face features were more salient, particularly when cartoon characters were included in the array.

Abstract This study explores the retrieval of proper names and the sensitivity of this lexical category to the modulatory effect of cognitive reserve in an aging population. Thirty-two elderly patients, undergoing their first neuropsychological evaluation were matched for age and education to thirty-two healthy controls. All participants were administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to measure their global cognitive performance, the Famous Face Naming test to assess proper name retrieval, and the Cognitive Reserve Index (CRI) questionnaire to obtain an index of cognitive reserve. The two groups had comparable CRI total scores, but patients’ performance was worse in both MoCA and Famous Face naming test, compared to healthy controls. Results showed that cognitive reserve predicted global cognitive performance (i.e., MoCA score) in the patients, but not in the healthy participants. Naming proper names was independent from cognitive reserve. This might be due to their lexical nature, which lies in a poor semantic connection between proper names and their bearers.

Surnames of celebrities that are English words (e.g. “Wood”, “Bush”, “Sleep”) were used to explore the relationship between production of common names and proper names that share the same phonology. No effect of priming of face naming latency was found from a prime task in which a written common name was presented and was read aloud, even when subjects were informed the words that they would read aloud were surnames. Production of common names to complete a sentence did not prime famous-face naming. However, the reaction time required to name a famous face by articulating the surname only was primed by seeing the written full name of the celebrity, whether the surname was read aloud or an occupation decision or a familiarity decision was made. No effect of priming was found if the test task did not require name production. The results are interpreted in terms of the information-processing model of face, name, and word recognition proposed by Valentine, Brédart, Lawson, and Ward (1991). It is concluded that the effect of repetition reflects greater accessibility of lexical output codes resulting from an increase in the weight on links from person identity nodes to the output lexicon. Access to the output lexicon is assumed to be mandatory from written input. Common names access the output lexicon from the word recognition system rather than the person recognition system and therefore do not prime face naming latency.

The effects of the frequency of a surname in the population and of the distinctiveness of a face on the latency to name famous faces were explored. Distinctive faces were named more quickly than were typical faces. Celebrities with low-frequency surnames were named faster than celebrities with high-frequency surnames, but only if their faces were distinctive. Subsequent experiments showed that the effect of surname frequency could not be attributed to differences in the articulatory onsets of the surnames and was not present in a task that did not require a naming response. Experiments in which surnames were taught to previously unfamiliar faces showed that familiar surnames (e.g. the surnames of celebrities) were produced more rapidly than were unfamiliar surnames. If familiar surnames were taught, no effect of surname frequency was observed. It is concluded that lexical access to peoples’ names is frequency sensitive—surnames shared by few individuals are accessed faster than are high-frequency surnames. However, when learning names to unfamiliar faces, familiar surnames (i.e. the surnames of people already known to the subject) are learned and accessed more quickly than unfamiliar surnames.

Abstract It was once not uncommon for elements to have more than one name. Tungsten and wolfram. Columbium and niobium. Beryllium and glucinum. The multiple names were generally due to language differences, personal preference, and nationality. These different names were ultimately harmonized into a single set of names after World War II with the development of a standardized nomenclature for inorganic chemistry (IUPAC’s famous Red Book). At the same time, new elements ceased be to found in naturally-occurring substances. Rather, new elements began to be created in accelerators. The advent of synthesized elements raised new questions regarding the discovery of new elements. It also created a new set of challenges for their naming, one of the tasks of the old Commission on Nomenclature for Inorganic Chemistry (CNIC) of IUPAC. As we will see, to face these challenges the CNIC relied successively on the adjudication of the US National Research Council (US NRC) for the naming of promethium in 1948, and then on an ongoing partnership with the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP).

ABSTRACTThe aim of this study was to investigate the impact of aging on the ability a) to name famous faces and b) to access biographical knowledge about famous people from different modalities of presentation (faces and names). Healthy elderly subjects (n = 117) divided into three different age groups were assessed using a semantic memory test of famous people. Results of this study indicate a decline in naming performance between oldest and youngest groups. In contrast, no difference between groups was found in terms of the ability to access semantic knowledge about famous people. Finally, a main effect of modality of presentation (faces vs. names) was found, revealing greater ability to identify famous people in the verbal (names) than in the visual modality (faces). Taken together, results of this study may contribute to developing new cognitive intervention programs in older adults presenting with proper-name anomia.

It is well established that retrieval of names is harder than the retrieval of other identity specific information. This paper offers a review of the more influential accounts put forward as explanations of why names are so difficult to retrieve. A series of five experiments tests a number of these accounts. Experiments One to Three examine the claims that names are hard to recall because they are typically meaningless (Cohen 1990), or unique (Burton and Bruce 1992; Brédart, Valentine, Calder, and Gassi 1995). Participants are shown photographs of unfamiliar people (Experiments One and Two) or familiar people (Experiment Three) and given three pieces of information about each: a name, a unique piece of information, and a shared piece of information. Learning follows an incidental procedure, and participants are given a surprise recall test. In each experiment shared information is recalled most often, followed by unique information, followed by name. Experiment Four tests both the ‘uniqueness’ account and an account based on the specificity of the naming response (Brédart 1993). Participants are presented with famous faces and asked to categorise them by semantic group (occupation). Results indicate that less time is needed to perform this task when the group is a subset of a larger semantic category. A final experiment examines the claim that names might take longer to access because they are less often retrieved than other classes of information. Latencies show that participants remain more efficient when categorising faces by their occupation than by their name even when they have received extra practice of naming the faces. We conclude that the explanation best able to account for the data is that names are stored separately from other semantic information and can only be accessed after other identity specific information has been retrieved. However, we also argue that the demands we make of these explanations make it likely that no single theory will be able to account for all existing data.

AbstractThe paper describes the case of a person (GB) without any clinical evidence of cerebral disease who showed a specific impairment in the retrieval of biographical information, including names, about famous people. This deficit appeared while GB scored normally in different long-term memory tasks, and in object naming tasks. Moreover, he showed no impairment in the structural encoding and the recognition of faces. His specific impairment is interpreted both in terms of Bruce and Young's (1986) functional model of person recognition and in terms of the more recent Burton et al. (1990) interactive activation version of the Bruce and Young model. (JINS, 1995, 7, 589–595.)

Revival takes on many different forms in Muslim societies. This article explores and identifies a ḥadīth discourse of revival, based on a famous ḥadīth and its commentary that promises renewal at the head of every century. Using an inter-textual analysis, it argues that revival was rooted in the first crisis faced by the early Muslim community when the Prophet died and could no longer personally guide Muslims. Across time and place, the discourse of revival confronts this original crisis by naming and renaming it, and offering a resolution. I also suggest that the first crisis was beyond resolution, as according to Muslim belief the prophetic line of succession ended with Muhammad. The discourse of revival thus became potentially recurrent, as resolution was always prone to disruption.

Objective: Memory assessment for the early diagnosis of cortical dementia is a complicated process which depends on important factors such as facial recognition and naming. These factors could be considered to carry a predictive power to detect neurodegenerative disorders. The present study aimed to study and compare naming or recognizing famous faces with the recognition of newly learned faces among patients with Amnesia Mild Cognitive Impairment (AMCI) and Alzheimer’s disease. Method: To collect data, 60 AMCI patients, 62 patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and 63 cognitively healthy individuals were assessed using Wechsler Memory Scale-III Faces test (WMS-III faces) and Famous Faces test. Results: The results of one-way ANOVA indicated that the patients suffering from AMCI and Alzheimer’s disease scored significantly worse than the control group on naming (p < 0.001), recognition (p < 0.001) section of the Famous Faces test, and immediate or delayed recognition on the WMS-III Faces test (p < 0.001). Also, the obtained results showed that the patients groups received lower scores on WMS-III Faces compared to the Famous Faces test. Conclusion: The results of this study suggested that the unfamiliar and Famous Faces tests allow the quantification of patients’ face recognition and name recall abilities which, in turn, makes it possible to make more accurate predictions about cases of dementia. These tests can be used for clinical and research purposes to screen those who may be prone to dementia and need further neuropsychological assessment.

AbstractAlthough putting on a mask over our nose and mouth is a simple but powerful way to protect ourselves and others during a pandemic, face masks may interfere with how we perceive and recognize one another, and hence, may have far-reaching impacts on communication and social interactions. To date, it remains relatively unknown the extent to which wearing a face mask that conceals the bottom part of the face affects the extraction of different facial information. To address this question, we compared young adults’ performance between masked and unmasked faces in four different tasks: (1) emotion recognition task, (2) famous face recognition and naming test, (3) age estimation task, and (4) gender classification task. Results revealed that the presence of face mask has a negative impact on famous face recognition and emotion recognition, but to a smaller extent on age estimation and gender classification tasks. More interestingly, we observed a female advantage in the famous face recognition and emotion recognition tasks and a female own-gender bias in gender categorisation and age estimation tasks. Overall, these findings allude to the lack of malleability of the adulthood face recognition and perceptual systems.

Abstract Focal anterior temporal lobe (ATL) degeneration often preferentially affects the left or right hemisphere. While patients with left-predominant ATL (lATL) atrophy show severe anomia and verbal semantic deficits and meet criteria for semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) and semantic dementia, patients with early right ATL (rATL) atrophy are more difficult to diagnose as their symptoms are less well understood. Focal rATL atrophy is associated with prominent emotional and behavioral changes, and patients often meet, or go on to meet, criteria for behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). Uncertainty around early symptoms and absence of an overarching clinicoanatomical framework continue to hinder proper diagnosis and care of patients with rATL disease. Here, we examine a large, well-characterized, longitudinal cohort of patients with rATL-predominant degeneration and propose new criteria and nosology. We identified individuals from our database with a clinical diagnosis of bvFTD or svPPA and a structural MRI (n = 478). Based on neuroimaging criteria, we defined three patient groups: rATL-predominant atrophy with relative sparing of the frontal lobes (n = 46), frontal-predominant atrophy with relative sparing of the rATL (n = 79), and lATL-predominant atrophy with relative sparing of the frontal lobes (n = 75). We compared the clinical, neuropsychological, genetic, and pathological profiles of these groups. In the rATL-predominant group, the earliest symptoms were loss of empathy (27%), person-specific semantic impairment (23%), and complex compulsions and rigid thought process (18%). On testing, this group exhibited greater impairments in Emotional Theory of Mind, recognition of famous people (from names and face), and facial affect naming (despite preserved face perception) than the frontal- and lATL-predominant groups. The clinical symptoms in the first three years of the disease alone were highly sensitive (81%) and specific (84%) differentiating rATL-predominant from frontal-predominant groups. FTLD-TDP (84%) was the most common pathology of the rATL-predominant group. rATL-predominant degeneration is characterized by early loss of empathy and person-specific knowledge, deficits that are caused by progressive decline in semantic memory for concepts of socioemotional relevance. Guided by our results, we outline new diagnostic criteria and propose the name, “semantic behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia” (sbvFTD), which highlights the underlying cognitive mechanism and the predominant symptomatology. These diagnostic criteria will facilitate early identification and care of patients with early, focal rATL degeneration as well as in vivo prediction of FTLD-TDP pathology.

