Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines

Andrea McDonnell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780745682198
  9780745682181
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745684550
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Americans are obsessed with celebrities. While our fascination with fame intensified throughout the twentieth century, the rise of the weekly gossip magazine in the early 2000s confirmed and fueled our popular culture's celebrity mania. After a decade of diets and dates, breakups and baby bumps, celebrity gossip magazines continue to sell millions of issues each week. Why are readers, especially young women, so attracted to these magazines? What pleasures do they offer us? And why do we read them, even when we disagree with the images of femininity that they splash across their hot-pink covers?

Andrea McDonnell answers these questions with the help of interviews from editors and readers, and her own textual and visual analysis. McDonnell's perspective is multifaceted; she examines the notorious narratives of celebrity gossip magazines as well as the genre's core features, such as the "Just Like Us" photo montage and the "Who Wore It Best?" poll. McDonnell shows that, despite their trivial reputation, celebrity gossip magazines serve as an important site of engagement for their readers, who use these texts to generate conversation, manage relationships, and consider their own ideas and values.

1

Gendering Celebrity Gossip

In early 2002, Canadian magazine executive Bonnie Fuller became editor-in-chief of the newly made-over Us Weekly magazine; eight months later, with news-stand sales up over 55 percent, Fuller was named Advertising Age's editor of the year.¹ But even while she was celebrated for her professional achievements, Fuller could not escape her magazine's reputation. “Us is ‘a deep-fried Twinkie’,” Claire Connors, Fuller's former colleague and entertainment director of Redbook magazine, told Advertising Age's David Carr. Carr himself likened the experience of reading Us to “eating the whole box of cookies, or ripping the top off a gumball machine and stuffing fistfuls in your mouth.”² Such analogies are not uncommon within the world of celebrity gossip. Us Weekly and its counterparts are often compared to sweets, fluff, and treacle. This rhetoric suggests that celebrity gossip is an excessive, addictive, potentially dangerous treat, offering too-tempting-to-resist pleasures that ultimately leave you sick to your stomach. As Connors puts it, “It's so bad, it's good.”

Today, celebrity gossip magazines continue to be defined in these terms. But this discourse is not new; nor is it unique to this particular genre. The rhetoric that suggests these magazines are saccharine, trashy delights is indicative of a series of deeply held discourses, which circulate around cultural texts that are produced for, marketed to, and associated with female audiences. This chapter examines the ways in which such texts, which I call the popular feminine, come to be gendered within both the popular and academic discourse. By examining these discursive frames, we can begin to understand how the gendering of popular texts impacts our perceptions of those texts, the meanings we associate with them, and our feelings about the pleasures we derive from them.

The Popular Feminine

Celebrity gossip magazines are part of a broader set of popular cultural products produced for, marketed to, and consumed primarily by women. Soap operas. Chick flicks. Romance novels. These texts are not only linked by their emphasis on female life and their popularity with female audiences, but also by a set of discourses which are commonly applied across such genres. In both the popular and academic literature, these texts and the audiences who enjoy them are routinely delegitimized, trivialized, and problematized. In an effort to point to the way in which these texts are inextricably linked within these discursive frames, I use the term “the popular feminine” to describe popular texts that are associated with women and female life and that are subject to denigration based upon this gendered association.

I draw the term “popular feminine” from the work of Tanya Modleski, who, in her 1982 book Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women, examines three forms of popular culture “designed specifically for a female audience:” Harlequin romance, gothic novels, and soap operas. Modleski uses the term “popular feminine texts” to describe the objects of her study. But while Modleski is fundamentally interested in the response of female audiences, she does not insist that the audience for these texts consists entirely of women; nor does she argue that all women enjoy them. Likewise, I do not mean to imply that all women enjoy Twilight and Cosmopolitan magazine, nor do I wish to suggest that women are the only consumers of these cultural products, although many women certainly do find them entertaining. Rather, I use the term “the popular feminine” to highlight the way in which the perceived gender of popular texts impacts their meanings and value.

Popular feminine texts are inextricably linked with female audiences. And while these texts may very well have many female fans, the actual gender of their audience matters less than its perceived gender. In other words, popular feminine texts come to be understood as “female.” For example, celebrity gossip magazines, in contemporary popular discourse, are gendered feminine. This is a point that ordinary people agree upon; however, it is an academically problematic one because it is difficult to empirically prove such a cultural assumption. Yet scholarship suggests that audiences do, in fact, form consensus around the gendered nature of popular cultural texts. In her 1995 study, Hermes' participants assume that gossip magazines are women's texts (gossip, too, being a presumed female pastime). Irrespective of whether there exist men who read these magazines, or ladies who loathe them, Hermes' readers associate the genre with women. Dorothy Hobson finds a similar distinction in her 1980 study of television and radio listeners; her participants suggest that different media texts belong to specific gendered “worlds” and demonstrate a preference for those texts that belong to the “world” with which they identify.

