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ABSTRACT
Instagram Live has become a useful tool for maintaining celebrity and continuing to generate engagement, one that many celebrities turned to during COVID-19 shut-downs. Among them, Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, the women’s sports power-couple, used Instagram Live to create a weekly talk-show that would eventually be titled A Touch More. The Instagram Live platform provided the unpredictability of liveness and enabled Bird and Rapinoe to perform intimacy and authenticity as part of their celebrity persona maintenance during a time of increased precarity for their sports and thus their main avenue for fame. This article analyzes how Instagram Live – in relation to Instagram and Instagram Stories – operates as a locus of celebrity performance of authenticity and intimacy with A Touch More as the case study. Further, by exploring the construction of Bird and Rapinoe’s individual and coupled celebrity personas as fundamentally connected to the gendered precarity of their sports, I argue that even with their superstar status, Bird and Rapinoe’s cultivated intimacy in A Touch More was, in essence, a market necessity.
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Charlotte E. Howell
Charlotte E. Howell is an Assistant Professor of Television Studies in the Department of Film and Television at Boston University. Her first book, Divine Programming: Negotiating Christianity in American Dramatic Television Production 1996-2016 was published with Oxford University Press in 2020.