From Clooney to Kardashian: reluctant celebrity and social media

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examine social media forms in relation to similarly multimodal, contingent understandings of contemporary celebrity and the politics of what we term ‘celebrity reluctance’. This wavering response to celebrity – a double-facing mode of celebrity performance in which the celebrity is disinclined to perform, yet performs nevertheless – reveals the privilege that constitutes such positioning. After all, to occupy a position of reluctance or hesitance is to have the privilege to be reluctant. Approaching celebrity as a space of fluid negotiations, we examine celebrities’ first tweets on, and commentaries about, Twitter, as a means by which to demonstrate how celebrities negotiate their degree of reluctance to engage with the fields of power at play in social media interactions. In the second half of the paper, we argue that such positioning needs to be read alongside its celebrity social media ‘other’: the enthusiastic, entrepreneurial adoption of social media, best exemplified by the Kardashian family and their manifold social media endeavours. In their self-characterisation as social-media-made celebrities and external characterisations of them as the de facto media sell-outs, the Kardashians, as unreluctant celebrities, become the exceptions that prove the rule, inversely defining the privileged, reluctant expressions of more ‘accepted’ stars.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity
• social media
• Twitter
• reluctance
• privilege

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Consider, for instance, Bauerlein (2008), Lanier (2010, 2013), Vaidhyanathan (2011), Turkle (2011, 2015), and Carr (2011).

2. Marwick and Boyd (2011) account for both the producers and consumers of media and celebrity. Although we focus on the productive processes, we are also attentive to the affective resonances of the reception and interpretation of reluctance.

3. Concern over ‘fake accounts’ has diminished with Twitter’s introduction of verified accounts, but would have been relevant to Dunn in 2011 (see Jourdan Dunn @missjourdandunn, 5:20PM, 1 September 2011). Grant, by contrast, positions his participation as counter-move against the more traditional celebrity foe of the tabloids (see Hugh Grant @HackedOffHugh, 9:44AM, 28 November 2012).

4. Such navigation is not exclusive to Twitter. We might think of Reddit’s ‘AMA’ (‘Ask Me Anything’) as the perfect expression of the meeting of celebrity reluctance and social media, where celebrities talk ‘directly’ to their fans – albeit in a carefully constructed, monitored setting.

5. In line with Marwick and Boyd (2011), we propose an understanding of a continuum of celebrity reluctance, as opposed to discretely categorised celebrity.

6. Tanaka and Gemeinboeck (2009) describe this ‘third space’ as ‘the paradoxical space between two antagonistic forces: the bottom-up approaches of collaborative spaces and collective interventions and the top-down strategies of centralised power and remote control’ (pp. 176–177).

7. This permeability is reinforced by the phenomenon of the so-called ‘Twitter quitter’ (Enlow 2015): a star whose position on Twitter – or other social media platforms – undergoes evolution from participation to withdrawal. Included here are Miley Cyrus; Courtney Love; Alec Baldwin; Jennifer Love Hewitt; Kanye West; and John Mayer. However, the ever-growing assemblage of Twitter quitters turned Twitter returners suggests that the (strategic) management of restricted disclosure is never entirely off the table.

8. When it comes to the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood mobile game, Kim frames her involvement as ‘an everyday job’ (Kim Kardashian cited Swisher 2014). Commercial partners confirm Kim’s ‘deep involvement’ (see Ziegler 2014).

9. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is believed to have made over $150 million in its first two years (Robehmed 2016).

10. In August 2015, Florida news anchor John Brown (2015b) walked off the set of Good Day Orlando, exasperatedly asserting: ‘I’m having a good Friday, so I refuse to talk about the Kardashians today […]. I can’t do it. I’ve had enough Kardashians’. Less than a week later Perez Hilton announced a ‘Kardashian kleanse’ on his website, opting not to provide any coverage of the family for a whole week in lieu of ‘highlighting DAILY inspiring stories about amazing women from all around the world!’ (Hilton 2015). Both stories were widely covered.

11. In response to Kim posting a nude (censored) selfie, Bette Midler, for instance, chides: ‘If Kim wants us to see a part of her we’ve never seen, she’s gonna have to swallow the camera’ (Bette Midler @BetteMidler, 10:47AM, 7 March 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pamela Ingleton

Pamela Ingleton is part-time professor of Liberal Studies and Learning Outcomes Assessment Consultant at Mohawk College, Canada. She has published on the relation between literature and social media (Technoculture, 2012) and micro-celebrity (Celebrity Studies, 2014). In 2018, she obtained her PhD with her thesis on Representations of Social Media in Popular Discourse at McMaster University.

Lorraine York

Lorraine York is professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. Her research interests focus on theories of celebrity and authorship. In 2007, she published Literary Celebrity in Canada (University of Toronto Press); her book Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity appeared in 2013 (University of Toronto Press). Recently, she published Reluctant Celebrity: Affect and Privilege in Contemporary Stardom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).