A Touch More with Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird: authenticity, intimacy and women’s sports celebrity on Instagram live

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Instagram
• celebrity
• gender
• sports

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

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.