Celebrity Stories Research Articles

Leveraging social media to enhance celebrity stories for anti-stigma efforts

Anti-stigma campaigns increasingly leverage personal narratives of celebrities or public figures through social media, yet little is known about what makes social media an effective storytelling tool. This study empirically tests their mental health stories in different media formats using a multiple message design. Through a pilot study, four celebrities were selected: Kristen Bell, Mariah Carey, Dwayne Johnson, and Kevin Love, who have disclosed their mental health struggles. An online between-subjects experiment was conducted with 389 participants who were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (social media vs. online article vs. no-message control). Results showed that participants who read the stories in a social media format felt a greater social presence, as if they were engaging in a real conversation with the celebrity, compared to those who read the same stories in an online article format. This, in turn, facilitated a stronger sense of transportation into the story, ultimately leading to persuasive outcomes such as positive attitudes toward help-seeking and increased intentions to seek both professional and informal help. Further analyses revealed that the effects of social presence and transportation on attitudes toward help-seeking were more pronounced among those with greater parasocial intimacy with the celebrity. The findings provide empirical support for the effectiveness of using social media as a storytelling channel for anti-stigma campaigns.

Study on After-school Services in Primary Schools in the Context of "Double Reduction"

With the introduction of the "Double Reduction" policy by the Chinese Government and the State Council, after-school services have emerged and become more popular. Parents' basic working hours conflict with their children's after-school hours, making it impossible for them to pick up their children on time. In addition, due to the generally low literacy level of parents, there is a lack of professional leadership in their children's education and growth, and it is even more difficult to tutor their children's studies. In view of this, the author conducted an innovative research on after-school service and actively explored the practical measures of primary school after-school service in the mobile Internet environment. Investigated the current situation of after-school services in primary schools, analysed the prospects of implementing after-school services through the mobile Internet environment, explored measures such as carrying out thematic mini-lectures, developing special school-based courses, classifying and pushing fables and celebrity stories, developing mini-games and designing comprehensive mini-practices, etc., and pushed the implementation through the mobile Internet, which received good results and effectively made up for the shortcomings of parents' only needs and traditional after-school services.

The Work of Acknowledgment: ‘Loud Fence’ as Community-Level Response to Institutional Child Sexual Abuse Testimony

Since the 1980s, the global dimensions of institutional child sexual abuse have become increasingly apparent. In some countries this has had a profound impact locally. In Australia, one such place has been the storied town of Ballarat. Throughout Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Ballarat became a significant focus of the Inquiry. As local abuse became clearer, colourful ribbons began appearing at sites throughout the town. This article investigates the meaning of such a response, and its role in relation to survivor testimony. Transforming into a movement that persists to this day, the effect is to reconsolidate a community's ‘difficult heritage’ of institutional abuse into a more celebrated story of rebellion and protest. The originality of the article stems from the contribution it makes to understanding community-level responses to institutional abuse, and the role of ritual in the formation of collective memory.

The menopause moment: The rising visibility of ‘the change’ in UK news coverage

Drawing on feminist scholarship that interrogates cultural representations of ageing women, this article examines UK news coverage of menopause from 2001 to 2021. We show that not only has there been a dramatic rise in menopause’s visibility since 2015, and especially since 2021, but that the coverage is concentrated in the conservative right-wing press. We also document six peaks in coverage, which are driven by celebrity stories, news about menopause-related medical guidelines, national hormone replacement therapy shortages and menopause-related governmental interventions, as well as the use of menopause as a metaphor for the economy. Based on these findings, we discuss some key social, cultural and economic forces that may help explain menopause’s heightened visibility. These include the rise of popular neoliberal feminism, celebrity culture, changing demographics and changes to UK work policy, ideological notions of biological womanhood and the influence of Big Pharma. We conclude by highlighting how menopause’s new luminosity contributes to challenging its traditional invisibility and negative framing, and gendered ageism more broadly. Yet, at the same time, in its current iteration, menopause’s increased visibility may reinforce a neoliberal feminist framework that deflects attention away from understanding menopause as a social and cultural issue, while also buttressing narrow conceptions of femininity and supporting neoliberal policies that aim to keep older women in the workforce for longer.

