Introduction: transgender celebrity, celebrity political endorsements, and the practice of celebrity public relations

The publication of the July issue of Vanity Fair magazine on 1 June 2015 announced the first sanctioned mainstream media appearance of post-transition Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic decathlete and Keeping Up with the Kardashians (E!, 2007–) reality TV celebrity, heretofore known as Bruce, who made public her identity as a transgender woman in a 20/20 (ABC, 1978–) interview with US television journalist Diane Sawyer in April that year. This cover story, and the media buzz it generated, arguably constituted the celebrity flashpoint of 2015. Its cover image, taken by A-list celebrity photographer Annie Leibowitz, featured Jenner sitting crossed legged on a stool with her hands behind her back, dressed in a strapless white corset, and was accompanied by the strapline ‘Call me Caitlyn’, officially marking the endpoint of her public gender transition (Bissinger 2015). This preceded the inaugural network airing that began the following month of I Am Cait (E!, 2015), a reality documentary series charting the aftermath of Jenner’s transition. Also, it followed the rise to prominence of the celebrity status of transgender former reality TV star Laverne Cox, whose path-breaking role as a post-transition inmate of a women’s prison in serial comedy-drama Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–) led to her becoming the first publicly transgender celebrity to feature on the cover of TIME magazine in May 2014. She thus became the public face of a cultural moment and movement for the transgender community that the strapline labelled ‘America’s next civil rights frontier’ (Steinmetz 2014). Undoubtedly, therefore, 2014–15 have been watershed years for the media visibility and discursive cultural prominence of transgender celebrity – and hence for the cultural visibility of transgender people and the currency of issues pertaining to both lived experiences and imagery of transgender identities across the spectrum of popular media.

Anita Brady’s entry in this, the first Celebrity Studies Forum of 2016, engages with this flashpoint, arguing that key texts in the early media coverage of Jenner’s transition ‘reconstitute a gendered paradigm of “earned” celebrity by positioning the integrity of Jenner’s fame in opposition to the feminised superficiality of [the Kardashians]’. Brady thus joins Mara Dauphin (2015), in issue 6(2) of this journal, in interrogating some of the meanings of celebrity through the lens of transgender identities, and Alexandra Sastre (2014) in issue 5(1–2) in recognising the powerhouse presence and socio-cultural significance of the Kardashian phenomenon to the contemporary celebrity mediascape.

Elsewhere in celebrity (and political) culture, as the Obama era draws to a close and the US media goes into overdrive in its coverage of the presidential primary campaign trail, the timeliness of Matthew Atkinson and Darin DeWitt’s consideration of the efficacy of celebrity political endorsements comes into clear view alongside the advent of the primaries, ahead of the forthcoming 2016 US presidential election. Atkinson and DeWitt raise questions that place their piece in productive dialogue with cognate work which considers the relationship between the endorsement of political candidates by celebrities, their election to public office, and the views and opinions of voters. Their article thus joins work published elsewhere in this journal by Valerie R. O’Regan (2014) who conducted an ethnographic study of young adults’ perception of celebrity political endorsements for issue 5(4), and Markéta Štechová who charts the development of celebrity endorsements in post-Communist Czech political culture in issue 6(2).

Finally, Paul Ziek’s contribution to this Forum investigates the cultivation of celebrity through the media and communications industry practice of public relations, and in doing so he engages productively with Ruth Penfold-Mounce’s earlier observation in issue 6(2) of the increasing imperative for work in celebrity studies – and other ‘glossy topics’ – to ‘successfully pursue the creation of measurable value by developing new bodies of evidence’ (Penfold-Mounce 2015, p. 255). Ziek is concerned with the intersection of the theory and practice of celebrity public relations, advocating for greater understanding of and attention to the latter in service to the development of the former.