Performing celebrity motherhood on Twitter: courting homage and (momentary) disaster – the case of Peaches Geldof

Abstract

It sickens me to see just how far the cult of celebrity and super fandom has come when grown women are passing their own kids round. I hate the world sometimes. (@peaches-g) (cited in Halliday 2013) This quote was part of a Twitter message that Peaches Geldof published in November 2013. In the message she also named the two women who had allowed the Lost Prophets singer Ian Watkins to abuse their babies. What became key elements focused upon by journalists in the newspaper debate that followed her subsequent deletion of the message and apology were the purpose of Twitter as a form of communication, and the celebritisation of public discourse. This tweet was constructed as an empty-headed, gossipy, childish and hence feminised intervention into the public sphere.1 Also tied up with this debate was the ongoing narrative of the ‘non-functionality’ of celebrity culture and its ‘reflexive exhibitionism’ (Hyde 2013). Yet Geldof had, until this point, used a combination of Twitter and Instagram to enact a self-transformation from girlhood to motherhood that had drawn critical affirmation from both media pundits and female followers via the social media sites. It is this image of motherhood that has informed the reporting of her sudden death of a heroin overdose at the age of 25 on 7 April 2014.