The advent of the #MeToo movement and the scale of participation in 85 countries (Gill and Orgad; see Google Trends) has greatly expanded debate about the revival of feminism (Winch Littler and Keeler) and the contribution of digital media to a “reconfiguration” of feminism (Jouet). Insofar as these campaigns are concerned with sexual harassment and related forms of sexual abuse, the longer history of sexual harassment in which this practice was named by women’s movement activists in the 1970s has gone largely unremarked except in the broad sense of the recharging or “techno-echo[es]” (Jouet) of earlier “waves” of feminism. However, #MeToo and its companion movement #TimesUp, and its fighting fund timesupnow.org, stemmed directly from the allegations in 2017 against the media mogul Harvey Weinstein by Hollywood professionals and celebrities. The naming of prominent, powerful men as harassers and the celebrity sphere of activism have become features of #MeToo that warrant comparison with the naming of sexual harassment in the earlier era of feminism.While the practices it named were not new, the term “sexual harassment” was new, and it became a defining issue in second wave feminism that was conceptualised within the continuum of sexual violence. I outline this history, and how it transformed the private, individual experiences of many women into a shared public consciousness about sexual coercion in the workplace, and some of the debate that this generated within the women’s movement at the time. It offers scope to compare the threshold politics of naming names in the 21st century, and its celebrity vanguard which has led to some ambivalence about the lasting impact. For Kathy Davis (in Zarkov and Davis), for instance, it is atypical of the collective goals of second wave feminism.In comparing the two eras, Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s is a bridging incident. It dates from closer to the time in which sexual harassment was named, and Hill’s testimony is now recognised as a prototype of the kinds of claims made against powerful men in the #MeToo era. Lauren Berlant’s account of “Diva Citizenship”, formulated in response to Hill’s testimony to the US Senate, now seems prescient of the unfolding spectacle of feminist subjectivities in the digital public sphere and speaks directly to the relation between individual and collective action in making lasting change. The possibility of change, however, descends from the intervention of the women’s movement in naming sexual harassment.The Name Is AllI found my boss in a room ... . He was alone ... . He greeted me ... touched my hair and ... said ... “Come, Ruth, sit down here.” He motioned to his knee. I felt my face flush. I backed away towards the door ... . Then he rose ... and ... put his hand into his pocket, took out a roll of bills, counted off three dollars, and brought it over to me at the door. “Tell your father,” he said, “to find you a new shop for tomorrow morning.” (Cohen 129)Sexual coercion in the workplace, such as referred to in this workplace novel published in 1918, was spoken about among women in subcultures and gossip long before it was named as sexual harassment. But it had no place in public discourse. Women’s knowledge of sexual harassment coalesced in an act of naming that is reputed to have occurred in a consciousness raising group in New York at the height of the second wave women’s movement. Lin Farley lays claim to it in her book, Sexual Shakedown, first published in 1978, in describing the coinage of the term from a workshop on women and work in 1974 at Cornell University. The group of participants was made up, she says, of near equal numbers of black and white women with “economic backgrounds ranging from very affluent to poor” (11). She describes how, “when we had finished, there was an unmistakable pattern to our employment ... . Each one of us had already quit or been fired from a job at least once because we had been made too uncomfortable by the behaviour of men” (11–12). She claims to have later devised the term “sexual harassment” in collaboration with others from this group (12).The naming of sexual harassment has been described as a kind of “discovery” (Leeds TUCRIC 1) and possibly “the only concept of sexual violence to be labelled by women themselves” (Hearn et al. 20). Not everyone agrees that Farley’s group first coined the term (see Herbert 1989) and there is some evidence that it was in use from the early 1970s. Catherine Mackinnon accredits its first use to the Working Women United Institute in New York in connection with the case of Carmita Wood in 1975 (25). Yet Farley’s account gained authority and is cited in several other contemporary radical feminist works (for instance, see Storrie and Dykstra 26; Wise and Stanley 48), and Sexual Shakedown can now be listed among the iconic feminist manifestoes of the second wave era.The key insight of Farley’s book was that sexual coercion in the workplace was more than aberrant behaviour by individual men but was systemic and organised. She suggests how the phrase sexual harassment “is the first verbal description of women’s feelings about this behaviour and it unstintingly conveys a negative perception of male aggression in the workplace” (32). Others followed in seeing it as organised expression of male power that functions “to keep women out of non-traditional occupations and to reinforce their secondary status in the workplace” (Pringle 93), a wisdom that is now widely accepted but seemed radical at the time.A theoretical literature on sexual harassment grew rapidly from the 1970s in which the definition of sexual harassment was a key element. In Sexual Shakedown, Farley defines it with specific connection to the workplace and a woman’s “function as worker” (33). Some definitions attempted to cover a range of practices that “might threaten a woman’s job security or create a stressful or intimidating working environment” ranging from touching to rape (Sedley and Benn 6). In the wider radical feminist discussion, sexual harassment was located within the “continuum of sexual violence”, a paradigm that highlighted the links between “every day abuses” and “less common experiences labelled as crimes” (Kelly 59). Accordingly, it was seen as a diminished category of rape, termed “little rape” (Bularzik 26), or a means whereby women are “reminded” of the “ever present threat of rape” (Rubinstein 165).The upsurge of research and writing served to document the prevalence and history of sexual harassment. Radical feminist accounts situated the origins in the long-standing patriarchal assumption that economic responsibility for women is ultimately held by men, and how “women forced to earn their own living in the past were believed to be defenceless and possibly immoral” (Rubinstein 166). Various accounts highlighted the intersecting effects of racism and sexism in the experience of black women, and women of colour, in a way that would be now termed intersectional. Jo Dixon discussed black women’s “least advantaged position in the economy coupled with the legacy of slavery” (164), while, in Australia, Linda Rubinstein describes the “sexual exploitation of aboriginal women employed as domestic servants on outback stations” which was “as common as the better documented abuse of slaves in the American South” (166).In The Sexual Harassment of Working Women, Catherine Mackinnon provided a pioneering legal argument that sexual harassment was a form of sex discrimination. She defined two types: the quid pro quo, when “sexual compliance is exchanged, or proposed to be exchanged, for an employment opportunity” (32); and sexual harassment as a “persistent condition of work” that “simply makes the work environment unbearable” (40). Thus the feminist histories of sexual harassment became detailed and strategic. The naming of sexual harassment was a moment of relinquishing women’s experience to the gaze of feminism and the bureaucratic gaze of the state, and, in the legal interventions that followed, it ceased to be exclusively a feminist issue.In Australia, a period of bureaucratisation and state intervention commenced in the late 1970s that corresponded with similar legislative responses abroad. The federal Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 1984 to include a definition of sexual harassment, and State and Territory jurisdictions also framed legislation pertaining to sexual harassment (see Law Council of Australia). The regimes of redress were linked with Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action frameworks and were of a civil order. Under the law, there was potential for employers to be found vicariously liable for sexual harassment.In the women’s movement, legislative strategies were deemed reformist. Radical and socialist feminists perceived the de-gendering effects of these policies in the workplace that risked collusion with the state. Some argued that naming and defining sexual harassment denies that women constantly deal with a range of harassment anywhere, not only in the workplace (Wise and Stanley 10); while others argued that reformist approaches effectively legitimate other forms of sex discrimination not covered by legislation (Game and Pringle 290). However, in feminism and in the policy realm, the debate concerned sexual harassment in the general workplace. In contrast to #MeToo, it was not led by celebrity voices, nor galvanised by incidents in the sphere of entertainment, nor, by and large, among figures of public office, except for a couple of notable exceptions, including Anita Hill.The “Spectacle of Subjectivity” in the “Scene of Public Life”Through the early 1990s as an MA candidate at the University of Queensland, I studied media coverage of sexual harassment cases, clipping newspapers and noting electronic media reports on a daily basis. These mainly concerned incidents in government sector workplaces or small commercial enterprises. While the public prominence of the parties involved was not generally a factor in reportage, occasionally, prominent individuals were affected, such as the harassment of the athlete Michelle Baumgartner at the Commonwealth Games in 1990 which received extensive coverage but the offenders were never publicly named or disciplined. Two other incidents stand out: the Ormond College case at the University of Melbourne, about which much has been written; and Anita Hill’s claims against Clarence Thomas during his nomination to the US Supreme Court in 1991.The spectacle of Hill’s testimony to the US Senate is now an archetype of claims against powerful men, although, at the time, her credibility was attacked and her dignified presentation was criticised as “too composed. Too cool. Too censorious” (Legge 31). Hill was also seen to counterpose the struggles of race and gender, and Thomas himself famously described it as “a hi-tech lynching of an uppity black” (qtd in Stephens 1). By “hi-tech”, Thomas alluded to the occasion of the first-ever live national broadcast of the United States Senate hearings in which Hill’s claims were aired directly to the national public, and re-broadcast internationally in news coverage. Thus, it was not only the claims but the scale and medium of delivery to a global audience that set it apart from other sexual harassment stories.Recent events have since prompted revisiting of the inequity of Hill’s treatment at the Senate hearings. But well before this, in an epic and polemical study of American public culture, Berlant reflected at length on the heroism of Hill’s “witnessing” as paradigmatic of citizenship in post-Reaganite America’s “shrinking” public sphere. It forms part of her much wider thesis regarding the “intimate public sphere” and the form of citizenship “produced by personal acts and values” (5) in the absence of a context that “makes ordinary citizens feel they have a common public culture, or influence on a state” (3), and in which the fundamental inequality of minority cultures is assumed. For Berlant, Hill’s testimony becomes the model of “Diva Citizenship”; the “strange intimacy” in which the Citizen Diva, “the subordinated person”, believes in the capacity of the privileged ones “to learn and to change” and “trust[s] ... their innocence of ... their obliviousness” of the system that has supported her subjugation (222–223). While Berlant’s thesis pertains to profound social inequalities, there is no mistaking the comparison to the digital feminist in the #MeToo era in the call to identify with her suffering and courage.Of Hill’s testimony, Berlant describes how: “a member of a stigmatised population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship” (222). It is an “act of heroic pedagogy” (223) which occurs when “a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege” (223). In such settings, “acts of language can feel like explosives” and put “the dominant story into suspended animation” (223). The Diva Citizen cannot “change the world” but “challenges her audience” to identify with her “suffering” and the “courage she has had to produce” in “calling on people to change the practices of citizenship into which they currently consent” (223). But Berlant cautions that the strongest of Divas cannot alone achieve change because “remaking the scene of public life into a spectacle of subjectivity” can lead to “a confusion of ... memorable rhetorical performance with sustained social change itself” (223). Instead, she argues that the Diva’s act is a call; the political obligation for the action of change lies with the collective, the greater body politic.The EchoIf Acts of Diva Citizenship abound in the #MeToo movement, relations between the individual and the collective are in question in a number of ways. This suggests a basis of comparison between past and present feminisms which have come full circle in the renewed