Detective Stories During Apartheid: H.I.E. Dhlomo as a Precursor of Drum

This article aims to contribute to the discussion of English-language crime fiction by black South African writers before 1994 by exploring H.I.E. Dhlomo’s relatively overlooked contribution to the genre in the first decade of apartheid. In particular, I intend to close read three detective stories written between the late 1940s and the early 1950s by Dhlomo, namely “Village Blacksmith Tragicomedy”, “Flowers”, and “Aversion to Snakes”, and compare them with the more celebrated stories published by Arthur Maimane in the popular magazine Drum a few years later. Notwithstanding their different re-elaboration of the tropes of crime fiction, I argue that both Dhlomo and Maimane resorted to this productive strand of popular literature to reassert a claim to knowledge denied to Africans, saturating their texts with new local meanings and exceeding Western genre conventions.

Julian of Toledo and Don Yllán de Toledo:

Abstract Exemplum XI of Don Juan Manuel’s Libro del Conde Lucanor (“De lo que contesçió a un deán de Sanctiago con don Yllán, el grand maestro de Toledo”, ca. 1331‒1335) relates the encounter of Don Yllán de Toledo, a learnèd necromancer, and the ambitious Dean of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Exemplum XI is one of the best known and most celebrated stories in the book for its seemingly preternatural turn in the plot’s action and the characters’ visit to the Other World. The article seeks to identify Don Yllán with Archbishop Julian of Toledo (642‒690), author of the Prognosticon futuri saeculi (687), an important theological tract that circulated widely during the Middle Ages and that served as the basis for the doctrine of Purgatory. The Prognosticon contains illustrative anecdotes of dialogs with the dead and journeys to and from the Other World. As such, it endowed Julian with the legendary reputation of necromancer and probably served as inspiration for Don Juan Manuel’s Exemplum XI of El Conde Lucanor.

Are public service media distinctive from the market? Interpreting the political information environments of BBC and commercial news in the United Kingdom

Public service media face an existential crisis. Many governments are cutting their budgets, while questioning the role and value of public service broadcasting because many citizens now have access to a wide range of media. This raises the question – do public service media supply a distinctive and informative news service compared to market-led media? Drawing on the concept of political information environment, this study makes an intervention into debates by carrying out a comparative content analysis of news produced by UK public service broadcasters and market-driven media across television, radio and online outlets (N = 1065) and interviewing senior editors about the routine selection of news. It found that almost all BBC news and commercial public service media platforms reported more news about politics, public affairs and international issues than entirely market-driven outlets. Online BBC news reported more informative topics than market-based media, which featured more entertainment and celebrity stories. The value of public service media was demonstrated on the United Kingdom’s nightly television news bulletins, which shone a light on the world not often reported, especially BBC News at Ten. Most market-driven media reported through a UK prism, excluding many countries and international issues. Overall, it is argued that the influence of public service media in the United Kingdom helps shape an information environment with informative news. The focus of the study is on UK media, but the conceptual application of interpreting a political information environment is designed to be relevant for scholars internationally. While communication studies have sought to advance more cross-national studies in recent years, this can limit how relevant studies are for debates in national political information environments. This study concludes by recommending more scholarly attention should be paid to theorising national policy dynamics that shape the political information environments of media systems within nations.

GRACE THROUGH GROTESQUE IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S REVELATION

Flannery O’Connor is an American short story writer and considered a prominent one in the canon of Christian fictional writing. Revelation (1965) is one of her most celebrated stories in all of her thirty two short stories. The select story is an embodiment of her objective of writings. O’Connor believes mankind should know and have God in their lives to realise their spiritual and moral depravity and then can transform themselves to lead a diligent and happy life. The article explores main character, Mrs Turpin of the select story who is in a false assumption of her self as a righteous person and a good Christian. She believes her treatment of poor and lowly people to be right, which in reality is not. This paper explores how God bestows his grace by providing her an opportunity to know her inner self through unexpected, abrupt and grotesque situations.

