Immaculate consumption: negotiating the sex symbol in postfeminist celebrity culture

Abstract

Contemporary female celebrity is produced within a context of postfeminism, sexualised culture, consumerism and neoliberalism. Feminist analyses often argue that such celebrity figures commodify female sexuality and depoliticise feminist issues regarding autonomy and sexual agency; although some celebrate contemporary celebrity as a site for producing less conventional sexual identities. In this paper we contribute to these debates with analysis of focus group and interview data from 28 white heterosexual women aged between 23 and 58 living in the UK. For the women in our study, female celebrities were figures of successful neoliberal entrepreneurial selves, with the capacity to make money from their bodies. This capacity was associated with continuous work on the bodies, rather than a natural beauty; and while there was often admiration for the work that went into this self-transformation, a consequence for the participants of equating beauty with normatively unattainable levels of body work was that they came to understand themselves as falling short of even ‘achievable’ attractiveness. We conclude that these participants made sense of celebrity sexiness through neoliberal rhetoric of ‘choice’, entitlement and pleasure, which worked to constantly underscore the ‘ordinary’ woman's inability to measure up.

Keywords::

• celebrity culture
• sexualisation of culture
• postfeminism
• neoliberalism

Notes

^1. It is recognised here that the term ‘postfeminist’ is itself complex and contentious (see Evans et al., 2010a, Smith 2010). By ‘a postfeminist sexualisation of culture’ we are referring to the ways in which contemporary ideas of sexiness are presented to women through media and consumer culture. These ideas often incorporate, and disown, feminist discourses, representing a shift from sexual objectification to sexual subjectification, bound up in notions of empowerment, choice and freedom (see Gill 2007, McRobbie 2009, Evan et al. 2010a).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrienne Evans

Adrienne Evans is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Coventry University. Her research has explored the relationship between the cultural, material and subjective within the field of the sexualisation of culture. This research adopts an interdisciplinary approach to analyze how femininities are taken-up, reworked and resisted within the dominant discourses of agentic and consumer-oriented subjectivity. Intersecting with issues of sexuality, gender, power, generation and class, the research documented the lived-experience of women's negotiations of sexiness in the twenty-first century. She has published this work in the European Journal of Women's Studies and Feminism and Psychology. She is the author (with Sarah Riley) of Sex, Identity and Consumer Culture (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Sarah Riley

Sarah Riley is a Senior Lecturer in the Psychology Department at University College Wales, Aberystwyth. Her research takes a social constructionist approach to explore issues of identity in relation to gender, embodiment and youth culture. Recent projects include a study of clubbing and dance cultures as forms of social and political participation with Chris Griffin and Yvette Morey (ESRC funded); and a co-operative inquiry study on ‘dilemmas of femininity’ (British Academy funded). She has published widely in journals including Feminism and Psychology, British Journal of Social Psychology, Sociology and Journal of Youth Studies. She co-edited Critical Bodies: Representations, Identities and Practices of Weight and Body Management (PalgraveMacMillan, 2008) and Doing a Qualitative Research Project (Sage, 2011); she is the co-author (with Adrienne Evans) of Sex, Identity and Consumer Culture (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).