Jade's confession: racism and the dialectics of celebrity

Abstract

In the United Kingdom in January 2007, Celebrity Big Brother became national and international news for incidents of racist language and bullying. The main culprit, Jade Goody, was subsequently evicted and then attempted to rehabilitate her public image in a series of confessional interviews. I explore these “confessions” through the concept of the “dialectics” of celebrity, arguing that the dialectical strategies of respect/ridicule and reality/hyper-reality are central to how the confessional format manages the semiotic damage to a star persona. I suggest that we can discern a reflexive deployment of hyper-reality, evidenced in the attempts to engage the audience in an acknowledgement that reality television is indeed hyper-real and therefore any racist behaviour in that environment is ultimately not real. The real or authentic Jade is similarly a reflexive construction, achieved through the confessional management of interiority using the respect/ridicule strategy. These dialectics permit the rehabilitation of the celebrity as commodity by rendering the displayed racism as “inauthentic”.