From #MeToo to #MeTooIndia: News Domestication in Indian English Language Newspapers

ABSTRACTThis study examines news domestication in an Indian context by analyzing the press coverage of the global #MeToo movement in India. The findings were based on the textual analysis of 641 news articles from five prominent English language newspapers published between October 2017 and October 2018. Accordingly, this study reveals that the press domesticated the global #MeToo movement by highlighting similar concerns in the Indian entertainment industry. It also filtered the stories through a local media logic, which included market/commercial and cultural logic. The news which passed through this media logic resulted in the selection of certain types of celebrity stories over others. While this helped to raise the issue of sexual harassment among educated middle-class Indians, it also trivialized it by focusing on celebrity scandals and ignoring problems faced by ordinary and less organized women in marginalized communities.

De ring van Polycrates (Herodotus, Historiën 3.39-43)

Summary This paper offers a narratological close reading of one of Herodotus’ most celebrated stories. Special attention is paid to the recurrent Herodotean themes and story-patterns which shape it and thus can help to interpret it. For once the advice of a warner is heeded, but the return of the ring shows that Polycrates’ fate is already sealed and cannot be averted anymore. His great good fortune has brought Polycrates the envy of the gods, a concept which must be looked at in terms of the contemporary Ionian interest in ‘balance’ (of the bodily humours, of climate, of good fortune): the gods watch over the balance of the kosmos and when mortals threaten to disturb it (because of excessive power, riches or good fortune), these mortals are brought down. Most of the times these ‘excessive’ mortals also ‘earn’ their fate by committing crimes or making grave mistakes, and the quick account of Polycrates’ earlier career showed him killing one of his brothers and abusing the unwritten law of ξεινίη. When he faithfully executes Amasis’ advice and throws away his precious ring it is already too late and, as Amasis concludes, his fate cannot be changed anymore.

«Почти каждой сплетнице есть что вспомнить»: репрезентации сексуального насилия в цифровых таблоидах

Полина Андреевна Ерофеева – к. п. н., преподаватель, Нижегородский государственный лингвистический университет им. Н. А. Добролюбова, Нижний Новгород, Россия. Электронная почта: polina.erofeeva@gmail.com
 Средства массовой информации играют важную роль в формировании общественных представлений о проблеме сексуального насилия. Переход к цифровым каналам информации дает возможность оценить, как проблему сексуального насилия воспринимают потребители цифровых СМИ разных жанров. В статье рассматриваются репрезентации сексуального насилия в отношении женщин среди потребителей цифровых таблоидов, комментирующих публикации по теме насилия. Роль читательского комментария разбирается с опорой на нарративную теорию Эрминии Ибарры, которая выделяет три этапа процесса формирования идентичности в коммуникации: (1) выбор ролевых моделей и их сопоставление с собой; (2) экспериментирование с поведением ролевых моделей; (3) внутренняя оценка поведения на предмет совместимости с прошлой идентичностью, а также его внешнее одобрение значимыми окружающими. Процесс формирования идентичности выражается в «я-нарративе», рассказе, который позволяет высказать соображение о себе. В статье читательский комментарий в цифровых СМИ рассматривается как форма «я-нарратива», в котором комментатор сопоставляет себя с ролевой моделью (героем новостной истории), получая или не получая одобрение («лайк») со стороны других участников обсуждения. В качестве эмпирического источника рассматривается женский цифровой таблоид «Сплетник». Статья демонстрирует, что, освещая жизнь знаменитостей, «Сплетник» дает благодатную почву для создания и подтверждения «я-нарративов». Показывается, что поводом для обсуждения темы насилия служат истории знаменитых женщин, его переживших. Используя тематический анализ, автор выявляет основные темы читательского обсуждения историй знаменитостей. Поскольку издание представляет собой гибрид таблоида и глянца, восприятие темы насилия среди аудитории «Сплетника» является ареной борьбы между разными дискурсами – патриархатным, характерным для таблоида, и феминистским, элементы которого присутствуют в современном женском глянце. В заключении критически осмысляется вклад «Сплетника» в развитие общественной дискуссии о проблеме сексуального насилия в России, легитимацию открытого обсуждения этой темы как социальной, а не частной проблемы.

