‘A trust betrayed’: celebrity and the work of emotion

Abstract

This article draws on psycho-social theories of emotional labour and the sociological concept of ‘emotion work’ in order to interrogate the affective communicative performances of celebrities, their deployment of a ready language of emotion and the broader therapeutic discourses from which this language is derived. It takes as its focus the emotional work undertaken by celebrities in order to limit or repair reputations damaged by scandal and to overcome a perceived betrayal of public trust. Starting from the premise that an ‘ideology of intimacy’ has formed the conditions in which the celebrity now labours as an emotional subject in the public arena, and that social relationships are considered to be ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ mainly through their commitment to the ‘inner psychological concerns of each person’, we explore the affective demands made upon the celebrity subject in contemporary media culture to be both intimate and ‘real’. In so doing we draw attention to the range of cultural spaces in which celebrity emotion work takes place, the conventions which enable this work and the only partially articulated contract of on-going public intimacy upon which this work is predicated. The article concludes with a consideration of how the public–celebrity contract intersects with a broader cultural imperative to perform emotion in the media, evident in the expectation that public figures should convey authentic feeling and convey it convincingly, in order to manage an on-going relationship of trust with their publics and thereby sustain a successful career in the public realm.