Brangelina: The Fertile Valley of Celebrity

Abstract

amily photos are probably never politically neutral, but this one is especially overdetermined. A testament to the Jolie-Pitts’ cosmopolitanism, freedom from race bias, and twenty-first-century internationalism, the photo also participates in an imaging of family that has become ubiquitous in contemporary culture. In a neoliberal era in which confidence in most forms of social and institutional organization is eroding, an intensely idealized vision of the family, endowed in its most privileged incarnations with a vast expansiveness, has flourished. While tableau scenes of large nuclear families have become prominent in postfeminist popular culture, the inverse image of the abject female singleton has likewise proliferated. (Jennifer Aniston isn’t physically present in the photo but implicitly juxtaposes it.) The celebrity-driven “family values” representational regime suggests that forms of social, racial, class, and even international inequality can be resolved through the assembling of families in the ultimate “privatizing” gesture. An important ideological corollary to neoliberalism, “family values” in its most intense stagings, as in the photo here, proffers a familial expansiveness that is biological, adoptive, racial (the racial meanings of this photo are heightened by a white and off-white aesthetic), and even (as in the case of the Jolie-Pitts, who refract and intensify the mobility of the new professional class Peter T. Kilborn writes about in Reloville) geographical. It is this version of the wealthy celebrity family that is symbolically positioned to solve economic and social justice problems. Images such as this one center a representational economy that favors the expansive family even while U.S. family size has been shrinking (outside of a small, privileged demographic). A pervasive impulse in celebrity culture has been to assemble but also to undo such families (witness the travails of the eponymous reality stars of Jon Brangelina: The Fertile Valley of Celebrity diane negra