Page 173 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Audience, Performance, and Celebrity 157

tours. But Spears also established herself as a controversial public fi gure.
And her life spun out of control. She married, had children, got divorced,
entered drug rehabilitation programs. shaved her head, attacked a paparaz-

zo ’ s car, and became a constant figure on the front cover of grocery store
gossip magazines. Nevertheless, by 2009, she had turned her life around,
had a successful comeback single in “ Womanizer, ” and won another
Album of the Year award with Blackout .
Comments on celebrities in magazines, on television, and online con-
stitute a discourse, a particular organization of language and of possible
language acts that as much create the object they are describing as record
an objective description of it. An objective description of Spears might
include physical facts, biographical data, record of accomplishments, and
the like. But once one begins to add adjectives, the description cease to be
objective and becomes subjective, something inside the viewer instead of
the object viewed. For example, a particularly strong adjective would be
slutty (as opposed to the more neutral sexy ) because it contains a negative
value judgment. Much celebrity gossip discourse contains such value judg-
ments. Examining where such judgments come from and what they mean
is as interesting a concern of cultural studies as the celebrities themselves.
Indeed, one could say that to be a celebrity is to have meaning for people
and that those meanings often appear as discursive acts that project onto
the celebrity grids of moral value that make him or her an occasion for
exercising moral judgment. Celebrities are a way of testing and reinforcing
moral values. But what kinds of values are at issue, and how do they
connect with the particular communities that engage in such acts of
valuation?
Cultural studies scholars noticed at one point that the discourse regard-
ing Spears shifted from her to her parents and to her mother especially,
who was portrayed in the discourse as exploiting her daughter ’ s sexuality
and talent to enrich herself. She was also characterized as a failed mother
who pushed her daughter out into the world too soon and failed to look
after her properly. This discourse was distinctly middle class because it
differentiated its own supposedly more wholesome and healthy family
values from those of Lynne Spears, in part because she was depicted as
White trash, a reference to poor or working - class rural, often Southern,
people (Lynne Spears is from Louisiana). According to the ideal paradigm
of this middle - class discourse, women should be decorous, deferential, and
selfless rather than ambitious, independent, and forceful in the pursuit of