My Job is Me

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to think through a number of issues concerning the relationship between postfeminist/neoliberal brand culture, celebrity femininity and commodified authenticity. Using the case study of British glamour model and media mogul Katie Price, I suggest that the affective and commercial appeal of postfeminist celebrity culture depends on the commodification and gendering of authenticity whereby the currency of “realness” in the current media economy is harnessed to neoliberal and postfeminist expressions of (self-)branding, entrepreneurship and feminine agency. I argue that the “Katie Price” brand makes use of a series of authenticating strategies to involve consumers in the construction and assessment of postfeminist celebrity subjectivity. In particular, I focus on three tropes that occur in conjunction with this type of authenticity in consumption: personal narrativization, class groundedness, and entrepreneurial/plastic femininity.

Keywords::

• postfeminism
• (self-)branding
• authenticity
• celebrity
• neoliberalism

Notes

^1. As Banet-Weiser (2012) highlights, in this context branding becomes a cultural phenomenon more than an economic strategy and therefore can be differentiated from marketing strategies like commodification that transforms social and cultural life into something that can be bought and sold (4–5).

^2. As Hearn (2008) suggests, self-branding involves “work on the production of a branded ‘self’” that creates “a detachable, saleable image or narrative, which effectively circulates cultural meanings. This branded self either consciously positions itself, or is positioned by its context and use, as a site for the extraction of value” (164–165).

^3. The notion of labour also connects with the field of affect studies—in particular, groundbreaking work by feminist sociologists like Arlie Hochschild who in the now classic text The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983) suggested that feelings themselves are subject to “management” in both private and public contexts, and that such “emotion work” could be commercially exploited as “emotional labour” (Hochschild 1983).

^4. If as Banet-Weiser notes “brands are actually a story told to the consumer” and “the setting around which individuals weave their own stories” (2012, 4), then postfeminism can undoubtedly be described as a branded context weaving stories of female independence and empowerment to the neoliberal market values of entrepreneurship and self-care.

^5. The concept of “immaterial labour” derives from Marx's notion of “living labour” and refers to the idea that individuals are primarily workers in the sense that they actually build the substance and meaning of their daily lives, regardless of their status as employees (Cova and Dalli 2010).

^6. To paraphrase Foucault's liberal formulation of freedom in The Birth of Biopolitics (2010), authenticity is in itself consumed and therefore in need of being re-produced: “the new [liberal] art of government consumes freedom. It consumes freedom, which means that it must produce it. … Liberalism formulates simply the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free. I am going to see to it that you are free to be free” (63).

^7. First screened in 2002 and broadcast on British television network ITV, I'm a Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here is a reality TV game-show in which celebrities live in jungle conditions and have to undergo a series of trials until public voting decides on a “jungle king/queen.”

^8. Urban musical genres like hip hop in particular have drawn on the concept of the authentic as a sales tactic to demarcate racial, social and gender boundaries (see Kembrew McLeod 1999).

^9. Here, Price can be distinguished from other British working-class celebrities like Kerry Katona who in My Fair Kerry (ITV 2005) was taken to an Austrian castle to be tutored in etiquette, deportment and table manners in an attempt to “make over” her working-classness (see Tyler and Bennett 2010).

^10. In this sense, Price exploits what Emma Bell calls “the bad girl/mad girl-redeemed script” in which a new breed of boisterous and scandalizing female celebrities renounce their apparent transgressions and embrace a more “acceptable” femininity (2008, par. 4, 7).

^11. A 2005 UK online survey of almost 1000 girls aged 15–19 years found that 63 percent considered “glamour model” and 25 percent “lap dancer” their ideal profession from a list of choices including teacher and doctor (see Coy and Garner 2010, 664).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stéphanie Genz

Stéphanie Genz is Senior Lecturer in Media and Culture at Edge Hill University, UK. She specializes in contemporary gender and cultural theory. Her publications include Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories, Postfemininities in Popular Culture and Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture. Stéphanie's current work centres on sexist liberalism/liberal sexism in post-recessionary culture that belies assumptions of gender equality and sexual freedom. Email: [email protected]