“I Am…”: Caitlyn Jenner, Jazz Jennings and the cultural politics of transgender celebrity

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, the visibility of transgender celebrities appears greater than ever. Whilst scholarly work has analysed, and continues to analyse, representations of trans celebrities, this research has largely approached these figures as significant because they make transgender visible, rather than because of the more specific fact that they are celebrities. This article interrogates the role of discourses and tropes of celebrity itself in enabling particular incarnations of trans subjectivity to become intelligible within popular culture. Focusing upon the examples of Caitlyn Jenner and Jazz Jennings, two of the most widely circulated trans celebrities in the contemporary moment, I argue that the tropes of authenticity, self-reflexivity, self-revelation and manufacture central to celebrity culture, have functioned as core discursive frameworks through which Jenner and Jennings’ transgender identities have been rationalised within the popular media. In becoming legible as transgender through celebrity, I argue that Jenner and Jennings’ media narratives have worked to confer recognisability to a highly limited model of transgender life, fraught with exclusions around race and gender normativity.

Keywords:

• Transgender
• celebrity
• reality television
• Caitlyn Jenner
• Jazz Jennings

Notes

1. In making this point, I do not wish to conflate transgender and cisgender experience. Various studies have discussed the qualitative differences between the ways in which transgender and cisgender-identifying people experience their identities on a day-to-day basis (see, for example, Enke 2012).

2. It is also important to acknowledge that many transgender people identify with the idea of being “trapped in the wrong body” for a plethora of reasons which far exceed their encounters with medico-legal scripts and media representations (see Jay Prosser 1998).

3. The reproduction of cultural norms is, of course, not unique to transgender celebrities. Much research within Celebrity, Media and Cultural Studies has explored the extent to which the broader field of celebrity culture operates as a disciplinary arena for the re-inscription of hegemonic ideals of gender and femininity (see e.g., Su Holmes and Diane Negra 2011).