Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines E-Book

Andrea McDonnell

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 265

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Americans are obsessed with celebrities. While our fascination with fame intensified throughout the twentieth century, the rise of the weekly gossip magazine in the early 2000s confirmed and fueled our popular culture’s celebrity mania. After a decade of diets and dates, breakups and baby bumps, celebrity gossip magazines continue to sell millions of issues each week. Why are readers, especially young women, so attracted to these magazines? What pleasures do they offer us? And why do we read them, even when we disagree with the images of femininity that they splash across their hot-pink covers?

Andrea McDonnell answers these questions with the help of interviews from editors and readers, and her own textual and visual analysis. McDonnell’s perspective is multifaceted; she examines the notorious narratives of celebrity gossip magazines as well as the genre’s core features, such as the "Just Like Us" photo montage and the "Who Wore It Best?" poll. McDonnell shows that, despite their trivial reputation, celebrity gossip magazines serve as an important site of engagement for their readers, who use these texts to generate conversation, manage relationships, and consider their own ideas and values.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Figures and Tables

Figures

Tables

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Celebrity Gossip Magazines in American Popular Culture

Loving (and Hating) Celebrity Gossip

Studying Celebrity Gossip Magazines

An Overview

1: Gendering Celebrity Gossip

The Popular Feminine

Softening the News

Feminism and the Popular Feminine

Gendering Guilt

2: All About Us: Celebrity Gossip Magazines and the Female Reader

Producing the Celebrity Gossip Magazine

When the Stars Align: Structuring Celebrity Gossip Narratives

3: Stars on Earth: The Paradox of Ordinary Celebrity

The Ordinary Celebrity

Between You and Me: The Magazine as Mediator

She and I: Audiences and the Ordinary Celebrity

4: Making Morality Meaningful

Ordinary Ideals: Celebrity Gossip as Moral Tale

Making Morality Meaningful

“It Makes My Life Seem a Lot Better”

5: Ambiguously Truthful

Creating Truth: Editorialization and Authority

The Pleasure of Detection

Conclusion: On Pleasure and the Popular

Working Through Gossip

Appendix A: Reader Profiles

Appendix B: Editor Profiles

Appendix C: Content Analysis of Female Celebrities in Cover Stories by Age

November–December 2009

References

Index

For my parents

Copyright © Andrea M. McDonnell 2014

The right of Andrea M. McDonnell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8218-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8219-8 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8455-0 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8454-3 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Figures and Tables

Figures

2.1 Cover story content, September–December 2009

2.2 Frequency of celebrity appearance by age, November–December 2009

2.3Us Weekly, November 16, 2009

3.1Star, December 14, 2009, p. 4/ Us Weekly, November 5, 2012, p. 26

4.1 Transformed Transgressors, Us Weekly, September 7, 2009, pp. 48–53

4.2 “Best & Worst Beach Bodies,” Star, March 26, 2012

5.1 The glory shot, the guilt shot, the grief shot; OK!, October 5, 2009/ Star, February 23, 2009/ Star, February 9, 2009

5.2Us Weekly, October 12, 2009

Tables

2.1 Weekly sections by publication

2.2 2010 Editorial calendar

4.1 Heroic vs failed mothers

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful for the many people who have supported my work on this project. Thank you to everyone at Polity, especially Joe Devanny, for his guidance and enthusiasm. Thank you to Helen Gray, for her attention to detail, and to the reviewers, whose thoughtfulness and fresh insights helped to shape this book into what I had hoped it would be.

To all of the participants who graciously contributed their time and personal stories, I cannot thank you enough.

Thank you to Wenner Media and American Media Inc. for allowing key images from Us Weekly, Star, and OK! to be included in this book.

Special thanks to my mentor and friend Paddy Scannell, without whose unwavering faith in the importance of this topic and in my ability to do it justice, this book would not exist. Thank you to Susan Douglas, whose knowledge, energy, and sense of humor proved invaluable throughout the revision process.

Many thanks to the department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan, especially Robin Means Coleman and Aswin Punathambekar, and to the department of English at Emmanuel College for their continued support. Thank you to June Howard, for sharing her passion for magazines with me. Thanks to all of my teachers, especially Paddy Graham, Michael Joyce, and Karen Robertson, for their wisdom, wit, and encouragement, which has propelled me forward, even in times when I did not yet know where I was headed. To my family and friends, who have always supported me, believed in me, and laughed with me – thank you. And to Scott, for all his love, I am forever grateful.

