Flesh-images, body shame and affective ambiguities in celebrity gossip magazines

ABSTRACT

In the last decade celebrity gossip magazines targeted at a female audience have emerged in Sweden. With inquisitive attention paid to the detailed, fleshy exposure of female celebrities’ bodies and body parts, they portray what Weber refers to as body-based shame. This article argues that these flesh-images partake in an aesthetic feminine body discourse where the perfect and the imperfect are intrinsically linked with the ordinary and extraordinary paradox surrounding the celebrity persona. Flesh-images rely on their intertextuality. They indicate a loss of value, presenting female celebrities as ordinary by means of corporeal failure. While the exposure of body faults could point to the unattainable ideals of feminine bodily standards, they do so at the cost of reinforcing the implicit recognition of desire, shame and disgust familiar to female experience and looking relations. Hence, within a culture increasingly driven by a technology of extreme extroversion, flesh-images aimed at a female audience make sense through the logic of the revelation discourse that frames celebrity culture, and through the deeply ambivalent affects surrounding female embodiment.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity culture
• disgust
• female embodiment
• desire
• affective vision

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In addition to the magazines and their total weekly edition of 300,000, Aller Media AB encompass a celebrity website (Hant.se) and a newly launched podcast (www.allersforlag.se).

2. In order: VeckansNu!, no. 17, 2015; HäntBild!, no. 14, 2016; VeckansNu!, no. 9, 2015; HäntBild!, no. 22, 2012; and HäntBild!, no. 9, 2016.

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Notes on contributors

Anja Hirdman

Anja Hirdman is Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research addresses the ways bodies perform as communicative tools, and how affective dimensions of media texts produce different subject positions. Recent publications include ‘The Passion of Mediated Shame, Affective Reactivity and Classed Otherness in Reality-TV‘ (European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2015) and ‘Speaking through the Flesh. Affective Encounters, Gazes and Desire in Harlequin Romances’ (MediaKultur, 32 (16), 2016).