Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8644
Title: Young people's uses of celebrity: Class, gender and 'improper' celebrity
Authors: Mendick, H
Keywords: Celebrity;Gender;Class;Aspirations;Neoliberalism
Issue Date: 2013
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Citation: Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 77 - 93, 2013
Abstract: In this article, we explore the question of how celebrity operates in young people's everyday lives, thus contributing to the urgent need to address celebrity's social function. Drawing on data from three studies in England on young people's perspectives on their educational and work futures, we show how celebrity operates as a classed and gendered discursive device within young people's identity work. We illustrate how young people draw upon class and gender distinctions that circulate within celebrity discourses (proper/improper, deserving/undeserving, talented/talentless and respectable/tacky) as they construct their own identities in relation to notions of work, aspiration and achievement. We argue that these distinctions operate as part of neoliberal demands to produce oneself as a ‘subject of value’. However, some participants produced readings that show ambivalence and even resistance to these dominant discourses. Young people's responses to celebrity are shown to relate to their own class and gender position.
Description: This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01596306.2012.698865.
URI: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01596306.2012.698865
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/8644
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.698865
ISSN: 0159-6306
Appears in Collections:Education
Dept of Education Research Papers

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