Introduction

Celebrity Gossip Magazines in American Popular Culture

We see them in airports and grocery checkouts, lining drugstore counters and street-corner news-stands. They are laughed at, ignored, and purchased – skimmed, pored over, flipped through. Their hot-pink headlines proclaim news of dates and diets, breakups and baby bumps. Whether you thumb through them or thumb your nose at them, celebrity gossip magazines are a ubiquitous part of the current popular cultural landscape in the United States, and most other Western countries. Since their emergence in the early part of the twenty-first century, these magazines have gained popularity and power, earning millions of readers and dollars to match. But while a handful of scholars have considered the role of similar publications in other countries (Brewer, 2009; Feasey, 2008; Holmes, 2005; Johansson, 2006), little is known about the influence of American gossip magazines, despite the genre's cultural and economic prominence. What are these magazines really about? Who reads them? And how have they sustained their success during a socially and economically tumultuous period, despite the fact that their contents have remained remarkably uniform? This book investigates these questions, combining interviews with editors and writers, trade press reports, reader commentary, and textual evidence from the magazines themselves, in an effort to understand why celebrity gossip magazines matter in contemporary American culture.

Since 2000, a new crop of magazines has earned a place on America's news-stands. Us Weekly, Life & Style, In Touch, Star, and OK!, have become synonymous with celebrity gossip. Week after week, these colorful, photo-filled glossies reach millions of readers, peddling news of feuds and facelifts. Celebrity gossip magazines are bright, colorful, and opinionated. Their stories are as short as their photos are large. And they offer bold headlines and oodles of juicy tidbits, for about the price of a cup of coffee. These features have helped celebrity gossip magazines carve for themselves a popular and profitable niche within a publishing market that has suffered through a decade of economic downturn.

The emergence of the celebrity gossip genre can be traced to the entertainment magazine Us, which in March 2000 announced that it would undergo a major redesign. In hopes of boosting lagging sales, Us transformed from a monthly entertainment magazine to a celebrity-focused weekly. Advertising Age dubbed the $50 million transformation “the largest re-launch in a decade,” and Terry McDonnell, former editor of Men's Journal and Esquire, was named editor-in-chief.1 The revamped Us promoted itself as a “cultural newsweekly,” featuring celebrity news stories designed to attract female readers aged 18 to 34. Though critics cringed and initial sales disappointed, Us Weekly reported a 12 percent increase in circulation and a 34 percent rise in ad sales by the start of 2002.2 Two months later, Bonnie Fuller, the Canadian media executive credited with spicing up Glamour and Cosmo, was tapped to replace McDonnell.3 Fuller injected a dose of winking irreverence into the magazine, raking in readers, fueling a cultural obsession with celebrity, and transforming Us into an industry darling while earning herself the nickname, “gossip's godmother.”4

By the end of 2002, Us Weekly had increased its news-stand sales by 55.3 percent, more than any other mass-market magazine.5The New York Times proclaimed that “the medium has transformed the message,” writer David Carr noting that the weekly's new format had converted scandalous tabloid themes into attractive stories, encouraging “thousands of new readers, some of them pretty far upscale.”6 Meanwhile, as Advertising Age praised Fuller for transforming the magazine into a “cultural touchstone,” the maven made a controversial exit, leaving Us to become the editorial director of Star.7

Previously a paper tabloid known for its no-holds-barred celebrity coverage and Enquirer-style covers, Star was to undergo a glossy, 20-million-dollar makeover in order to compete with Us.8 American Media, the tabloid's parent company, hoped that Fuller and her “upbeat,” “energetic” spirit would place Star at the center of the growing celebrity weekly industry.9 The industry was, in fact, expanding. As Fuller took her place at the helm of Star, Bauer Publishing debuted two new celebrity weeklies, In Touch and Life & Style, both featuring content, format, and aesthetics nearly identical to those of Us.10 Then, in August, 2005, British media mogul Richard Desmond and his company, Northern & Shell, launched an American edition of the popular British tabloid OK!.

