Rebellious Bodies
Rebellious Bodies
Stardom, Citizenship, and the New Body Politics
Celebrity culture today teems with stars who challenge long-held ideas about a “normal” body. Plus-size and older actresses are rebelling against the cultural obsession with slender bodies and youth. Physically disabled actors and actresses are moving beyond the stock roles and stereotypes that once constrained their opportunities. Stars of various races and ethnicities are crafting new narratives about cultural belonging, while transgender performers are challenging our culture’s assumptions about gender and identity. But do these new players in contemporary entertainment media truly signal a new acceptance of body diversity in popular culture?
Focusing on six key examples—Melissa McCarthy, Gabourey Sidibe, Peter Dinklage, Danny Trejo, Betty White, and Laverne Cox—Rebellious Bodies examines the new body politics of stardom, situating each star against a prominent cultural anxiety about bodies and inclusion, evoking issues ranging from the obesity epidemic and the rise of postracial rhetoric to disability rights, Latino/a immigration, an aging population, and transgender activism. Using a wide variety of sources featuring these celebrities—films, TV shows, entertainment journalism, and more—to analyze each one’s media persona, Russell Meeuf demonstrates that while these stars are promoted as examples of a supposedly more inclusive industry, the reality is far more complex. Revealing how their bodies have become sites for negotiating the still-contested boundaries of cultural citizenship, he uncovers the stark limitations of inclusion in a deeply unequal world.
A highly engaging book that makes a smart and important contribution to star and celebrity studies, and to scholarship on twenty-first-century Hollywood and the cultural politics of identity.
I believe this book is going to become a model for stardom studies organized around a cultural theory. Its focus on supposedly diverse star bodies is a wonderful and original idea, especially in its development of the cultural narratives developed to make these bodies palatable. Also original is the linking together of stars whose back stories and celebrity are very different, but who are actually similar in their cultural configurations and meanings.
RUSSELL MEEUF is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Media at the University of Idaho.
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Star Bodies and the Politics of Inclusion
- 1. Melissa McCarthy: Class and Corpulence in the Obesity Epidemic Era
- 2. Gabourey Sidibe: Obesity and Postracial Femininity
- 3. Peter Dinklage: Meritocracy and the World’s Sexiest Dwarf
- 4. Danny Trejo: Latino Action Stardom and the Shifting Borders of Whiteness
- 5. Betty White: Bawdy Grandmas, Aging in America, and “Prefeminist” Fantasies
- 6. Conclusion: Laverne Cox, Trans Women, and the Limits of Neoliberal Citizenship
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
