The work of emotion in a digital age: ‘A trust betrayed’, ten years on

ABSTRACT

This article explores the legacy of Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi’s germinal 2010 article, ‘A Trust Betrayed’, which provided a hugely generative framework for considering the politics of emotion exemplified in celebrity culture. Focusing on the relational politics of affective revelation, Nunn and Biressi identified the emotional labour of celebrity individuality underpinned by the continual work of self-narrativisation. I briefly highlight the continuing generative elements of this framework in a context of highly mediated public individuality. Digital culture has become even more crucial to the circulation of celebrity, as well as reinforcing celebritised norms of self-presentation in everyday contexts. Biressi and Nunn’s framework of celebrity emotional labour raises important questions about the continuing place of personality on the political terrain of popular culture, and how authenticity, legitimacy and ‘relatability’ in the ascent of social media culture, may be unequally attributed in terms of gender, class and race. In the context of intensifying social inequality and neoliberal ‘commonsense’, I suggest Biressi and Nunn’s framework continues to give us much to consider in terms of self-revelation as an unequally distributed resource of identity.

KEYWORDS:

• affect
• emotional labour
• therapeutic culture
• digital culture
• identity politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Thanks to Sarah Banet-Weiser, who raised this question of believability in a public lecture in December 2019, ‘#BelieveWomen: Believability in an Age of Post-Truth’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Akane Kanai

Akane Kanai is a lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her book, Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture: Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value (2018), is published with Palgrave Macmillan. Her work on identity, affect, and the politics of digital culture has been published in journals including Feminist Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and Social Media + Society.