recognition of sexual harassment in the continuum of sexual violence. Compared with the past, the voices of #MeToo are arguably empowered by a genuine, if gradual, change in the symbolic status of women, and a corresponding destabilization of the images of male power since the second wave era of feminism. The one who names an abuser on Twitter symbolises a power of individual courage, backed by a responding collective voice of supporters. Yet there are concerns about who can “speak out” without access to social media or with the constraint that “the sanctions would be too great” (Zarkov and Davis). Conversely, the “spreadability” — as Jenkins, Ford and Green term the travelling properties of digital media — and the apparent relative ease of online activism might belie the challenge and courage of those who make the claims and those who respond.The collective voice is also allied with other grassroots movements like SlutWalk (Jouet), the women’s marches in the US against the Trump presidency, and the several national campaigns — in India and Egypt, for instance (Zarkov and Davis) — that contest sexual violence and gender inequality. The “sheer numbers” of participation in #MeToo testify to “the collectivity of it all” and the diversity of the movement (Gill and Orgad). If the #MeToo hashtag gained traction with the “experiences of white heterosexual women in the US”, it “quickly expanded” due to “broad and inclusive appeal” with stories of queer women and men and people of colour well beyond the Global North. Even so, Tarana Burke, who founded the #MeToo hashtag in 2006 in her campaign of social justice for working class women and girls of colour, and endorsed its adoption by Hollywood, highlights the many “untold stories”.More strikingly, #MeToo participants name the names of the alleged harassers. The naming of names, famous names, is threshold-crossing and as much the public-startling power of the disclosures as the allegations and stimulates newsworthiness in conventional media. The resonance is amplified in the context of the American crisis over the Trump presidency in the sense that the powerful men called out become echoes or avatars of Trump’s monstrous manhood and the urgency of denouncing it. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, the name is all. A figure of immense power who symbolised an industry, naming Weinstein blew away the defensive old Hollywood myths of “casting couches” and promised, perhaps idealistically, the possibility for changing a culture and an industrial system.The Hollywood setting for activism is the most striking comparison with second wave feminism. A sense of contradiction emerges in this new “visibility” of sexual harassment in a culture that remains predominantly “voyeuristic” and “sexist” (Karkov and Davis), and not least in the realm of Hollywood where the sexualisation of women workers has long been a notorious open secret. A barrage of Hollywood feminism has accompanied #MeToo and #TimesUp in the campaign for diversity at the Oscars, and the stream of film remakes of formerly all-male narrative films that star all-female casts (Ghostbusters; Oceans 11; Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels). Cynically, this trend to make popular cinema a public sphere for gender equality in the film industry seems more glorifying than subversive of Hollywood masculinities. Uneasily, it does not overcome those lingering questions about why these conditions were uncontested openly for so long, and why it took so long for someone to go public, as Rose McGowan did, with claims about Harvey Weinstein.However, a reading of She Said, by Jodie Kantor and Megan Tuohey, the journalists who broke the Weinstein story in the New York Times — following their three year efforts to produce a legally water-tight report — makes clear that it was not for want of stories, but firm evidence and, more importantly, on-the-record testimony. If not for their (and others’) fastidious journalism and trust-building and the Citizen Divas prepared to disclose their experiences publicly, Weinstein might not be convicted today. Yet without the naming of the problem of sexual harassment in the women’s movement all those years ago, none of this may have come to pass. Lin Farley can now be found on YouTube retelling the story (see “New Mexico in Focus”).It places the debate about digital activism and Hollywood feminism in some perspective and, like the work of journalists, it is testament to the symbiosis of individual and collective effort in the action of change. The tweeting activism of #MeToo supplements the plenum of knowledge and action about sexual harassment across time: the workplace novels, the consciousness raising, the legislation and the poster campaigns. In different ways, in both eras, this literature demonstrates that names matter in calling for change on sexual harassment. But, if #MeToo is to become the last long take on sexual harassment, then, as Berlant advocates, the responsibility lies with the body politic who must act collectively for change in ways that will last well beyond the courage of the Citizen Divas who so bravely call it on.ReferencesBerlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. 1997. Durham: Duke UP, 2002.Bularzik, Mary. “Sexual Harassment at the Workplace: Historical Notes.” Radical America 12.4 (1978): 25-43.Cohen, Rose. Out of the Shadow. NY: Doran, 1918.Dixon, Jo. “Feminist Reforms of Sexual Coercion Laws.” Sexual Coercion: A Sourcebook on Its Nature, Causes and Prevention. Eds. Elizabeth Grauerholz and Mary A. Karlewski. Massachusetts: Lexington, 1991. 161-171.Farley, Lin. Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women in the Working World. London: Melbourne House, 1978.Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Beyond Gender at Work: Secretaries.” Australian Women: New Feminist Perspectives. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1986. 273–91.Gill, Rosalind, and Shani Orgad. “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualisation of Culture’ to #MeToo.” Sexualities 21.8 (2018): 1313–1324. <https://doi-org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.1177/1363460718794647>.Google Trends. “Me Too Rising: A Visualisation of the Movement from Google Trends.” 2017–2020. <https://metoorising.withgoogle.com>.Hearn, Jeff, Deborah Shepherd, Peter Sherrif, and Gibson Burrell. The Sexuality of Organization. London: Sage, 1989.Herbert, Carrie. Talking of Silence: The Sexual Harassment of Schoolgirls. London: Falmer, 1989.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013.Jouet, Josiane. “Digital Feminism: Questioning the Renewal of Activism.” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 8.1 (2018). 1 Jan. 2018. <http://dx.doi.org.elibrary.jcu.edu.au/10.22381/JRGS8120187>.Kantor, Jodi, and Megan Twohey. She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.Kelly, Liz. “The Continuum of Sexual Violence.” Women, Violence, and Social Control. Eds. Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard. London: MacMillan, 1989. 46–60.Legge, Kate. “The Harassment of America.” Weekend Australian 19–20 Oct. 1991: 31.Mackinnon, Catherine. The Sexual Harassment of Working Women. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.New Mexico in Focus, a Production of NMPBS. 26 Jan. 2018. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlO5PiwZk8U>.Pringle, Rosemary. Secretaries Talk. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988.Rubinstein, Linda. “Dominance Eroticized: Sexual Harassment of Working Women.” Worth Her Salt. Eds. Margaret Bevege, Margaret James, and Carmel Shute. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1982. 163–74.Sedley, Ann, and Melissa Benn. Sexual Harassment at Work. London: NCCL Rights for Women Unit, 1986.Stephens, Peter. “America’s Sick and Awful Farce.” Sydney Morning Herald 14 Oct. 1991: 1.Storrie, Kathleen, and Pearl Dykstra. “Bibliography on Sexual Harassment.” Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation 10.4 (1981–1982): 25–32.Wise, Sue, and Liz Stanley. Georgie Porgie: Sexual Harassment in Every Day Life. London: Pandora, 1987.Winch, Alison, Jo Littler, and Jessalyn Keller. “Why ‘Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies’?” Feminist Media Studies 16.4 (2016): 557–572. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1193285>.Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHowLong and #WhereTo?” European Journal of Women's Studies 25.1 (2018): 3–9. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506817749436>.

Reality TV has emerged as a visible site for contemporary debates over modern fame. In fact, while issues of ‘taste’ and cultural value have long since shaped conceptions of celebrity (Turner, Bonner, Marshall 178), the issue of fame has played a central role in the negative cultural criticisms of Reality TV. Reality programming is often invoked as short-hand to illustrate the moral ills of contemporary fame – as if it has somehow swept away the certainties of ‘the past’ where discourses of public recognition, visibility and reward are concerned. In exploring Reality TV as a site of contemporary fame, I examine here some of these claims to ‘transformation’, not so much to defend the form’s participation in celebrity culture, as to indicate that there is more going on here than these (increasingly familiar) critiques appear to suggest. We can note, for example, their tendency to simplify the history of fame (which of course then makes it far easier to situate Reality TV as a conclusive break with the past). Equally, these criticisms seem of limited use when it comes to considering what is clearly a broader cultural fascination with fame in Reality TV. Furthermore, such critiques tend to operate at a very general level, often paying little attention to how fame is actually articulated in Reality TV, and the possibilities of differences between formats. The period 2000-1 saw a number of global reality game shows emerge in the UK and elsewhere and in general terms, critics often foregrounded fame as part of a broader negative response to the use of factual programming as primarily entertainment. The pervasive screen examples of ‘would-be presenters’ or ‘wannabe models’ were invoked as antithetical to perceptions of factual programming’s traditionally more ‘worthy’ (and implicitly public service) agenda (Holmes, “All”). But in the context of fame, it is more appropriate to suggest that a number of critical positions on Reality TV have emerged. For example, in what is probably the most prevalent perspective in circulation, contestants have persistently been constructed as exemplifying, and in many ways accelerating, a shift toward a fame culture in which an emphasis on ‘famous for being famous’ has regrettably triumphed over the concepts of ‘talent’ and ‘hard work’ (Holmes, “All”) (even though this perspective is clearly far from new) (see Marshall 9-11). Second, and related to the emphasis on ‘undeserved’ fame above, has been a position which foregrounds the prominence of falsity and manufacture. Here, Reality TV contestants are seen as falling victim to the manipulative powers of a ruthless fame-making machine. Often yoked to an emphasis on the ephemeral nature of their celebrity, here we encounter cautionary tales about the price of public visibility and the lure of immediate wealth, a penalty when, as one programme put it, ‘instant television fame is over in a dream’ (Tonight with Trevor McDonald, ITV1, 13 Feb. 2004). In contrast, the centrality of the ‘ordinary’ person turned celebrity has been read in terms of democratisation, both in relation to access to the televisual airwaves (a position championed by broadcasters and producers, for example) (Bazalgette) and to the dynamics of public/ media visibility itself (see Biressi and Nunn). These positions clearly intersect, their distinctions largely inflected by the perspective of the observer. For example, what is the producer’s claim to ‘democratisation’ is the critic’s class-based distaste for all these ‘awful ordinary’ people on television (see Bazalgette). While each of these positions is limited and simplistic, collectively they do speak to changing cultural conceptions of fame. Joshua’s Gamson’s (Claims, “Assembly”) work in particular has usefully suggested a picture in which certain positions on, or ‘explanations of fame’, have had a historical significance in vying for cultural visibility (although the contours of these narratives must be swiftly drawn here). With the growth of the arts and technologies and the establishment of celebrity as a mass phenomenon (see Gamson, “Assembly” 261), public visibility became increasingly detached from aristocratic standing, with discourses of democracy – as epitomised by the American context – increasingly coming to the fore. With the Hollywood studio system representing celebrity’s later period of industrialisation, and with a controlled production system producing celebrities for a mass audience, the earlier theme of ‘greatness’ became muted into questions of ‘star quality’ and ‘talent’ (Gamson, “Assembly” 264). While the focus may now have been predominantly on the culture of the ‘personality’, Gamson argues that the primary narrative was still one of ‘natural’ rise (“Assembly” 264). However, what is crucial here is that the increasing visibility of the publicity machine itself gradually began to pose a threat to this myth. Shaped by industrial and cultural shifts such as the decline of the Hollywood studio system and the emergence of television, as well as the increasing growth of celebrity journalism, the second half of the 20th century witnessed the increasing prevalence of the ‘manufacture’ discourse, where it henceforth becomes what Gamson describes as a ‘serious contender’ in explaining celebrity (Claims 44). This is not to suggest that the older