As the industry grew, sales continued to climb, silencing critics who predicted that the market was oversaturated and doomed to fail. In 2003, Janice Min replaced Fuller as Us Weekly's editor-in-chief. The following year, news-stand sales of Us rose 47.3 percent to 745,887 copies per week and Advertising Age named Us 2004's “Magazine of the Year:”

Roll your eyes; purse your lips and shake your head; slip it inside your bag so your smarty-pants friends don't see it. But resistance is futile. Thanks to its unprecedented fusion of newsstand heat, advertiser interest and – most incredibly – the way it's found a younger and wealthier audience, Us Weekly is Advertising Age's Magazine of the Year.11

And Us was not the only one cashing in on the weekly craze. In 2006, advertiser spending in Us, In Touch, Life & Style and OK! totaled $564 million, proving that gossip could sell, and sell big, to the coveted female demographic.12 All the while, countless blogs, television programs, and even newspapers were revamping their content in an attempt to court celebrity-obsessed audiences. By the middle of the decade, the celebrity gossip genre had become an instantly recognizable and virtually unavoidable part of American pop culture. “Like it or not,” wrote Advertising Age's Jon Fine, “Us Weekly has become a cultural reference point, if not an entire world view.”13

Celebrity magazines have existed since the start of the twentieth century, when cinema captured audiences' attention and fueled fans' desire to learn about their favorite players. Richard deCordova (1990) traces the ways in which the discourse surrounding actors transformed throughout the nineteen teens and twenties. Early fan magazines such as Photoplay, Silver Screen, and Picture-Play Magazine produced what deCordova calls “picture personalities.” Narratives within these publications emphasized the link between actor and character and essentially worked to produce the actor as an extended version of his or her filmic representation. As deCordova writes:

Personality existed as an effect of the representation of character in a film – or, more accurately, as the effect of the representation of character across a number of films … Extrafilmic discourse did talk about the players' personalities outside of films but only to claim that they were the same as those represented in films … the player's identity was restricted to the textuality of the films she or he was in. (1990: 86–7)

The content of these stories was primarily controlled by studio press departments, which “operated not only as promoters but also as protectors,” crafting public personae that fit with the studio's desired image, according to Joshua Gamson, who traces the history of the celebrity industry in his book, Claims to Fame (1994: 27).

But, by 1914, the discourse around picture personalities took an important turn. Whereas early stories were often redundant and narrowly focused, these new narratives began to explore the players' private lives outside of film, dramatically expanding the scope of information that readers could learn about famous figures. DeCordova argues that it is precisely this shift that produces the actor as star. Throughout the twentieth century, discourse around the star continued to evolve and expand. In the 1920s, emphasis on actors' private lives produced scandalous stories, wherein the stars' domestic problems and moral transgressions took center stage (deCordova, 1990: 119). By the 1930s, the glamorous aura of the star was dissolving; actors were now depicted not as idols or as democratic royalty, but as wealthier, prettier versions of ordinary people (Gamson, 1994: 29). As the studio system began to unravel in the late 1940s and early 1950s, due largely to anti-trust legislation and the emergence of television, actors gained greater control of their own image. Since then, an entire industry of publicists, agents, stylists, editors, and groomers has emerged to help stars cultivate and maintain their fame, a fame based not on some idealized screen image, but on the appearance of authenticity and ordinariness (Gamson, 1994). In 1974, these stars began appearing in the newly launched People Magazine, whose names-make-news approach to reporting helped feed an appetite for celebrity culture that has influenced the American media landscape ever since. All the while, a growing body of research has emerged in an effort to understand the proliferation of fame and its industries; scholars have examined the historical roots of fame (Braudy, 1986), the evolution of stardom and its ties to the development of radio, film, and television (Gamson, 1994; Marshall, 1997), the relationship between celebrity and commodification (Cashmore, 2006), and the ways in which star stories impact conceptions of social mobility (Sternheimer, 2011) and ethnicity (Negra, 2001).

In many ways, the latest group of celebrity magazines may be viewed as a logical extension of pre-existing discourses around celebrity and stardom. Today's celebrity gossip magazines have much in common with their predecessors. They emphasize the sensational and the outrageous. They revel in bias and speculation. They, too, use large, stylized images to catch the eye of potential readers. And they follow the rich and famous with a monomaniacal eye. Yet I argue that Us Weekly, Life & Style, Star, In Touch, and OK! can be understood as a singular cohort, one which marks an important elaboration and exaggeration of previous representations of fame. Throughout this book, I refer to these five texts as celebrity gossip magazines and I consider them a genre, in and of themselves. I do so not to diminish their historical ties to other similar publications, but to emphasize the common features and affordances of these particular texts.

