Disconcerting bodies: Female celebrity and contemporary American culture
Abstract
This dissertation argues that stardom has undergone a symptomatic shift whereby female stars signify and refer to their own production, and that the notion of female celebrity no longer relies on any sense of a mythic, inaccessible star figure. While stars have historically spoken about the separation between the public figure and the private self, this project suggests that female celebrities have come to speak implicitly and explicitly about the distinct process of star construction in the public domain, ultimately merging the two aforementioned binaries together and demystifying their stardom in the process. Focusing on this shifting and markedly different relationship between the female celebrity body and the American public as it has been made manifest at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, this project considers the relationship between this new mode of stardom and American culture. As shall be made clear in this project, female celebrities are tied to the social and political landscape in unprecedented and illuminating ways and are indicative of discourses that run counter to nation formation. This dissertation demonstrates that Jodie Foster, Rosie O'Donnell, Oprah Winfrey, and Courtney Love are evocative of larger caches of power that challenge the ideological pretenses by which America is configured and examines the ways in which they necessitate that we confront national ideologies anew. In this manner, I argue that celebrities illuminate national ideologies within which we are all situated, such as heterosexuality as a cultural mainstay, racial binaries as a means to denote whiteness as the nation's definitive corporeality, and the paradoxical nature of HIV/AIDS infection, and demonstrate that female stars afford us a new dimension through which we ought to revise those same ideologies.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Somerville, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Motion Pictures
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