Welty on the Interstate: Mobility and Mass Culture on I-55 and the Natchez Trace

Welty on the Interstate:Mobility and Mass Culture on I-55 and the Natchez Trace Daniel Spoth Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it. —Eudora Welty, OWB 918 This is the story of two roads, the Natchez Trace and I-55, and the separate ways in which these roads foster mobility in and into the South. Their point of convergence is Jackson, Mississippi, the lifelong home of Eudora Welty. The Trace only crosses two interstates, I-55 and I-20, over its entire length, both just outside Jackson, making the southern capital the locus of the old and the new, the haunted Trace and the modern city.1 My aim here is to deconstruct these roads, to peel back the asphalt and discover what regional and national ideals and assumptions built them. More to the point, I want to contemplate how the coexisting ideals of mobility and stasis that animate Welty's work shape and are shaped by these southern thoroughfares. "Should one decide to draw up a map of Eudora Welty's fictional countryside," writes Ann Masserand, "one might safely assert that a road would run through it" (39). It is very likely that, as is the case for so much of Welty's fiction, Masserand's hypothetical road would be named the Natchez Trace. In such celebrated stories as "The Wide Net," "A Worn Path," "A Still Moment," and, most prominently, The Robber Bridegroom, the Trace emerges as the most storied and significant of Welty's roads, a place of living legend where vernacular southern stories bump elbows with classic myths. Each of these works re-inscribes the mystic elements of the thoroughfare in subtly different ways: the forest and its inhabitants become monstrous obstacles in "A Worn Path"; "A Still Moment" brings together three living legends of American history; and "The Wide Net," as Nancy Anne Cluck has argued, structures itself around classical patterns of heroism, testing, and reward.2 All of these encounters unfold against the backdrop of the Trace. The Trace was, for Welty, a distinctly southern answer to the myth-saturated landscapes of the Old World, an avenue for elevating regional cultures to legendary status. The Robber Bridegroom uses both folktale fabulism [End Page 55] (birds and disembodied heads have the power of speech, magical disguises are donned and shed, the laws of physics are regularly bent) and environmental cues to portray the Trace as replete with legendary significance.3 Perhaps a single example will suffice: the hurried flight that accompanies the abduction and rape of the innocent Rosamond by Jamie Lockhart. Birds flew up like sparks from a flint. Nearer and nearer they came to the river, to the highest point on the bluff. A foam of gold leaves filled the willow trees. Taut as a string stretched over the ridge, the path ran higher and higher. Rosamond's head fell back, till only the treetops glittered in her eyes, which held them like two mirrors. So the sun mounted the morning cloud, and lighted the bluff and then the valley, which opened and showed the river, shining beneath another river of mist, winding and all the colors of flowers. (RB 32–33) Though, strictly speaking, there is nothing "magical" happening in this passage, the superabundance of luminous language, which it shares with the description of Natchez in the book's initial scene and with Clement Musgrove's account of the wilderness in the novella's closing chapters, broadcasts the mystical valences of the landscape. The trees "glitter" and "foam" with leaves, matching the "sparks" of the birds and the "shining," multihued river. The setting is suffused with light, even in the predawn hours, creating a scene that seems alchemical, transforming mundane features into objects of significance. The environment gives an impression of motion, yet the horse, rider, and abductee remain still—the portrayal invokes the rape of Europa, commonly represented in art as a moment of frozen movement, deepening the mythic resonances of Welty's description. The above is one instance of many from The Robber Bridegroom. Throughout the novella, the Trace...

Book review: Bronwen Thomas and Julia Round (eds), Real Lives, Celebrity Stories: Narratives of Ordinary and Extraordinary People Across Media

Book review: Bronwen Thomas and Julia Round (eds), <i>Real Lives, Celebrity Stories: Narratives of Ordinary and Extraordinary People Across Media</i>

That “Beautiful Art”: Black-and-White Photography in Henry James's “The Jolly Corner”

AbstractIn many of his later works, fiction and nonfiction alike, Henry James often sought to “appropriate aspects of photography” by using incredibly precise “verbal constructions of images.” In “The Jolly Corner” (1908), one of his most celebrated short stories, James accomplishes just that. This work, an especially elegant version of the traditional doppelganger tale, has crisp and focused imagery throughout its three chapters. However, there is no color in the story. All of the rich descriptive passages for which the author is so renowned are offered only in subtle gradations of black and white and grey, just like in haunting photographs from the period. In essence, this carefully rendered psychological ghost story, “enchanting and chilling” by turns, is presented as a type of prose photograph album of New York City at the century's turn, a stylish attempt by James, and a successful one, to reproduce with words what he himself once praised as that “beautiful art,” the “art” of black-and-white photography as practiced by Edward Steichen, Katherine McClellan, and the other masters of the new medium.

