Introduction: gal pals, gamers and hacktivists in contemporary cultures of celebrity

The contributions that comprise this issue of the Forum look at contemporary celebrity culture through three timely and topical lenses: the cultural currency of female same-sex celebrity couples, emergent forms of celebrity in cultures of gaming, and the acquisition of celebrity status by ‘hacktivist’ whistleblowers.

As Shelley Cobb writes, ‘Since 2008’, with the passing of California’s Proposition 8 to overturn the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the USA (which has since been dismissed as unconstitutional), ‘gay and lesbian celebrity couples have become more ubiquitous in the media’ (2015, p. 211). Sam McBean thus writes at the intersection of celebrity studies and queer studies about a problematic discourse that has emerged from a mid-2010s media buzz surrounding same-sex relationships between celebrity women. Specifically, the characterisation of the nature of these relationships in media coverage in ways that seem to preclude the possibility of sex, via a surface discourse of female friendship. She refers to this as the ‘gal pal epidemic’ in which ‘lesbian possibility [is masked] with euphemisms of friendship’. In this respect her piece joins cognate earlier work in this journal by Anita Brady (2014), which also interrogated the cultural politics of mediating same-sex relationships between women in celebrity culture, in this case through an analysis of three widely mediated female celebrity kisses.

The paratexts of cultures of videogaming have, as scholars have noted (Shepherd et al. 2015, Tomkinson and Harper 2015), recently given rise to the celebrity of people like feminist blogger and videogames critic Anita Sarkeesian, and female videogame developers like Zoë Quinn and Breanna Wu, all of whose celebrity status escalated after they were subjected to misogynist online harassment in an Internet hate campaign that became known as the ‘GamerGate’ controversy. Acknowledging the role of GamerGate in the emergent celebrity culture of gaming, but also looking beyond it, James Newman makes a timely and much-needed intervention at an intersection of celebrity studies and game studies. He identifies the limited public visibility of the key figures involved in the production of videogames, and lays claim to the intentionality behind the perpetuation of the status quo vis-à-vis the relative cultural invisibility of these individuals, on the part of those in power in the gaming industries. He also argues that online spaces like YouTube provide efficacious platforms for the emergence of the figure of the celebrity gamer, by way of celebrity scholar Terry Senft’s (2008) conceptualisation of ‘microcelebrity’. Newman highlights significant divergences in how this development in the emergent celebrity culture of gaming is being received by users, gamers and industry figures. In this regard, his piece raises a number of pertinent questions for celebrity studies about the relationship between videogaming and contemporary celebrity culture.

At the time of writing (March 2016), WikiLeaks founder and celebrity hacktivist Julian Assange is once again making waves in both the mainstream news media and in celebrity culture. Assange, who has not left the Ecuadorean embassy in London since seeking refuge and being granted asylum there on 16 August 2012, is still wanted for questioning following a rape allegation made against him in Sweden in 2010. A number of celebrities, including artist Ai Weiwei, filmmakers Oliver Stone and Alfonso Cuarón, and fashion icon Vivienne Westwood, have recently come out in support of Assange, publicly signing a petition to the effect that he is being detained arbritrarily (Bowcott and Crouch 2016). It is in this context that Philip Di Salvo continues the conversation about celebrity ‘hacktivism’ started in this journal by Mandy Merck (2015), interrogating the mediation of hacktivism through the lens of celebrity studies. This conversation concerns the celebritisation of high-profile hacktivists, and the move to celebrity status experienced by individuals like Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning (known as Bradley Manning at the time she first attained celebrity status), and Edward Snowden, in the aftermath of revelations made public in the media as a result of their respective activities in whistleblowing hacktivism.