Gendering mental distress in celebrity culture: introduction

Supposedly, as the saying goes, it is very lonely at the top. However, one of the many insights that the field of celebrity studies has brought forward is that, in reality, it is very crowded at the top. Celebrities are never really alone and have hardly any privacy: on a daily basis, they are moulded by producers, pressured by public image advisors, harangued by paparazzi, and closely eyed by uncountable fans and often unrelenting critics. Celebrity culture, at its core, is a culture of surveillance: rarely does the star have a moment alone.

Little wonder, then, that mental distress is part and parcel of being a famous individual. As human beings, of course, celebrities can live under the same conditions as any other person, such as depression, personality disorders or panic attacks. Yet at the same time, they are confronted with forms of mental distress that are arguably the result of their fame. They struggle with high expectations of global audiences, a profound split between their public and private self, and the pressure of being the keystone in global economic infrastructures built around their work and image. This Forum issue brings together two insightful contributions that explore how celebrities deal with such pressures and how their fans and critics respond to it.

That celebrities can succumb to mental distress in response to their success is already well-known. In his Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity, Giles (2000) offers an extensive list of the psychological perils of fame, which includes the loss of privacy, the alienating experience of self-commodification, potential delusions of grandeur, or even a full-fledged identity crisis. Just et al. (2016) further points to the high prevalence of drug abuse problems among the celebrity population. Intriguingly, each celebrity domain comes with its own ‘cultural aetiologies’ of mental distress: successful orchestral musicians, for instance, suffer from experiences of depression and music performance anxiety due to the pressure they live under (Kenny and Ackermann 2015), whereas elite sport performers are confronted with the consequences of psychological self-neglect (low self-esteem, depression, burn-out) as they struggle with the stigma of mental health issues prevalent in the athletic environment (Newman et al. 2016). In the pages of Celebrity Studies, too, such topics have been well-explored (see for instance Palmer 2016, Peberdy 2019 or Ferreday 2020).

As all life experiences are, mental distress is fundamentally shaped and coloured through the identity dimensions of class, race and gender. The role of gender, in particular, has received much academic attention. Nina K. Martin, for example, argues that breakdowns of male celebrities are considered ‘fascinating, demonstrating behaviour that shores up stereotypical hetero-masculinity’, whereas female celebrities displaying psychological distress are associated with failure, mental frailty and hysteria (Martin 2015, p. 31). Likewise, Stephen Harper observes that popular media representations of men’s struggle with mental crisis are characterised by heroic recovery through ‘sheer strength of will’, whilst female madness is figured as ‘abjection’ (Harper 2009, p. 190).

It is to this discussion on gendering celebrities’ mental distress that the two Forum submissions collected here aim to contribute in particular. In his contribution, Kai Arne Hansen analyses Zayn Malik’s openness about contending with disordered eating. In his 2016 autobiography Zayn, the pop artist Malik, formerly of the boy band One Direction, disclosed that he had suffered from an eating disorder as a result of feeling restricted and exploited by the band’s record companies and management. As eating disorders are stereotypically portrayed by the media as ‘women’s illness’, Malik’s disclosure was lauded as challenging traditional notions of masculinity and resisting gender inequality. However, evoking insights into ‘hybrid masculinities’, Hansen demonstrates that Malik’s rewriting of the gendered narrative of eating disorders is not as straightforward as it may appear. Hybrid masculinities, Hansen argues, usher in gender ideals that promote equality, but simultaneously reproduce existing systems of gender and sexual inequality. Hansen shows how Zayn’s persona indeed affirms gendered notions of mental distress due to popular success as much as it resists them.

Focusing on a pop star struggling with the pressures of being a celebrity as well, Susan Hopkins, in her contribution, investigates the aftermath of Britney Spears’ public display of mental distress in 2007 and the 14-year long, apparently suffocating conservatorship that the star was held under since then. Redirecting the attention away from Spears’ much-discussed 2007 crisis (Redmond 2008, Fisher 2011), Hopkins highlights the role of empowered femininity in the online #FreeBritney movement. Analysing the voices of #FreeBritney activists in the documentary Framing Britney Spears (2021, dir. Samantha Sparks), Hopkins demonstrates how the movement pushes back against conservative and patriarchal discourses around ideals of disciplined femininity and shamed celebrity ‘trainwrecks’: Spears’ fans co-create an alternative narrative of a vulnerable young woman who, to the detriment of her mental health, struggles to regain control of her life and voice – a narrative with which many individuals growing up in the sexist 1990s identify. The #FreeBritney movement, Hopkins concludes, is a reminder that the youthful ‘feminine’ realm of pop culture fandom has become a force to be reckoned with.

Taken together, these two contributions offer original insights and point towards promising further avenues for research. What is the role of class, for instance, in experiences of mental distress in celebrity culture, or that of race? The Forum of Celebrity Studies welcomes any submission that takes up these important and fascinating questions.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gaston Franssen

Gaston Franssen is Professor of Dutch Literary Studies and Intermediality 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).