What is troubling here is not necessarily the fact that different texts may be associated with audiences of different genders, but rather the consistency with which texts that have been gendered feminine have been linked to a web of discourses that undercut their value and underestimate the taste and intellect of those who enjoy them. As an author of young adult literature, Maureen Johnson knows this all too well. In an essay entitled “The Gender Coverup” (2013), she discusses the assumptions she routinely encounters:

When I hear people talk about “trashy” books, 95% of the time, they are talking about books written by women. When I see or hear the terms “light,” “fluffy,” “breezy,” or “beach read” … 95% of the time, they are talking about books written [and read] by women. Many times I hear people talking about books they have not read – books they've seen or heard about. I hear their predictions about those books. And then I hear people slapping labels on books they haven't read, making predictions. Again, I hear the same things. “Oh, that's just some romance.” “I'll read that when I just want something brainless.”

The books in question? You guessed it. Written by women. And some of those books, I'll note to myself, are fairly hardcore and literary, and I'll try to explain that. “Oh?” people will say. “Really? I thought it was just some chick lit book” … Somehow, we have put books into gender categories.

These gender categories, as Johnson makes clear, devalue texts that are presumed to be feminine. Further, these categorical assumptions work to shame audiences who enjoy feminine texts by perpetuating a distinction between cultural products that are “for women,” which are painted as illegitimate, and those “for men” which, by contrast, are bolstered. Thus, anyone, regardless of gender, who seeks out or enjoys the popular feminine is subject to its negative glare.³ In order to understand how it is that popular texts, and celebrity gossip magazines in particular, have come to be gendered and how it is that this gendering renders the pleasures associated with these texts taboo, “less than,” or otherwise “guilty,” we must examine those discourses which work to marginalize and trivialize the popular feminine.

Negative associations between women and popular cultural texts can be traced to the nineteenth century, as Andreas Huyssen documents in his 1986 article “Mass Culture as Woman.” During this time, as the Industrial Revolution produced major advances in printing and new books and periodicals emerged to meet the demands of a growing population of literate workers, serial novels and family magazines became increasingly popular with an expanding cohort of literate women. At the same time, these texts were condemned by bourgeois critics, who alleged that these forms of “mass culture” were unworthy substitutes for “true literature” (Huyssen, 1986).

The critiques aimed at the popular press were often gendered in nature; as Huyssen writes, “a specific traditional male image of women served as a receptacle for all kinds of projections, displaced fears, and anxieties (both personal and political), which were brought about by modernization and the new social conflicts” (1986: 52). For example, in an 1855 letter to his publisher, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne complained of “the damned mob of scribbling women” – popular female authors whose books often outsold his, reaching hundreds of thousands of readers. And 30 years later, prominent journal editor Michael Georg Conrad wrote that literature needed to be emancipated from the “tyranny of well-bred debutantes and old wives of both sexes” (Huyssen, 1986: 50).⁴ In order to guard themselves against the threat of the newly literate population, elite men held tight to traditional high cultural forms, contrasting literature, classical music, and the avant-garde with a bawdy, feminine mass culture in order to assert the former's legitimacy. In this way, mass-culture critiques became inextricably linked with the devaluation of female audiences and female pleasure in turn-of-the-century America. Since that time, this ideology has been used to trivialize and marginalize everything from Gossip Girl to Days of Our Lives.

The critique of mass culture works hand in hand with the discourse of public and private life. It has long been noted that the things that concern women lie outside the realm of the political public sphere, which was originally and remains to this day largely the domain of men. The political sphere of the late eighteenth century emerged thanks, in no small part, to the growth of a newly literate reading public, the literary public sphere, which was forged in the early decades of the century. This reading public had two distinct strands: one oriented toward news and one toward amusement. The news-reading public consisted of men who read and discussed the news in their coffee houses and clubs, from which women were excluded. The entertainment-reading public included women of the new bourgeois social class who had time, leisure, and money to spend on magazines and novels, which they consumed in what Jürgen Habermas calls the “intimate sphere” of the bourgeois household ([1962]1989). Outside the home, men read to be informed. Inside the home, women read to be entertained. Politics, war, business – these are public matters, matters impacting what Habermas calls “the common good”; domestic, familial, and bodily matters – these are private affairs, and so, the logic goes, should be confined to the intimate sphere. This division between public and private works to produce a gendered moral economy in which the concerns of men are deemed weighty, worldly, and important, while the concerns of women are considered lightweight, domestic, and trivial.

