The Nobel celebrity-scientist: genius and personality

Abstract

Scientists are a poorly covered area of research in the field of celebrity studies. This article attempts to rectify this issue by discussing representations of science and scientists in a televised Nobel Banquet on Swedish public-service television, SVT. The televised Nobel Banquet is a genre hybrid that consists of two genres; namely, science communication and award show. Drawing on cultural, media, and gender studies, this article examines the mediated persona of the scientist in the televised Nobel Banquet via contextualised textual analysis. The main questions of this article are as follows: in what ways do the media, the genre, and the idea of geniality affect the representation of the scientist? The article suggests that the increasing ‘celebrification’ of scientists is characteristic of the past several decades, and that, among other factors, this has been due to the entry of aspects of entertainment into banquet broadcasts. Through such processes, the ‘celebrity-scientist’ has emerged within the high-status sphere of science. However, a very specific type of celebrity is represented in the Nobel context: the celebrity-scientist is commonly a white man of high education whose fame has been reached through hard work in competition with others of the same kind. This representation of a scientist and its associated quality of genius will here be examined from a gender perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• celebrity
• science
• television
• Nobel Prize
• gender

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the two excellent peer-reviewers who contributed to making this article so much better.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The prizes in Literature and Peace are not scientific ones, focusing primarily on fiction and activities for peace and brotherhood, in accordance with the will of Alfred Nobel. Television broadcasts of the Nobel Banquet are not aired in their entirety in any other country. However, smaller parts of the Banquet are usually shown in the countries from which the laureates come. The US and Japan are especially interested.

2. Rojek’s concept of achieved celebrity is close to Boorstein’s definition of a hero: ‘… a human figure – real or imaginary or both – who has shown greatness in some achievement. He is a man or woman of great deeds’ (Boorstein 2006, p. 74).

3. The coronation could also be called a consecration, Bourdieu’s term for cultural honours or awards. The role of a Nobel Prize in the scientific society could more generally be analysed in terms of cultural production, habitus, field, and academic capital, applying a more sociological approach in the spirit of Bourdieu (1993). However, this study instead focuses on the work of cultural representations and meaning-making processes.

4. Andreas Huyssen (1987) shows, in his classic text, how mass culture/popular culture since the seventh century has been associated with women. The new, popular novel was considered to be so feminised that Huyssen interprets the counter-reaction of modernism as distinctly masculine and elitist. It is possible to read the ambivalence of the scientific community towards the televised Nobel Banquet in the same way: too much glamour and entertainment threatens to emasculate science into a feminine popular culture.

5. Mulkay (1984) sees these enumerations as a way to reassign the praise to some third party. In fact, it is the most common way to respond to the compliments in his study of 39 lectures and 20 short Banquet speeches in the Nobel context, 1978–81.

6. Leo Lowenthal (1961) found that the press was interested in the hobbies of the famous persons he studied. The articles also often used superlatives when describing the hero’s character. The result from his study is largely still valid today.

7. Implicit in these theories of men as creative and generative is also the idea of which gender is the active or passive part in reproduction. Battersby (1989, pp. 61–70) scrutinises the notion that genius is related to sperm, an idea that turns out to date back to the Roman empire. Even in the Nobel context there is an idea of the creative and producing sperm, at least in the story of the North American sperm bank with Nobel Laureates as donors (Plotz 2005).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hillevi Ganetz

Hillevi Ganetz is Professor of Gender and Media Studies at Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. Her books include Talangfabriken. Iscensättningar av genus och sexualitet i svensk talang-reality [Fame Factory: Performances of Gender and Sexuality in Swedish Talent-Reality] and Naturlikt: Människor, djur och växter i SVT:s naturmagasin [Like Nature: Humans, Animals and Plants in Swedish Wildlife Films]. This article is part of a project entitled ‘The Prize of Science: The Science and Media Interface in the Televised Nobel Banquet’.