Ageing on and off the red carpet: Joan Rivers, celebrity culture and postfeminist television

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1994 Joan Rivers stepped onto the red carpet, a significant yet under-studied moment in fashion and celebrity culture. While she had been in the public eye for decades, Rivers discovered late career success by engaging with and deconstructing the myths of Hollywood glamour. Through analysis of her red carpet appearances on E!, TV Guide, as host of the E! program Fashion Police, and the press discourse surrounding these TV appearances, this article argues that her distinctly flexible, mobile persona appealed to a ‘knowing’ audience cultivated by post-network television. By presenting celebrity as the result of market forces invested in selling a coherent ‘glamourous’ image, Rivers offered a democratic image of celebrity, one in which elite stars are subject to the evaluative discourse of fans. Her position as a grandmotherly figure with decades of experience in Hollywood helped shore up her role as cultural mediator who critiques unrealistic, hegemonic ideals for femininity. While Rivers offered an unruly critique of celebrity, she simultaneously perpetuated the postfeminist sensibility in which women, in particular, are subject to surveillance and hegemonic expectations of sexualised beauty. In these ways, Joan Rivers provides a useful figure to help understand how ageing female celebrities survive at the margins of mainstream Hollywood culture.