ideological myths of fame are entirely obscured but rather that, perhaps as never before, the two positions precariously jostle for visibility in the same space. Indeed, Gamson suggests that by the late 20th century, it was possible to discern strategies intended to ‘cope’ with the increasing potential for disjuncture here. In particular, he points toward the twin devices of the ‘exposure’ of the process and the construction of an ironic and mocking perspective on celebrity culture, both of which can be seen to offer the audience a flattering position of power (Claims 276). In many ways, Reality TV would appear to be paradigmatic of these discursive shifts in fame. While I emphasise the specificity of particular formats below, Reality TV in the form of Big Brother, Pop Idol or celebrity-reality shows (such as I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!), have made a particular claim to ‘reveal’ or ‘expose’ the process of fame construction – whether in terms of following ‘ordinary’ hopefuls from the audition stages to their entrance into the media world, or by claiming to offer us an unprecedented ‘access’ to existing celebrities (‘stripping’ away the celebrity façade). (While of course what Richard Dyer termed ‘the negotiation of authenticity’, or the bid to think in terms of ‘really’, has long since structured the textual mediation of celebrity, it can conceivably be seen to have witnessed an accelerated shift in these contexts.) Equally, in terms of the decline of older myths of fame, these shows exhibit a self-conscious acknowledgement of the process of image production and construction, and the use of celebrity for commercial purposes. Lastly, in mediating the threat of the manufacture discourse, they evidently speak quite explicitly to an emphasis on the ‘power’ of the audience given that, through the now familiar use of interactivity (see Holmes, “But”), they construct the audience as operating as the ultimate creator of the celebrity. This already begins to indicate how, responding to and participating in particular discursive shifts in fame, Reality TV negotiates contemporary discourses on celebrity in complex and contradictory ways. Yet this would also need to acknowledge the differences and specificities of particular formats. For example, Big Brother may well be invoked as the ultimate example of the decline of older myths of fame. The programme does not suggest that a special ‘talent’, or ‘hard work’, are necessary for fame. Indeed, time in the house is clearly organised around an excess of leisured time in which, as the primary antidotes to boredom, eating, sleeping and sunbathing are repetitiously played out before the camera’s gaze. Contestants talk self-consciously about being ‘produced’ as celebrities while in the house (in terms of the programme and wider press coverage), with the understanding that each other’s behaviour and self-presentation is clearly directed to this end. The highly opportunistic and potentially calculating conception of fame is thus self-consciously displayed in the programme itself. In comparison, drawing on the older genre of the TV talent show, the Reality pop programmes such as Popstars (2001, UK), Pop Idol (2001-2, 2003, UK), Fame Academy (2002, 2003, UK) and most recently, The X-Factor (2004, UK) are more explicitly configured around the ‘search’ for a star. In this respect, they are specifically concerned with dramatising a power relationship between music industry and audience, a dialogue which is mapped onto the narrative of the star-making process. Certainly, on one level, they are self-consciously a product of the manufacture era of fame, produced for the scrutiny of a media-aware audience entirely conversant with the concept of ‘image’ construction. In tracking the contestants through auditions, training and re-styling, we witness the open production of the famous self – often trying on different ‘images’ week by week – and the ideological constraints (such as those pertaining to body image or physical appearance) under which this process must take place. The judges equally claim to be representative articulations of the ‘reality’ of the business by foregrounding the importance of image ‘packaging’ and the selling of the self. (As the notoriously ‘nasty’ judge Simon Cowell explains in one edition of Pop Idol, ‘Ten year old girls in Hull have to want to be you… They have to buy into the “image”. Do you see?’) (12 Sep. 2003). In short, they often boldly foreground the capitalistic nature of celebrity production. But at the same time, these programmes clearly draw upon, and arguably engage the audience by, much articulating older myths of fame. Given that, in Gamson’s terms, the pervasive nature of the manufacture discourse ultimately represents a threat to the commercial enterprise of celebrity, these shows provide exemplary evidence of the ways in which the two claims-to-fame stories continue to jostle for cultural legitimacy. Celebrating a mythic emphasis on a unique, authentic and gifted self, there is a persistent bid to lay claim to an indefinable sense of ‘specialness’. Indeed, the phrases ‘you’ve got “star quality” or the “X factor” have become an increasingly self-conscious convention in the shows themselves – as suggested by the naming of the most recent UK format, The X-Factor. In their emphasis on ‘ordinariness’, ‘lucky breaks’, ‘specialness’ and ‘hard work’, they are paradigmatic of the meritocratic ideology of the ‘access myth’ (Dyer, Stars). As Fame Academy’s singing coach Carrie Grant gravely tells the contestants: ‘The only place where “success” comes before work is in the dictionary’ (14 Dec. 2002). In this respect, without the irony or humour that has become such a pervasive aspect of contemporary celebrity coverage (see Gamson, Claims, “Assembly”), the programmes clearly also re-peddle traditional explanations of fame for contemporary cultural consumption (Holmes, “Reality”). Dismissals of these programmes in terms of their promotion of ‘manufactured pop’ ignore the fact that ‘authenticity’ is not really configured around the music itself. Pop music (and particularly TV pop) has historically been configured as ‘the most inauthentic music’ (Moore 220), whether in terms of industrial production, form/ sound, or artist expression and identity. But in many ways the programmes openly acknowledge the derivative and packaged nature of ‘pop’. The aspirant pop stars often sing cover versions on the shows (although they are valued and praised for inserting their ‘individual’ style), and in Pop Idol we witness each of the three finalists record the winning song in the studio prior to the result of the (live) television vote. In this respect, evoking Adorno’s famous critique of popular music’s standardised form, their voice is a cog in a wider machine – a component part which can be substituted and exchanged. But Reality TV’s serial form, aesthetic style and pursuit of ‘the real’, asks us to buy into the authenticity of the self, that the participants are – despite the image packaging – somehow the same person that auditioned at the start. There is often equally the suggestion that Reality TV may bring out the ‘real’, ‘special’ self that was partly inside all along: As one contestant in Fame Academy is chastised after a live performance: ‘We’ve had you showing that you can be Westlife or Bryan Adams, but have we had Barry yet? Where, Barry, is the “Barryness” of Barry?’ (19 Sep. 2003). But in broad terms, with factory workers, waitresses or train drivers turning into superstars, contestants are often imagined as being more ‘authentic’ because of their class background, something which has historically been conceived to signify ‘ordinariness’ within narratives of fame. This is again paradigmatic of the older, traditional discourse of the success myth (and its close companion, the American Dream) (Dyer, Stars). In the Reality format, this is also factored though the sense that we have ‘known’ them in the moment of authentic ‘pre-fame’, when, in short, they were ‘just like us’. In the context of his wider argument that stars work to articulate ideas of personhood or selfhood (Dyer, Stars), one of Richard Dyer’s key interventions was to suggest that stars function to work through discourses of individualism (see also Marshall). Working from a broadly Marxist perspective, he explained how the perpetual attempt to negotiate authenticity in the star image worked to promote a particular concept of personhood on which capitalist society depends. Dyer conceptualised this as ‘a separable, coherent quality, located “inside” consciousness and variously termed “the self”, “the soul”, “the subject”…’ (9). Although, in the context of contemporary celebrity culture and the discourses of postmodernism, Dyer’s model of the self has been critiqued and challenged (see Lovell, King), it by no means seems redundant here. We are absolutely encouraged to seek out, recognise, and believe in, the ‘inner’ self in Reality TV, while the highly performative and mediated context of the form makes this quest more paradoxical than ever. In fact, while programmes such as Big Brother and Pop Idol may display significantly different discourses on, or explanations of fame, this ideology of selfhood permeates much of Reality TV. While in Big Brother there is much self-reflexive and dizzying discussion of ‘who is being their real selves? Who is simply playing up for the camera?’, we are asked to judge the contestants (and they are asked to judge each other), precisely by this criteria of ‘authenticity’. We only need note that – from Big Brother, the pop programmes to the celebrity-reality shows – winners are often chosen and applauded because they are seen to have been the most ‘true’ to themselves. Again, despite the self-reflexive and performative context of Reality TV, this suggests highly conservative ideologies of selfhood and individualism. As Dyer reminds us, we have historically valued stars who appear to ‘bear witness to the continuousness of their own selves’, given that ‘sincerity and authenticity are two qualities greatly prized in stars’ (11). While it is not my intention to make assumptions about audience reading strategies here, it is worth noting that existing audience research (Hill, Jones) into Reality TV has emphasised how viewers indeed obtain satisfaction from the search for ‘the real’ in Reality TV, and from actively negotiating the tensions between construction, performance and authenticity. Annette Hill describes how the ‘game’ is ‘to find the “truth” in the spectacle/performance environment’ (337), and as this quote implies, this is far from suggesting that audiences have given up on the idea of ‘the real’ in Reality TV (Hill, Jones). The primary site on which this is played out is the representation of the self – an arena which stardom and celebrity has historically placed centre stage (Dyer, Marshall). As this suggests, then, the two fields have much to discuss. While I have only touched briefly on the detail of the formats here, this discussion emphasises how Reality TV demands closer consideration in the context of claims suggesting its ‘transformation’ of celebrity. Its position with a longer history of fame, the specificities of particular formats, and the ideological parameters in which they function, all question any simple or homogenous interpretation of its impact on celebrity culture. References Adorno, Theodor. “On Popular Music.” 1941. On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. Eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London: Routledge, 1990. 22-38. Bazalgette, Peter. “Big Brother and Beyond.” Television (Oct. 2001): 20-3. Biressi, Anita, and Heather Nunn “The Especially Remarkable: Celebrity and Social Mobility in Reality TV.” Mediactive 2 (2004): 44-58. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979 (reprinted 1998). Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: BFI, 1986. Gamson, Joshua. Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Gamson, Joshua. “The Assembly Line of Greatness: Celebrity in Twentieth-Century America.” Popular Culture: Production and Consumption. Eds. C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 259-82. Hill, Annette “Big Brother: The Real Audience.” Television and New Media 3.3 (2002): 323-41. Holmes, Su. “’All You’ve Got to Worry about Is Having a Cup of Tea and Doing a Bit of Sunbathing…’: Approaching Celebrity in Big Brother.” Understanding Reality TV. Eds. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn. London: Routledge, 2004. 111-35. Holmes, Su. “But This Time You Choose!: Approaching the Interactive Audience of Reality TV.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.2 (2004): 213-31. Holmes, Su. “Reality Goes Pop!: Reality TV, Popular Music and Narratives of Stardom in Pop Idol.” Television and New Media 5.2 (2004): 147-72. Jones, Janet. “Show Your Real Face: A Fan Study of the UK Big Brother Transmissions (2000, 2001, 2002).” New Media and Society 5.3 (2003): 400-21. King, Barry. “Embodying an Elastic Self: The Parametrics of Contemporary Stardom.” Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. Eds. Thomas Austin and Martin Barker. London: Arnold, 2003. 29-44. Lovell, Alan. “I Went in Search of Deborah Kerr, Jodie Foster and Julianne Moore But Got Waylaid…” Contemporary Hollywood Stardom. Eds. Thomas Austin and Martin Barker. London: Arnold, 2003. 259-70. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Holmes, Susan. "'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?': Conceptualising Fame in Reality TV." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/07-holmes.php>. APA Style Holmes, S. (Nov. 2004) "'The Only Place Where ''Success'' Comes before ''Work'' Is in the Dictionary...?': Conceptualising Fame in Reality TV," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/07-holmes.php>.

