Introduction: transformations of celebrity studies: the inaugural issue, ten years on

‘Our star is yet to be fully born’, Bennett (2010, p. 113), co-founder of Celebrity Studies, mused in the Introduction to the inaugural edition of this journal’s Forum section. Bennett was quick to add, however, that scholars should be careful not to be bedazzled by the bright light of this new discipline called celebrity studies: ‘We should be critically aware of the discourses, including our own, that will constitute’ the emergent field, he noted (p. 113). Nurturing this critical awareness, in fact, was precisely the goal of the new section he was introducing: the Forum was envisaged to be ‘a “public sphere” for the celebrity studies citizenry’, a space in which ‘the radical critical potential of celebrity – its unruliness and incoherence – is embraced, discussed and analysed from a variety of perspectives’ (p. 113).

Over the last ten years, the Forum section has provided exactly that: a public platform for short, timely ‘think pieces’, provocative and open-ended, that draw attention to ‘what’s “hot” in celebrity culture’, signal new research perspectives or reconsider accepted insights. At times, issues of the Forum collected spontaneously submitted stand-alone pieces, foregrounding the connections between them and framing them in the extant literature. At other times, the Forum presented pre-planned ‘special issues’ on a variety of timely topics: celebrity and politics (Bennett 2011), the Big Brother reality-tv series (Holmes 2011), celebrity and feminism (Hamad and Taylor 2015) or celebrity and #metoo (Franssen 2020) are just a few examples.

For this Forum special edition, in the final issue of the tenth year of Celebrity Studies, we felt it would be fitting to look back on some of the original article contributions to the inaugural issue and reflect on their impact and ongoing relevance in the context of related transformations in the field since then. Thus, we invited some of the most promising among the new generation of celebrity studies scholars to reflect on developments in the field, taking one of the articles in the very first issue of the journal as their starting point. With room for just four contributions, it was obviously not possible to do justice to all of the contributions in the first issue, even though every single of them has been profoundly influential. Nonetheless, these four contributions together make up a fitting ‘anniversary’ issue of the Forum, celebrating ten years of the journal.

In the first contribution, Alice Leppert revisits Bennett and Holmes (2010) article ‘The “place” of television in celebrity studies’. Leppert takes up on Bennett’s and Holmes’ argument that the entrepreneurial, self-branding and presentational impulse of reality TV has become part and parcel of the common expectations about everyday life. Expanding on this, Leppert points out that in our current times of COVID-19-enforced video calling and conferencing, the presentation of the self has been modelled on television fame: intriguingly, a pandemic makes us all television stars. The second contributor is Akane Kanai, who presents a reflection on ‘A trust betrayed: celebrity and the work of emotion’ by Nunn and Biressi (2010). Kanai underlines the importance of Nunn’s and Biressi’s take on celebrities’ self-presentation as a form of emotional work, governed by specific ‘feeling rules’ and goes on to argue that digital culture has produced an intensification of those rules, resulting in a deepening of celebritised norms of authenticity, perfection and ‘relatability’. Annelot Prins authored the third piece for this Forum, offering a rereading of Douglas Kellner’s (2010) ‘Celebrity diplomacy, spectacle and Barack Obama’ in the light of the celebrity politics of Donald Trump. Contrasting Kellner’s analysis of Obama’s celebrity diplomacy with a reading of Trump as a master in ‘the art of negative affect’, Prins suggests that both can be understood as part of a more general shift from structured ideological positions to a politics of affect, or ‘emo-truth’. In the final contribution, Jessica E. Johnston develops a line of argument set out in P. David Marshall’s (2010) ‘The promotion and presentation of the self: celebrity as a marker of presentational media’. Building on Marshall’s claim that celebrity has become a pedagogical tool and pedagogical aid in the discourse of the self, Johnston puts forward that it has now become a professional tool as well, that guides individuals in navigating an increasingly digitised and precarious jobs economy. This development, she warns, warrants critical attention, as it reinforces old inequalities of race, gender and class.

Taken together, these four contributions fulfil the promise offered in the first issue of Celebrity Studies, that is, to remain critically aware of the discourses that constitute – and continue to shape, widen and deepen – the field. In doing so, they demonstrate not only that ‘our star’ has matured, but also that it is has been revealed to be a part of an ever-expanding universe.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gaston Franssen

Gaston Franssen is assistant professor of Literary Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He has published on celebrity in the Journal of Dutch Studies, Celebrity Studies, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. In 2016, he co-edited Celebrity Authorship and Afterlives in English and American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan); in 2017, Idolizing Authorship: Literary Celebrity and the Construction of Identity, 1800 to the Present (Amsterdam University Press).