Jennifer Lawrence, remixed: approaching celebrity through DIY digital culture

Abstract

This article seeks to interrogate the relationship between two gendered aspects of celebrity: the way in which female celebrities are used to determine normative femininity in a postfeminist regulatory environment, and the way their audiences are primarily imagined as young and female. I aim to consider the intersections of this relationship by conducting an analysis of the discursive and affective practices of a feminine digital public where displays of digitally remixed culture are used to enact identity. Consisting of the circulation of self-representative ‘GIF reaction’ blogs authored by young women on blogging social network Tumblr, I analyse how popular young actress Jennifer Lawrence is discursively and affectively sampled and remixed by these bloggers. These blogs match GIF (or .gif) images excerpted from film, television and other popular culture with self-authored captions to construct narratives of youthful femininity documenting feelings and reactions to quotidian situations. I draw together celebrity studies work and the work of feminist scholars of online identity to ask how young women, as subjects who are addressed by celebrity as a vehicle for broader, postfeminist narratives, use Lawrence’s gendered, affective labour in their own identity work in a social, digital environment. Here, the blogs reuse and reconstruct Lawrence’s skilful affective navigation of postfeminist demands and her celebrity signification of carefree and fun authenticity in narrating the bloggers’ own negotiations of femininity.