The word 'nigger' is arguably the most charged epithet in American English; thus it is surprising that this word has been appropriated by some African Americans to refer to themselves. To be precise, the African-American version of this term is not 'nigger' but 'nigga', a word that has, as Geneva Smitherman notes, "a variety of meanings ranging from positive to negative to neutral" (Black Talk 167). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his study of African-American literature, provides a theoretical foundation for understanding why some African Americans use this word and how it operates rhetorically. Building on Gates's work, I will argue that the co-optation of the slur often involves a complex of three rhetorical devices that fall under the rubric of an African-American rhetorical strategy called Signifyin(g)—a term that will be discussed at length later. The first of these devices is agnominatio, defined as "the repetition of a word with an alteration of both one letter and a sound" (Gates 46). The second, semantic inversion, is the reversal of the meaning of a term (Holt qtd. in Smitherman, "Chain"). Chiastic slaying, the third rhetorical strategy, is a critique that transforms the status of a group or individual.1 Through these three modes of rhetorical transfiguration, the slur 'nigger' becomes 'nigga' a positive term that carries with it a critique of racism. I will further argue that all of these rhetorical devices operate through a principle I term "semantic looping" in which a new term derives meaning by continual reference to an older, existing term. This principle is a key to understanding how Signifyin(g) works in the appropriation of 'nigger' and helps to reveal how, in the words of Michel Foucault, the appropriation is a culturally rooted form of "reverse discourse" (101). Ultimately, this rhetorical analysis reveals that the African-American usage of 'nigga' is a strategy for asserting the humanity of black people in the face of continuing racism, a strategy that celebrates an anti-assimilationist vision of African-American identity. Foucault has argued that while the naming of oppressed groups by those in power serves as an instrument for oppression, such naming can also engender group identification and resistance to oppression (101). The coining of the word 'homosexual', for example, allowed for the repression of gay people but also allowed homosexuals to organise a gay rights movement using the very terminology utilized to oppress them (Foucault 101). One strategy for resisting hostile slurs like 'queer' or 'nigger' is for the oppressed group to appropriate the name and transform it into a rallying cry or "reverse discourse". An understanding of how 'nigga' operates as a reverse discourse requires a culturally rooted rhetorical analysis of the term. Gates, in The Signifyin(g) Monkey, provides background for such an analysis. Because his project is ultimately to derive an African-American theory of literary criticism, he touches on the appropriation of 'nigger' only briefly, asserting that a "political offensive" was mounted against the term by African-Americans through a black rhetorical strategy called Signifyin(g) (47). Gates, however, does not explain precisely how Signifyin(g) works in this case, except to suggest that it involves agnominatio (46). Thus 'nigger' becomes 'nigga', a word that differs from the racial slur but originates from and recalls it.2 Although Gates's commentary on the appropriation of 'nigger' amounts to little more than a sentence, much of his explication of the term Signifyin(g) implicitly applies to the co-optation of 'nigger'. The rhetorical analysis presented in this paper is a logical extension of Gates's initial linkage of the appropriation of 'nigger' with the rhetorical practice of Signifyin(g). The social baggage attached to 'nigga' assures that every use of the term is double-voiced in the Bakhtinian sense. More precisely, 'nigga' is a Bakhtinian parody of 'nigger'; the new connotation parodies or comments on the original because the new term carries with it the history of its pejorative use as well as the refashioned connotation of defiant group pride.3 This kind of rhetorical turn or critique is an example of the African-American rhetorical practice Gates identifies as Signifyin(g). Pinning down exactly what constitutes Signifyin(g) is difficult. Numerous black language scholars have commented on the expansiveness of the term.4 Gates argues that in its broadest sense, to Signify means to be "figurative," further noting that "to define it in practice is to define it through any number of its embedded tropes" (81).5 For our purposes it can be described as a rhetorical action that indirectly critiques another term or sign by revising it. Gates explains that, fundamentally, this revision and critique involve "repetition, with a signal difference" (51). Gates distinguishes the African-American term, 'Signifyin(g)', from the word 'signifying' by capitalizing the 'S' and bracketing the 'g' (46). It is helpful to think of the former term as 'Signifyin(g) on' (or critiquing) something whereas the latter word 'signifies' (or means) something but does not inherently involve a critique. Thus, to parody the motions of a police officer behind his or her back 'Signifies on' the officer and 'signifies' one's disrespect.6 Signifyin(g) is inherently a counter-puncher's strategy, an act of resistance against an oppressive force. Gates even goes so far as to call it the "slave's trope" (52). In Signifyin(g), the revised term, through its parodic double-voicedness, enters into a semantic loop with the original term; recollection of past oppressive usage must occur to fuel the term's new meaning. Figure 1 - Semantic Loop of Semantic Inversion and Agnominatio This semantic loop recalls what W.E. B. Dubois termed African-American double consciousness, a consciousness that yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (16-17) While 'nigga' recalls how blacks have been measured by the tape of the world, it also defies this estimation through ironic revision of the name. Although Dubois would criticize this pathway through the white term as a road to false consciousness, others might insist that since revision of the white term occurs through distinctly African-American rhetorical strategies, the revision is emblematic of an authentically African-American consciousness—which is a double consciousness. In this view the revision does not attempt to reconcile what DuBois calls the "two unreconciled strivings" of the black person as "an American and a Negro" but instead involves them in an endless interplay (17). The interplay of the two signs sustains an antagonistic stand toward the dominant white community through the polemical comment: "this is how whites see us but we are something more". 'Nigga', then, is "authentically black" speech because it recognizes and maintains the divide between black and white worlds. As Smitherman notes: [e]ncoded within the rhetoric of racial resistance, nigga is used to demarcate (Black) culturally rooted from (white) culturally assimilated African Americans. Niggaz are those Bloods (Blacks) who are down for Blackness and identify with the trials as well as triumphs of the Black experience… ("Chain") The defiance implied by the revision of the white slur is also an assertion of human subjectivity. Gates identifies a parallel strategy in African-American slave narratives. Referring to Frederick Douglass's famous chiasmus—"You have seen how a man became a slave, you will see how a slave became a man."—Gates asserts that "Douglass's major contribution to the slave narrative was to make chiasmus the central trope of slave narration, in which a slave-object writes himself or herself into a human subject through the act of writing" (172). By comparison, through the semantic inversion of 'nigger'/'nigga', dehumanized blacks speak themselves into human subjects through the act of speaking. This transfiguration conforms to what Gates terms "chiastic slaying" (66). His somewhat off-hand phrase is inspired by the African-American use of chiasmus, which is defined as, "a grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other" (Oxford English Dictionary qtd. in Grothe). Chiasmus is often represented as an ABBA pattern (so Douglass's chiasmus would be reduced to: (A) man - (B) slave - (B) slave - (A) man). In Gates's usage, chiastic slaying involves repetition and reversal but not necessarily a literal ABBA pattern of chiasmus. In the same vein, 'nigga' is a repetition of 'nigger' that reverses the position of African Americans (from objects to subjects). Analogously, 'nigger to nigga' can be conceived of as the inverted second clause of a chiastic statement like Douglass's 'man - slave - slave - man' in which personhood and agency are re-affirmed. This re-affirmation of humanity implicit in 'nigga' is not likely to be understood by many whites given, as Smitherman notes, that they often fail to recognize the semantic difference between 'nigger' and 'nigga'.7 Since whites are frequently unaware of the Signification of 'nigga', it is impossible for African Americans to kill (i.e. end) the white use of the racist term. In the context of Signification, chiastic slaying does not put an end to the idea Signified upon. In fact, Signification must be activated by what Gates calls the "absent presence" of the original term (48). The critique of racism and assertion of subjectivity implicit in the employment of 'nigga' is not aimed at white people or the elimination of their sign; it is aimed at a black audience that must survive in a continually racist environment. What, then, is the "slaying" of chiastic slaying? It must be seen as a refutation of the original term or sign. In the case of 'nigga', it is a rejection of the dehumanization implied by 'nigger' with the recognition that African Americans will still be continually subjected to this libel despite its refutation. Thus, the chiastic slaying of 'nigger' by 'nigga' requires a continual interplay or semantic loop between the two terms. The context of continuing racism, then, requires 'nigga' to recurrently signify on (i.e. assert the falsity of) the slur. The recurrent Signification can be thought of as a loop inscribed upon the linear chiastic pattern: Figure 2 - Semantic Loop Inscribed on the Chiastic PatternThe context of continuing racism is one factor that accounts for the value of semantic looping in African-American rhetoric. Since the semantic loops of African-American culture draw their strength from the oppression to which they react, they are continually useful. This kind of resistance does not attempt to overcome racism but instead draws African-American attention to it so blacks can survive it. The first step in this survival is to be aware, as DuBois might say, that blacks in America are perceived of as a "problem" (15). The Signification of 'nigga' also "keeps it real", by reminding African Americans of the harsh truth of racism and by continually enacting a refutation of racism through a complex of culturally familiar rhetorical strategies. In this respect, the appropriation of the white slur is, to borrow the words of Foucault, a culturally inspired "reverse discourse" aimed at responding to white oppression. The identification of semantic looping in this case opens up an array of other questions. How does semantic looping function in the appropriation of other epithets by other groups? (A few cases that may be worth investigating in addition to the previously mentioned 'queer', are 'dyke', 'girl'/'grrl' by young feminists and 'anorexia'/'ana' as well as 'bulimia'/'mia' by pro-eating-disorder advocates.) Do the cultural differences of various groups affect how semantic looping operates? What does semantic looping reveal about the struggle over authenticity or identity, especially with respect to gender, class and subculture? And lastly, how do groups respond to re-appropriations by dominant groups? (In particular I am thinking of the increasing use of 'nigga' by white American teenagers.) I hope others will find these questions worth pursuing. Notes 1. While Gates suggests that agnominatio is involved in the co-optation of 'nigger', he does not mention the term 'semantic inversion' at all (although he is obviously aware that Signifyin(g) often involves this rhetorical action). Gates's phrase, chiastic slaying, occurs only in the context of a general discussion of Signifyin(g). See 66 in Gates for his use of chiastic slaying. 2. Other English speakers including Australians and the English may find it difficult to distinguish between these spoken words and 'hear' them both as 'nigguh'. But to those from the United States the distinction is noticeable. 3. Gates identifies Bakhtin's notion of the double voiced word and his concept of narrative parody as relevant to African-American rhetoric. See 50, 110-13 and 131 in Gates. Bakhtin's most comprehensive discussion of double-voiced discourse can be found in 185-186, and 190-99. Bakhtin's distinction between parody and other types of discourse can be found in 193-99. 4. Gates lists the following as providing substantive definitions of Signifyin(g): H. Rap Brown, Roger D. Abrahams, Thomas Kochman, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Geneva Smitherman and Ralph Ellison (71). Gates considers Mitchell Kernan's data to be more representative than the others' and even she states that she could not get consensus from her informants regarding Signifyin(g) (Gates 80-81). 5. Gates has identified numerous rhetorical strategies that can be involved in Signifyin(g). See 52 in Gates for a complete list of these tropes. 