Introduction: Special Issue – Going Cheap? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres

Dec. 1, 2008

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) [1] What is it with female celebrities lately? While the good girl/bad girl categories of a ludicrously dichotomized cultural script of femininity have...

Mother of the Year: Kathy Hilton, Lynne Spears, Dina Lohan and Bad Celebrity Motherhood

Nov. 1, 2008

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) In the lives of many young people, that person [responsible for curbing bad behaviour] is a parent. But what if it’s not? What...

Fame is a Losing Game: Celebrity Gossip Blogging, Bitch Culture and Postfeminism

Oct. 1, 2008

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) Introduction [1] From “outing” well known actors to breaking news of celebrity pregnancies or mental breakdowns, the gossip blog has become a key...

The Horror of Something to See: Celebrity “Vaginas” as Prostheses

Sept. 1, 2008

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) [1] 2007 was the year of the vagina. This word, which formerly maintained semi-taboo status—as either coldly clinical or uncomfortably explicit—circulated like never...

From Bad Girl to Mad Girl: British female celebrity, reality products, and the pathologization of pop-feminism

Aug. 1, 2008

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) “Hi everyone, I’m Kerry. You probably think you know everything about me already, but don’t believe all that crap you read in the...

Living The Hills Life: Lauren Conrad as Reality Star, Soap Opera Heroine, and Brand

July 2, 2008

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality, Tabloid and Scandal Genres – Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES ) [1] Multiple accounts of reality television discuss its ability to make a celebrity out of anybody, to pluck an ordinary person out of...

Latchkey Hero: Masculinity, Class and the Gothic in Eric Kripke’s Supernatural

June 15, 2008

“Redneck Aliens Take Over Trailer Park.” —Weekly World News (2006) [1] The gothic, a pan-media mode that migrated from novels to drama and poetry and then to film and television, has a long history of engaging the binary construction of gender and race as well as class (see, for instance,...

From Croft to Campus: Extra-Marital Pregnancy and the Scottish Literary Renaissance

June 1, 2008

[1] Teaching in rural Ohio, I have been surprised by the number of students who become pregnant, defying the current trend towards delaying motherhood. It is easy for those of us educating these students to shake our heads sadly, reflecting on the premature responsibilities and lost opportunities we imagine they...

M/Othering the Children: Pregnancy and Motherhood as Obstacle to Self-Actualization in Jane Eyre

May 1, 2008

“Children can feel, but they cannot analyze their feelings.” –Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (24). “Neither Charlotte nor Emily Bronte was, at the time of writing Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, in a position to experience or even anticipate actual motherhood.” –Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in...

On the Semiotic Basis of Knowledge and Ethics: An Interview with Susan Petrilli and Augusto Ponzio about their new book, Semiotics Unbound

April 1, 2008

[1] DP: Let me start by thanking you for agreeing to talk about your book with me. I found Semiotics Unbounded a really fascinating attempt to synthesize a lot of material in the field of semiotics that will be unfamiliar to many of us (especially in the U.S.) who were...

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