This discourse relegates important social issues, many of which directly impact women, to the political margins (Fraser, 1992; MacKinnon, 1983, 1989). In her essay, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Nancy Fraser argues that “there are no naturally given, a priori boundaries” between public and private concerns and that “only participants themselves can decide what is and what is not common concern to them” (1992: 129). Fraser uses the example of domestic violence to illustrate this point, noting that, until recently, “feminists were in the minority in thinking that domestic violence against women was a matter of common concern and thus a legitimate topic for public discourse” rather than simply a private, domestic issue (1992: 129). For Fraser and other feminist scholars, conceptions of public and private, which are unstable, historically and socially relative, and “affected by political powers and dominant ideological systems” have been employed to undercut a wide range of issues pertaining to childcare, abortion, and domestic relations, to name just a few, which deeply affect women's lives (João Silveirinha, 2007: 66).

Indeed, this was the rallying cry of second-wave feminists: the personal is political. This mantra challenged the rigid divide between public and private life by insisting that the discourse of the personal was a false construct, an ideological wedge used to relegate important social issues to the fringes of political debate. Feminist activists and scholars have since sought to retrieve these “private” matters from the shadowy realm of the personal and reposition them in the public spotlight; however, despite their groundbreaking efforts, public and private, personal and political continue to serve as powerful defining categories.

In her 2008 book The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Lauren Berlant argues for what she calls an intimate public, “a space of mediation [often facilitated by the consumption of media texts, i.e., “the popular feminine”] in which the personal is refracted through the general” (2008: viii). Within the intimate public, participants are linked through a shared “fan­tasy” of communal engagement, based upon “an expectation that consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience” (viii). The promise of a female-centered intimate public is that it allows women “to feel that their emotional lives are already shared and have already been raised to a degree of general significance while remaining true to what's personal” (ix). In short, the intimate public emphasizes the personal, the commonplace, the presupposed historical and cultural conditions that shape women's understanding of their own experiences in a way that creates, link by link, an imagined, but deeply felt, sense of connection and community.

Furthermore, the intimate public serves as a realm in which norms, values, and attitudes about female behavior and experience are monitored and discussed, although this dialogue is not based on the kind of rational discourse that Habermas advocates. This model is a productive one in that it allows us to recognize and take seriously, on its own terms, the sense of commonality that women's popular cultural texts provide to their audiences and the potential for “realistic, critical assessment” (2008: viii) and endurance that mediated engagement can encourage. And yet the intimate public that Berlant sets forth continues to be “denigrated in the privileged publics of the United States,” regardless of the fact that it provides a key “experience of social belonging” for many women (2008: xi).

Despite gains in education and employment, assumptions about women's relationship to the private sphere persist. Popular texts that document matters of personal life or address issues concerning the home and the family, the body, and relationships are routinely feminized in deprecatory ways. And while scholarship has shown that the popular texts that engage with matters of private life provide audiences with an important opportunity for identification, engagement, and discussion – a means of seriously grappling with personal challenges in a pleasurable way – these texts continue to be diminished (Brown, 1989; Feasey, 2008; Johansson, 2006; Radway, 1984). To this day, the intimate sphere is defined as both separate from and less important than its public, masculine counterpart.

Softening the News

We can see the operationalization of these assumptions about public and private life in the discourse of tabloidization, which circulates around celebrity gossip magazines, talk shows, and entertainment news programs such as The Today Show and Good Morning America. Critics accuse these news programs, which often feature human interest and celebrity stories, of degrading and “softening” (i.e., feminizing) mainstream news. These critiques are not new – debates over the alleged tabloidization of the mainstream press have been ongoing since the early part of the nineteenth century when the penny press emerged in the United States – but the clamor has risen in recent years, as stories about the personal lives of celebrities, once a rarity in mainstream newspapers, television, and news radio shows, have become commonplace.

Celebrity news is some of the most sought-after and widely consumed content in the country and mainstream news sources, struggling to stay afloat in a content-saturated marketplace, are now cashing in on the celebrity craze. Reporter, writer, and former Us Weekly editor Lauren Schutte argues that mainstream news has been forced to incorporate these stories, which have the power to reach mass audiences and dra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Celebrity Gossip Magazines in American Popular Culture
• 1: Gendering Celebrity Gossip
• 2: All About Us: Celebrity Gossip Magazines and the Female Reader
• 3: Stars on Earth: The Paradox of Ordinary Celebrity
• 4: Making Morality Meaningful
• 5: Ambiguously Truthful
• Conclusion: On Pleasure and the Popular
• Appendix A: Reader Profiles
• Appendix B: Editor Profiles
• Appendix C: Content Analysis of Female Celebrities in Cover Stories by Age
• References
• Index