6. I build on an example from Abrahams who states that "... it is signifying to make fun of a policeman by parodying his motions behind his back..." (52). 7. Smitherman notes that the semantic inversion of 'nigger' (or 'flippin the script' as it is known in the hip-hop world) "... is often misunderstood by European Americans and castigated by some African Americans" (Chain). Smitherman's comment suggests that the ability to discriminate between the two terms (as well as one's comfort level with the usage of 'nigga') is not racially monolithic. Whites who participate in hip-hop culture, for example, are likely to see the distinction between 'nigger' and 'nigga'. Some factors that seem likely to complicate any generalization about understanding and comfort level with 'nigga' are race, affinity for hip-hop, class, age and geographic location. References Abrahams, Roger D. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: Aldine, 1970. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. DuBois, W.E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1961. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Grothe, Mardy. Chiasmus.com. Online. Internet. 9 Oct. 2001. Available <http://www.chiasmus.com/whatischiasmus.shtml>. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford U P, 1988. Smitherman, Geneva. "'The Chain Remain the Same'." Journal of Black Studies 28 (1997): n.pag. Online. Academic Search Elite. 10 May 2002. - - -. Black Talk. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Links http://www.chiasmus.com/whatischiasmus.shtml Citation reference for this article MLA Style Jacobs, Andrew T.. "Appropriating a Slur" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php>. Chicago Style Jacobs, Andrew T., "Appropriating a Slur" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Jacobs, Andrew T.. (2002) Appropriating a Slur. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction Children are not only born digital, they are fashioned toward a lifestyle that needs them to be digital all the time (Palfrey and Gasser). They click, tap, save, circulate, download, and upload the texts of their lives, their friends’ lives, and the anonymous lives of the people that surround them. They are socialised as Internet consumers ready to participate in digital services targeted to them as they age such as Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. But they are also fashioned as producers, whereby their lives are sold as content on these same markets. As commodities, the minutiae of their lives become the fodder for online circulation. Paradoxically, we also celebrate these digital behaviours as a means to express identity. Personal profile-building for adults is considered agency-building (Beer and Burrows), and as a consequence, we praise children for mimicking these acts of adult lifestyle. This article reflects on the Kids, Creative Storyworlds, and Wearables project, which involved an ethnographic study with five young children (ages 4-7), who were asked to share their autobiographical stories, creative self-narrations, and predictions about their future mediated lives (Atkins et al.). For this case study, we focus on commercialised forms of children’s automedia, and we compare discussions we had with 6-year old Cayden, a child we met in the study who expresses the desire to make himself famous online, with videos of Jacob, a child vlogger on YouTube’s Kinder Playtime, who clearly influences children like Cayden. We argue that child social influencers need consideration both as autobiographical agents and as child subjects requiring a sheltered approach to their online lives.Automedia Automedia is an emergent genre of autobiography (Smith and Watson Reading 190; “Virtually Me” 78). Broadcasting one’s life online takes many forms (Kennedy “Vulnerability”). Ümit Kennedy argues “Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, construct[ing] their identity online” (“Exploring”). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson write that “visual and digital modes are projecting and circulating not just new subjects but new notions of subjectivity through the effects of automediality” with the result that “the archive of the self in time, in space and in relation expands and is fundamentally reorganized” (Reading 190). Emma Maguire addresses what online texts “tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate ‘real’ life through media” naming one tool, “automedia”. Further, Julie Rak calls on scholars “to rethink ‘life’ and ‘writing’ as automedia” to further “characterize the enactment of a personal life story in a new media environment.” We define automedia as a genre that involves the practices of creating, performing, sharing, circulating, and (at times) preserving one’s digital life narrative meant for multiple publics. Automedia revises identity formation, embodiment, or corporealities in acts of self-creation (Brophy and Hladki 4). Automedia also emphasizes circulation. As shared digital life texts now circulate through the behaviours of other human subjects, and automatically via algorithms in data assemblages, we contend that automediality currently involves a measure of relinquishing control over perpetually evolving mediatised environments. One cannot control how a shared life narrative will meet a public in the future, which is a revised way of thinking about autobiography. For the sake of this paper, we argue that children’s automedia ought to be considered a creative, autobiographical act, in order to afford child authors who create them the consideration they deserve as agents, now and in the future. Automedial practices often begin when children receive access to a device. The need for a distraction activity is often the reason parents hand a young child a smartphone, iPad, or even a wearable camera (Nansen). Mirroring the lives of parents, children aspire to share representations of their own personal lives in pursuit of social capital. They are often encouraged to use technologies and apps as adults do–to track aspects of self, broadcast life stories and eventually “live share” them—effectively creating, performing, sharing, and at times, seeking to preserve a public life narrative. With this practice, society inculcates children into spheres of device ubiquity, “socializing them to a future digital lifestyle that will involve always carrying a computer in some form” (Atkins et al. 49). Consequently, their representations become inculcated in larger media assemblages. Writing about toddlers, Nansen describes how the “archiving, circulation and reception of these images speaks to larger assemblages of media in which software protocols and algorithms are increasingly embedded in and help to configure everyday life (e.g. Chun; Gillespie), including young children’s media lives (Ito)” (Nansen). Children, like adult citizens, are increasingly faced with choices “not structured by their own preferences but by the economic imperatives of the private corporations that have recently come to dominate the internet” (Andrejevic). Recent studies have shown that for children and youth in the digital age, Internet fame, often characterized by brand endorsements, is a major aspiration (Uhls and Greenfield, 2). However, despite the ambition to participate as celebrity digital selves, children are also mired in the calls to shield them from exposure to screens through institutions that label these activities detrimental. In many countries, digital “protections” are outlined by privacy commissioners and federal or provincial/state statutes, (e.g. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada). Consequently, children are often caught in a paradox that defines them either as literate digital agents able to compose or participate with their online selves, or as subjectified wards caught up in commercial practices that exploit their lives for commercial gain.Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables ProjectBoth academic and popular cultural critics continually discuss the future but rarely directly engage the people who will be empowered (or subjugated) by it as young adults in twenty years. To address children’s lack of agency in these discussions, we launched the Kids, Creative Storyworlds and Wearables project to bring children into a dialogue about their own digital futures. Much has been written on childhood agency and participation in culture and mediated culture from the discipline of sociology (James and James; Jenks; Jenkins). In previous work, we addressed the perspective of child autobiographical feature filmmakers to explore issues of creative agency and consent when adult gatekeepers facilitate children in film production (Pedersen and Aspevig “My Eyes”; Pedersen and Aspevig “Swept”). Drawing on that previous work, this project concentrates on children’s automediated lives and the many unique concerns that materialize with digital identity-building. Children are categorised as a vulnerable demographic group necessitating special policy and legislation, but the lives they project as children will eventually become subsumed in their own adult lives, which will almost certainly be treated and mediated in a much different manner in the future. We focused on this landscape, and sought to query the children on their futures, also considering the issues that arise when adult gatekeepers get involved with child social media influencers. In the Storyworlds ethnographic study, children were given a wearable toy, a Vtech smartwatch called Kidizoom, to use over a month’s timeframe to serve as a focal point for ethnographic conversations. The Kidizoom watch enables children to take photos and videos, which are uploaded to a web interface. Before we gave them the tech, we asked them questions about their lives, including What are machines going to be like in the future? Can you imagine yourself wearing a certain kind of computer? Can you tell/draw a story about that? If you could wear a computer that gave you a super power, what would it be? Can you use your imagination to think of a person in a story who would use technology? In answering, many of them drew autobiographical drawings of technical inventions, and cast themselves in the images. We were particularly struck by the comments made by one participant, Cayden (pseudonym), a 6-year-old boy, and the stories he told us about himself and his aspirations. He expressed the desire to host a YouTube channel about his life, his activities, and the wearable technologies his family already owned (e.g. a GroPro camera) and the one we gave him, the Kidizoom smartwatch. He talked about how he would be proud to publically broadcast his own videos on YouTube, and about the role he had been allowed to play in the making of videos about his life (that were not broadcast). To contextualize Cayden’s commentary and his automedial aspirations, we extended our study to explore child social media influencers who broadcast components of their personal lives for the deliberate purpose of popularity and the financial gain of their parents.We selected the videos of Jacob, a child vlogger because we judged them to be representative of the kinds that Cayden watched. Jacob reviews toys through “unboxing videos,” a genre in which a child tells an online audience her or his personal experiences using new toys in regular, short videos on a social media site. Jacob appears on a YouTube channel called Kinder Playtime, which appears to be a parent-run channel that states that, “We enjoy doing these things while playing with our kids: Jacob, Emily, and Chloe” (see Figure 1). In one particular video, Jacob reviews the Kidizoom watch, serving as a child influencer for the product. By understanding Jacob’s performance as agent-driven automedia, as well as being a commercialised, mediatised form of advertising, we get a clearer picture of how the children in the study are coming to terms with their own digital selfhood and the realisation that circulated, life-exposing videos are the expectation in this context.Children are implicated in a range of ways through “family” influencer and toy unboxing videos, which are emergent entertainment industries (Abidin 1; Nansen and Nicoll; Craig and Cunningham 77). In particular, unboxing videos do impact child viewers, especially when children host them. Jackie Marsh emphasizes the digital literacy practices at play here that co-construct viewers as “cyberflâneur[s]” and she states that “this mode of cultural transmission is a growing feature of online practices for this age group” (369). Her stress, however, is on how the child viewer enjoys “the vicarious pleasure he or she may get from viewing the playing of another child with the toy” (376). Marsh writes that her study subject, a child called “Gareth”, “was not interested in being made visible to EvanHD [a child celebrity social media influencer] or other online peers, but was content to consume” the unboxing videos. The concept of the cyberflâneur, then, is fitting as a mediatising co-constituting process of identity-building within discourses of consumerism. However, in our study, the children, and especially Cayden, also expressed the desire to create, host, and circulate their own videos that broadcast their lives, also demonstrating awareness that videos are valorised in their social circles. Child viewers watch famous children perform consumer-identities to create an aura of influence, but viewers simultaneously aspire to become influencers using automedial performances, in essence, becoming products, themselves. Jacob, Automedial Subjects and Social Media InfluencersJacob is a vlogger on YouTube whose videos can garner millions of views, suggesting that he is also an influencer. In one video, he appears to be around the age of six as he proudly sits