Point of view - Celebrity stories help us to talk about cancer

THIS MONTH marks the tenth anniversary of singer Kylie Minogue’s diagnosis of breast cancer. The story of her treatment, survival and subsequent career successes is uplifting and less disconcerting than the rather more morbid tales of Angelina Jolie and Kelly Osbourne.

Content characteristics of IPTV: analysis of sensationalism, localism, and interactivity

This study combined observation and content analysis to examine professional Internet Protocol television (IPTV) content in terms of sensationalism, localism, and interactivity. Observational results found these videos were sensational, localized, and somewhat interactive. Content analysis showed that IPTV was different from traditional TV content in that it used more sensational sex and celebrity stories, used more tabloid packaging, and appealed more to emotions through vivid storytelling techniques, in both entertainment and news content. In addition, localism was reflected in the selection of geographically and culturally proximate stories. The ‘local hook’ was more important in news than in entertainment. This case utilized some interactive features and social media for redistributing and for promoting selected content, but it still lacked two-way user interactivity. Implications are discussed.

A Short History of Celebrity (review)

Reviewed by: A Short History of Celebrity Aaron Jaffe A Short History of Celebrity. Fred Inglis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. x + 311. $29.95 (cloth). If the word means anything, celebrity gets at something different from fame. Unlike fame, for example, it's difficult to say with any certainty if celebrity is any good. It's hard to get close enough to tell. Celebrity organizes feelings for people we don't know, after all, intimacy with strangers, as Richard Schickel says. Unnerving examples of the known nobodies of modernity, celebrities seem to carry with them a reflexive sense of irritation. There's a need to append disclaimers whenever they're up for consideration: love 'em or hate 'em, they're here to stay. The convulsions of celebrity, borrowing an image from Djuna Barnes, are like "the fluids of the oyster, that must cover [an] itch with a pearl."1 And, it's not an accident that the Hollywood system prefers the term stars. As Colin MacCabe notes, it dresses up "crucial ambiguity" in the concept. Namely, celebrity value is value injected with risk: "Today's celebrity is tomorrow's nobody. Today's nobody is tomorrow's celebrity. Such a notion of change seems fundamentally democratic; celebrity is a fame that everybody can enjoy."2 If one of celebrity's cardinal qualities is that it captures the very ambivalence of its value, the same can't be said for fame. Fame designates an unalloyed good, a test of time, withstood. Fame heralds, celebrity has side-effects and hidden workings. Fame has an opposite—infamy, or bad fame. With celebrity, badness is already on-board—inevitably, inexorably it fades, expires, goes stale. Mel Gibson? Who? One useful distinction between fame and celebrity is that the latter approximates immortality, the old virtue of being forever, while the former aspires to ubiquity, the new value of being everywhere, which all too quickly spills into over-exposure and semiotic overkill. Fred Inglis's Short History of Celebrity is an intelligent, well written, and wide-ranging book, hopping smartly from discussions of Elizabeth I's coronation, Lord Byron, and Sarah Bernhardt, to reflections on Cary Grant, Princess Diana, Oprah Winfrey, and Tiger Woods. Rightly, Inglis argues that celebrity is tangled up with modernity. It's new but not brand new. His account gives it 250+ years in the making, dished out from a long simmering soup-pot of democratic, city-dwelling sentiments for theatrical spectacle, fashion and the romantic cult of personality. Decidedly, this version of The Long Now shifts the explanatory emphasis away from later technical developments. Inglis's account isn't interested (enough) in the role of the rise of photographic image and new forms of professional authority in making celebrities. One might invoke Walter Benjamin here but even Gilbert Seldes knew that something was afoot. Seldes didn't name celebrity per se alongside slapstick and comic strips in The 7 Lively Arts, but its work is tangled in each of the seven—the new vernacular media of modernism—anatomized in his 1924 study. The ways mass-mediated celebrity warps the empire of words and things deserves more attention than Inglis gives it. In effect, celebrity is the ultimate fan fiction. So, it should be no surprise that this short history of celebrity is short on theory (about the engines of celebrity, authorship, and celebrification and its attendant audience structures) and long on celebrity stories. The learned historian himself serves as a vital receiver of celebrity's strong signal, a high fidelity tuner, which—in its rebroadcast of Diana's death, for instance, or Seamus Heaney's sanctification—often resembles an all-too-marveled fan testimony. "[S]tories about celebrities must and should grip us," he avers, "fastidious distaste will not do; these people have things to tell us about the meaning of our lives" (104). Indeed, despite its title, Inglis's book isn't so much a short history of celebrity as it is a short history of celebrities. History-as-celebrity-fanzine is a suggestive gloss on DeMan's literary modernity after literary history. Despite Inglis's assertion of a poet ("Famous Seamus") as a last, consummate example of celebrity...