with folded hands, bright eyes, and a beaming, but partly toothless smile (see Figure 2). He says, “Welcome to Kinder Playtime! Today we have the Kidi Zoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech” (Kinder Playtime). We see the Kidi Zoom unboxed and then depicted in stylized animations amid snippets of Jacob’s smiling face. The voice and hands of a faceless parent guide Jacob as he uses his new wearable toy. We listen to both parent and child describe numerous features for recording and enhancing the wearer’s daily habits (e.g. calculator, calendar, fitness games), and his dad tells him it has a pedometer “which tracks your steps” (Kinder Playtime). But the watch is also used by Jacob to mediate himself and his world. We see that Jacob takes pictures of himself on the tiny watch screen as he acts silly for the camera. He also uses the watch to take personal videos of his mother and sister in his home. The video ends with his father mentioning bedtime, which prompts a “thank you” to VTech for giving him the watch, and a cheerful “Bye!” from Jacob (Kinder Playtime). Figure 1: Screenshot of Kinder Playtime YouTube channel, About page Figure 2: Screenshot of “Jacob,” a child vlogger at Kinder Playtime We chose Jacob for three reasons. First, he is the same age as the children in the Storyworlds study. Second, he reviews the smart watch artifact that we gave to the study children, so there was a common use of automedia technology. Third, Jacob’s parents were involved with his broadcasts, and we wanted to work within the boundaries of parent-sanctioned practices. However, we also felt that his playful approach was a good example of how social media influence overlaps with automediality. Jacob is a labourer trading his public self-representations in exchange for free products and revenue earned through the monetisation of his content on YouTube. It appears that much of what Jacob says is scripted, particularly the promotional statements, like, “Today we have the Kidizoom Smartwatch DX. It’s from VTech. It’s the smartest watch for kids” (Kinder Playtime). Importantly, as an automedial subject Jacob reveals aspects of his self and his identity, in the manner of many child vloggers on public social media sites. His product reviews are contextualised within a commoditised space that provides him a means for the public performance of his self, which, via YouTube, has the potential to reach an enormous audience. YouTube claims to have “over a billion users—almost one-third of all people on the Internet—and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views” (YouTube). Significantly, he is not only filmed by others, Jacob is also a creative practitioner, as Cayden aspired to become. Jacob uses high-tech toys, in this case, a new wearable technology for self-compositions (the smart watch), to record himself, friends, family or simply the goings-on around him. Strapped to his wrist, the watch toy lets him play at being watched, at being quantified and at recording the life stories of others, or constructing automediated creations for himself, which he may upload to numerous social media sites. This is the start of his online automediated life, which will be increasingly under his ownership as he ages. To greater or lesser degrees, he will later be able to curate, add to, and remediate his body of automedia, including his digital past. Kennedy points out that “people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online” (“Exploring”). Her focus is on adult vloggers who consent to their activities. Jacob’s automedia is constructed collaboratively with his parents, and it is unclear how much awareness he has of himself as an automedia creator. However, if we don’t afford Jacob the same consideration as we afford adult autobiographers, that the depiction of his life is his own, we will reduce his identity performance to pure artifice or advertisement. The questions Jacob’s videos raise around agency, consent, and creativity are important here. Sidonie Smith asks “Can there be a free, agentic space; and if so, where in the world can it be found?” (Manifesto 188). How much agency does Jacob have? Is there a liberating aspect in the act of putting personal technology into the hands of a child who can record his life, himself? And finally, how would an adult Jacob feel about his childhood self advertising these products online? Is this really automediality if Jacob does not fully understand what it means to publicly tell a mediated life story?These queries lead to concerns over child social media influence with regard to legal protection, marketing ethics, and user consent. The rise of “fan marketing” presents a nexus of stealth marketing to children by other children. Stealth marketing involves participants, in this case, fans, who do not know they are involved in an advertising scheme. For instance, the popular Minecon Minecraft conference event sessions have pushed their audience to develop the skills to become advocates and advertisers of their products, for example by showing audiences how to build a YouTube channel and sharing tips for growing a community. Targeting children in marketing ploys seems insidious. Marketing analyst Sandy Fleisher describes the value of outsourcing marketing to fan labourers:while Grand Theft Auto spent $120 million on marketing its latest release, Minecraft fans are being taught how to create and market promotional content themselves. One [example] is Minecraft YouTuber, SkydoesMinecraft. His nearly 7 million strong YouTube army, almost as big as Justin Bieber’s, means his daily videos enjoy a lot of views; 1,419,734,267 to be precise. While concerns about meaningful consent that practices like this raise have led some government bodies, and consumer and child protection groups to advocate restrictions for children, other critics have questioned the limits placed on children’s free expression by such restrictions. Tech commentator Larry Magid has written that, “In the interest of protecting children, we sometimes deny them the right to access material and express themselves.” Meghan M. Sweeney notes that “the surge in collaborative web models and the emphasis on interactivity—frequently termed Web 2.0—has meant that children are not merely targets of global media organizations” but have “multiple opportunities to be active, critical, and resistant producers”...and ”may be active agents in the production and dissemination of information” (68). Nevertheless, writes Sweeney, “corporate entities can have restrictive effects on consumers” (68), by for example, limiting imaginative play to the choices offered on a Disney website, or limiting imaginative topics to commercial products (toys, video games etc), as in YouTube review videos. Automedia is an important site from which to consider young children’s online practices in public spheres. Jacob’s performance is indeed meant to influence the choice to buy a toy, but it is also meant to influence others in knowing Jacob as an identity. He means to share and circulate his self. Julie Rak recalls Paul John Eakin’s claims about life-writing that the “process does not even occur at the level of writing, but at the level of living, so that identity formation is the result of narrative-building.” We view Jacob’s performance along these lines. Kinder Playtime offers him a constrained, parent-sanctioned (albeit commercialised) space for role-playing, a practice bound up with identity-formation in the life of most children. To think through the legality of recognising Jacob’s automedial content as his life, Rak is also useful: “In Eakin’s work in particular, we can see evidence of John Locke’s contention that identity is the expression of consciousness which is continuous over time, but that identity is also a product, one’s own property which is a legal entity”. We have argued that children are often caught in the paradox that defines them either as literate digital creators composing and circulating their online selves or as subjectified personas caught up in commercial advertising practices that use their lives for commercial gain. However, through close observation of individual children, one who we met and questioned in our study, Cayden, the other who we met through his mediated, commercialized, and circulated online persona, Jacob, we argue that child social influencers need consideration as autobiographical agents expressing themselves through automediality. As children create, edit, and grow digital traces of their lives and selves, how these texts are framed becomes increasingly important, in part because their future adult selves have such a stake in the matter: they are being formed through automedia. Moreover, these children’s coming of age may bring legal questions about the ownership of their automedial products such as YouTube videos, an enduring legacy they are leaving behind for their adult selves. 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Introduction Online influencers play an increasingly important role in political communication – they serve as both intermediaries and producers of political messages. As established opinion leaders in areas such fashion and lifestyle consumption, many influencers recently turned towards more political content (Riedl et al.). For influencers who built their personal brands around aspirational domestic and lifestyle content, the COVID-19 global pandemic created an opportunity (and sometimes even a necessity) to engage in political discourse. The most basic everyday acts and decisions – such as where to shop for food, how to organise playdates for children, if and where to go on holiday – suddenly turned into political discussions and the influencers found themselves either promoting or challenging anti-pandemic restrictions imposed by national governments as they were forced to actively defend their decisions on such matters to their followers. Within this process that I call politicisation of the domestic (Heřmanová), many influencers explored new ways to build authority and leadership within their communities and positioning themselves as experts or “lifestyle gurus” (Baker and Rojek). While the proliferation of political content, including disinformation and conspiracy narratives, on digital communication platforms has been the focus of both public and academic attention in recent years, the focus has mostly been on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter (Finlayson). Instagram, the traditional “home” of lifestyle influencers, only recently became the focus of political communication research (Larsson). This article builds on recent scholarship that focusses on the intersection of lifestyle, spiritual, and wellness content on Instagram and the proliferation of political conspiracy narratives on the platform (Remski, Argentino). I use the example of a prominent Czech spiritual influencer Helena Houdová to illustrate the blending of spiritual, aspirational and conspiracy content among Instagram influencers and argue that the specific aesthetics of Instagram conspiracies needs to be understood in the context of gendered, predominantly female “third spaces” (Wright) in the male-coded global digital space. Case Study – Helena When you look at Helena’s Instagram profile, all you see at first is the usual aspirational influencer content – pictures of ocean, beaches, sunsets, and Helena herself in white dresses or swimsuits. Sometimes she’s alone in the pictures, sometimes with her children, and sometimes with a group of similarly serene-looking women with sun-kissed skin and flowers in their hair. In the captions under her Instagram posts, Helena often talks about self-acceptance, self-love, and womanhood, and gives her followers advice how they can, in her own words, “create their own reality” (@helenahoudova, 8 Aug. 2021). Her recipe for the creation of one’s own reality sounds very simple – open your heart, accept the love that the Universe is giving you, accept that you are love. Helena is 41 years old, a divorced mother of 3 children, and a former model and philanthropist. Born in the Czech Republic, Helena won the title of Czech Miss in 1999, when she was 20 years old. She competed in the Miss World competition and started a successful modelling career. After a complicated marriage and divorce, she struggled to obtain an Australian visa and finally found a home in Bali. Over the past few years, Helena managed to build a successful business out of her online presence – she markets online courses and Webinars to her 50,000 followers and offers personal coaching. In this regard, she is a representative example of an “spiritual influencer” (Schwartz), an emerging group of (mostly) female influencers who focus their content on New Age type spirituality, personal healing, and teach their followers the practice of “manifesting”, based on the belief that “the world we perceive, either positively or negatively, is a projection of our own consciousness and that we can transform our reality for the better by transforming ourselves internally” (Urban 226). Helena’s Instagram account is bilingual, and she posts both in Czech and English, though her audience seems to be mostly Czech – most comments left under her posts are also in Czech. Within the Czech influencer community, she is one of the most famous spiritual influencers. Influencers, (Con)spirituality and COVID-19 Spiritual influencers like Helena are part of a global phenomenon (Chia et al.) that has generated lot of media attention over the past year (Schwartz). With their focus on wellbeing and health, they overlap with wellness influencers (O’Neill), but the content they produce also explores various types of New Age spirituality and references to different religious traditions as well as neo-pagan spiritual movements. From this perspective, spiritual influencers often position themselves in opposition to a Western lifestyle (interpreted as materialistic and based on consumption). In this aspect they fit into the category of ‘lifestyle gurus’ as defined by Baker and Rojek: “Lifestyle gurus define themselves in opposition to professional cultures. Selectively and instrumentally, they mix elements from positive thinking, esoteric systems of knowledge and mediate them through folk culture” (390). While prominent figures of the wellness spirituality movement such as Gwyneth Paltrow would be more likely defined as celebrities rather than influencers (see Abidin), spiritual influencers are native to the Internet, and the path to spiritual awakening they showcase on their Instagram profiles is also their source of income. It is this commodified aspect of their online personas that generated a significant backlash from the media as well as from the influencer community itself over the past year. What provoked many critical reactions is the way spiritual influencers became involved in the debate around the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-COVID vaccination all around the world. As I argued elsewhere (Heřmanová), the pandemic impacted on the way influencers build boundaries between ‘domestic’ and ‘political’ within their content and inside the communities of their followers. For women who build their brands around aspirational domesticity (Duffy), the pandemic lockdowns presented a significant challenge in terms of the content they could post. Within the spiritual influencer culture, the discussion around vaccines intersected with influencers’ focus on spiritual and physical health, natural remedies, and so-called ‘natural immunity’. The pandemic thus accelerated the above-mentioned process of the “politicization of the domestic” (Heřmanová). The increasing engagement of spiritual influencers in political debates around COVID-19 and vaccines can be interpreted within the broader context of the conspirituality phenomenon. The term, first coined by Charlotte Ward and David Voas in 2011, describes a “web movement expressing an ideology fuelled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldview“ (103). The conspirituality phenomenon is native to the Internet and appears at the intersection of New Age-inspired spirituality and distrust towards established authorities. The conspirituality approach successfully bridges the gap between the spiritual focus on the self and the conspiratorial focus on broader political processes. For spiritual influencers and other types of lifestyle gurus, conspirituality thus offers a way to accommodate the hyper-individualistic, commodified nature of global influencer culture with their message of collective awakening and responsibility to educate wider audiences, because it enables them to present their personal spiritual path as a political act. For the predominantly female wellness/spirituality influencers of Instagram, the term conspirituality has been widely used in the public and media debate, with reference to the involvement of influencers in the QAnon movement (Tiffany, Petersen, and Wang). Argentino coined the term “pastel QAnon” to refer to the community of female influencers initially found on Instagram, but who are increasingly present on various dark platforms, such as Parler or Gab (Zeng and Schäfer), or, in the Czech context, the messaging platform Telegram (Šlerka). “Pastel” refers “to the unique aesthetic and branding these influencers provided to their pages and in turn QAnon by using social media templates like Canva” (Argentino) that is used to soften and aesthetically adapt QAnon messages to Instagram visuality. Many adherents to the pastel version of QAnon are members of the spiritual, yoga, and wellness community of Instagram and were “recruited” to the movement through concerns about COVID-19 vaccines (Remski). This was also the case for Helena. Before the pandemic, her content mostly focussed on her family life and promoting her Webinars and retreats. She rarely commented on political events beyond general proclamations about the materialistic nature of our culture, in which we are losing connection to our true selves. As the pandemic advanced, Helena started to make more and more explicit references to the current global situation. For a long time, however, she resisted openly political, critical proclamations. Then on 12 July 2021 Helena posted a picture of herself standing at the beach in a flowy dress, holding a big golden cup in her hand and accompanied it with the caption: There are barricades on the streets. There are tanks on the streets. We cannot move freely. We must identify ourselves with designated signs. And we must wear a yellow star to sign we’re not against it. But they say it’s for our own protection. The year 1941. There are barricades on the streets. There are tanks on the streets. (THIS AFTERNOON). We cannot move freely. We must identify ourselves, we have to cover our face as a sign we’re not against it. But they say it’s for our own protection. The year 2021. She continues with a call to action and praises her followers, the people who have “woken up” and realised that the pandemic is a global conspiracy meant to enslave people and the vaccination at attempt at “genocide” (@helenahoudova, translated from Czech by author). Fig. 1: Helena's post about COVID-19. This post can be interpreted as a symbolic transgression from spiritual to conspiritual content on Helena’s profile. In the past year, the narrative explaining COVID-19 as an orchestrated political event organised by the global elites to curb the civic and personal freedoms of all citizens has become central in her communication towards her followers. Interestingly, in some of her videos and Instagram stories, she addresses the Czech audience specifically when she compares the anti-pandemic restrictions implemented by the Czech government as an attempt to return the country to its authoritarian, pre-1989 past. Within post-socialist media spaces, the symbolic references to the former totalitarian regime became an important feature of pandemic conspiracies, creating interesting instances of online context collapse. For example, when influencers (including Helena) post content originating from US-based QAnon-related Websites, they tend to frame it as “the return of communism as it we have experienced it before 1989” (Heřmanová). While Helena dedicates her profile almost exclusively to her own content, other Czech spiritual influencers use also other Instagram features such as sharing posts in Stories or sharing content from various Websites, both Czech- and English-speaking, with links to calls for direct actions and petitions against the anti-COVID restrictions and/or vaccination. A few other well-known Czech influencers interact with Helena’s posts by liking them or leaving comments. In this way, the whole community interlinks via different types of political content that is then on the individual profiles blended with lifestyle, wellness, and other ‘typical’, less overtly political, influencer content. Conclusion: Gendered Third Spaces of Instagram Helena’s Instagram presence, along with that of many other women who post similar content, presents an interesting conundrum when we try to decipher how conspiracy theories proliferate in digital spaces. She has, since her ‘coming-out’ as anti-vax adherent and COVID-denialist, branched out her business activities. She now also offers Webinars to teach women how to operate their business in 5D reality that includes intuition as a tool to establish ‘extrasensory’ perception and enables connection to other dimensions of reality (as opposed to the limited 3D perception we typically apply to the world around us). Her journey is representative of a wider trend of politicisation of formerly non-political online spaces in at least two aspects: her prominent focus on women, womanhood, and “sisterhood” as a unit of political organisation, and her successful blend of Instagram-friendly, aspirational, ‘pastel’ aesthetics with overtly political messaging. Both the aesthetics and content of the conspirituality movement on Instagram are significantly gendered. The gendered character of influencers’ work on social media often leads to the assumption that politics has no place in the feminised space of influencer communities on Instagram because it is seen as a male domain (Duffy; Duffy and Hund). Social media, nonetheless, has offered women a tool of political expression, where dedication to domestic affairs may be seen as a political act in itself (Stern). Conspiritual communities on Instagram, such as the one Helena has managed to build, could also be seen as an example of what Scott Wright calls “third spaces” – neutral, inclusive, and accessible virtual spaces where political talk happens (11). A significant body of research has shown that global digital spaces for political discussion tend to be male-coded and women are actively discouraged from participating in them. If they do participate, they are at much higher risk of being exposed to hate-speech and gender-based online violence (Poletta and Chen). The same trend has been analysed within Czech-speaking online communities as well (Vochocová and Rosenfeldová). The COVID-19 pandemic on the other hand opened the opportunity and sometimes necessity (as mentioned above) to engage in political discussion to many women who previously never expressed an interest in political matters. Profiles of conspiritual influencers are perceived both by supportive influencers and by their followers as safe spaces where political opinions can be explicitly discussed precisely because these spaces are not typically designed as political arenas. Helena herself quite often uses the notion of “sisterhood” as a reference to a safe, strong, female community and praises her followers for being awake, being political, and being open to what she calls ‘inner truths’. In a very recent 16-minute video that was originally livestreamed and then saved on her profile, she reflects on current geopolitical developments and makes a direct connection to “liberating sisterhood” as a tool for solving world problems such as wars. The video was posted on 7 March 2022, a week after Russia invaded Ukraine and thus brought war to the near proximity of Helena’s home country. In the video, Helena addresses her followers in Czech and talks about “dark and fragile times”, praises “the incredible energy of sisterhood” that she wants to bring to her followers, and urges them to sign up for her course, because the world needs this energy more than ever (@helenahoudova). Her followers often reflect these sentiments in the comments. They talk about the experience of being judged for embracing their femininity and speaking up against evil (war, vaccination) and mention that they feel encouraged by the community they found. Helena connects with them via liking their comments or leaving responses such as “I stand with you, my love.” The originally non-political character of the third spaces of conspiritual communities on Instagram also partly explains their success in bringing fringe political narratives towards the aspirational mainstream. Helena’s Instagram profile was not originally created, and neither is it run now by her as an openly political/conspiracy account. She does not use hashtags related to QAnon, anti-vax, or any other openly ‘conspiracy-branded’ content. The overall tone of her account and her communication towards her followers has not changed after her ‘coming-out’: she still focusses on highly feminised spiritual aesthetics. She uses light colours, beach photos, and flowy white dresses as a visual frame to her content, and while the content gets politicised, the form still conforms to the standards of Instagram as a platform with its focus on first-person storytelling via selfies and pictures documenting everyday life (Leaver, Highfield, and Abidin). In this respect, Helena’s content can also be seen as an example of what Crystal Abidin calls “subversive frivolity”. Abidin shows how influencers use highly gendered and often mocked and marginalised tools (such as the selfie) and turn them into a productive and powerful means to achieve both economic and social capital (Abidin). In this aspect, the proliferation of conspiracy narratives on Instagram differs significantly from the mechanisms of Twitter and YouTube (Finlayson). While it would be unwise to underestimate the role of recommendation algorithms and filter bubbles (Pariser) in spreading COVID-19-related conspiracies on Instagram, it is also true that the content often circulates despite these mechanisms, as Forberg demonstrated in the example of QAnon communities in the U.S. He proposes to look closely at the “routines” that individual members of these communities employ to make their content visible in mainstream spaces (Forberg). In the case of Helena and members of her community, these routines of engaging with COVID-related content in a way that becomes more and more overtly political form the process of the politicisation of the domestic. While it could be argued that ‘personal is always political’ especially for women (Hanish), Helena and her peers and followers are actively making personal matters political both by naming them as such and by directly connecting themselves, via the notion of sisterhood, to geopolitical developments. In this way, conspirituality influencers are successfully bridging the gap between the individualist ethos of influencer cultures and the collective identity-building of conspiracy movements. 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