“Bouncing back”: How Australia's leading women's magazines portray the postpartum ‘body’

To examine how the Australian media portrays the childbearing body through the use of celebrity stories in women's magazines. The study aimed to provide insight into socially constructed factors that might influence women's body image and expectations during pregnancy and the early postnatal period. Media content analysis was used to analyse 25 celebrity stories about the childbearing postnatal body (images and texts) collected from Australia's three leading women's magazines between January and June 2009 (n=58). A variety of persuasive textual and visual messages were elicited. The major theme representing how the postnatal body was constructed was labelled 'Bouncing back'; the focus of this paper. The social messages inherent in the magazine stories were that women need to strive towards regaining a pre-pregnant body shape with the same effort one would employ when recovering from an illness. Three specific sub-themes that promoted weight loss were identified. These were labelled 'Racing to bounce back', 'Breastfeeding to bounce back' and 'Pretending to bounce back'. A fourth sub-theme, 'Refusing to bounce back: Celebrating my new body', grouped together stories about celebrities who appeared to embrace their changed, but healthy, postnatal body. The study highlighted the expectations of the postpartum body in relation to speedy return to the pre-pregnant state. Understanding how these portrayals may contribute to women's own body image and expectations in the early postpartum period may better assist maternity health care providers to engage with women in meaningful discussions about this important time in their lives and challenge notions of ideal body types. Assisting women to accept and nurture themselves and have confidence in their ability as a new parent is a crucial element of quality maternity service provision.

CUT!... Flannery O'Connor's Apotemnophiliac Allegories

Grotesque or damaged bodies play a central role in a number of Flannery O'Connor's most powerful stories. One route for interpreting their significance is to approach them by way of a rare psychological condition that has been named apotemnophilia. Apotemnophiliacs experience an overwhelming desire to amputate one of more of their perfectly healthy limbs. Among the things that make the condition particularly mysterious is the challenge it offers to our standard conception of what constitutes a “whole” body. Two of O'Connor's most celebrated stories, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” and “Good Country People,” have at their center amputated bodies, those of Tom T. Shiftlet and Hulga Hopewell respectively. Evans argues that those incomplete bodies are intended to contest the notion of “wholeness” as a spiritual or existential ideal. On the contrary, O'Connor's stories drive her characters towards a necessary recognition of their incompleteness. Finally, the allegorical form of O'Connor's fiction itself constitutes a parallel to the amputated and imperfect condition of the bodies that inhabit them. Just as the bodies point insistently to their own incompleteness, so the stories advertise their own inadequacy, forcing upon the reader a kind of hermeneutic phantom pain, an importunate demand for interpretation that can, however, never be fully satisfied.

GOSSIP, SPORT AND PRETTY GIRLS

At the centre of media controversy, tabloids continue to be the best-read newspapers in Britain. Competing for the largest group of the British newspaper readers, these papers have been criticized for abandoning their journalistic responsibility, to the detriment of society and the media climate at large. Yet, little research has been conducted on the reception of tabloid journalism. Building on the ongoing debate about popular journalism and “tabloidization”, this article draws on focus groups and interviews with 55 male and female young adult readers of the Sun and the Daily Mirror, the two circulation leaders among the popular tabloids. It provides an analysis of readers’ experiences of what is often perceived of as typically “trivial” tabloid journalism, such as human interest, sport and celebrity stories, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the popularity of this kind of newspaper content. In doing so, readers’ experiences are related to day-to-day routines and the social structures surrounding these, and the article shows how tabloid newspaper reading links with a wider social context.