What makes celebrity gossip magazines unique? First, the aesthetic of the genre is specific and shared across publications. As chapter 2 demonstrates, all celebrity gossip magazines adhere to a defined set of visual and textual codes. In particular, the use of many, large, full-color photographs is a contemporary development, one that has only been made possible thanks to digital imaging technologies and the widespread availability of high-speed Internet.

Second, where previous star magazines meshed industry-related content with narratives about the personal lives of the stars, contemporary celebrity gossip magazines eschew nearly any reference to players' professional careers. Here, celebrities are no longer idols of the silver screen. They are ordinary. They are, quite simply, just like us. The paradox of ordinary stardom is a theme that has been widely discussed in the literature on celebrity culture (Dyer, 1991; Gamson, 1994; Holmes and Redmond, 2006; Lai, 2006). But while the motif of the ordinary celebrity is nothing new, it is made all the more salient in the twenty-first century, in an age where the fame (and notoriety) once reserved for royalty, inventors, and film stars (Braudy, 1986; Rojek, 2001) has been sprinkled over a vast and ever-growing army of celebs culled from the ranks of reality television shows, YouTube videos, and human interest stories.

Celebrity theorist Chris Rojek calls this new crop of stars celetoids, “media-generated, compressed, concentrated” celebrities, made famous through pseudo-events and the industrial machinery of a well-oiled celebrity industry (2001: 18). The need for these types of stars has grown exponentially since the emergence of cable television in the 1980s, when the rise of niche channels and the 24-hour news cycle sparked a ceaseless demand for content (Lotz, 2007).14 Further fueling this push for fresh faces, reality television took root in the 1990s and early 2000s with the debut of The Real World, Survivor, Big Brother, and American Idol. Now a pervasive part of our televisual landscape, reality TV creates a demand for new “ordinary” stars while simultaneously grooming an endless group of up-and-comers who, once known, are discussed in the tabloid press, dissected on talk and entertainment news shows, and obsessed over in the blogosphere. Add to this the rise of online technologies and social media and the explosion of “ordinary” celebrities on the pages of gossip magazines seems almost inevitable.

In addition, deCordova notes that early claims about the ordinariness of the stars were built on representations of private life, which typically focused on familial relationships. Thus celebrity scandals of the early twentieth century emphasized breaks in the traditional nuclear family caused by infidelity and divorce. In short, moral transgression for stars of the past was defined as sexual transgression. In chapter 3, I trace the development of the ordinary star as she appears in celebrity gossip magazines; indeed, contemporary narratives continue to emphasize family life – marriages, babies, and the like – and today's scandals are often sexual in nature. Yet within contemporary narratives, a new site of moral transgression emerges. Private life, and the codes of conduct deemed “ordinary” therein, is no longer defined only by sexual relations, but also by the body and the regimentation of that body (Douglas, 2010). The culmination of sexual and bodily discourses of the private appears in what is perhaps the genre's defining narrative: the baby bump watch. As we will see in chapter 4, this storyline obsessively scrutinizes the female body (which, being pregnant, is also a sexual body). The genre's emphasis on the behaviors and bodies of women is crucial, for the final element that distinguishes celebrity gossip magazines from fan magazines of the past is their singular focus on female stars and female life.

Celebrity gossip magazines are fundamentally concerned with the experiences and emotions of women. Although each publication has a self-avowed mission: to combine “honest and accurate reporting” with a “fun, irreverent format” (In Touch), to “highlight Hollywood's timeliest trends and help readers translate their favorite stars' styles into their own lives” (Life & Style), or to be “the magazine the stars trust” (OK!), all share a single-minded goal: to document and comment on the personal lives of celebrity women. In other words, these magazines are not simply about famous figures; they are about famous females.

This is not to say that male celebrities do not appear in the pages of these magazines. They do. However, they are featured less often and less prominently than their female counterparts. They are rarely the centerpiece of a story and narratives are almost never told from a male perspective. To see this, we need only think of the British royal family. Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, is, as the heir to the British throne, arguably the most renowned man in England. And yet when he appears in the pages of celebrity gossip magazines (yes, even the American ones) he is not depicted as a famous figure in his own right. He is the son of Diana, Princess of Wales (whom the tabloid press notoriously pursued), and the husband of Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton. Now, he is also the father of a mini-royal, Prince George. And so the Duke of Cambridge appears as a man whose import is determined by his relationship to the women in his life, not by his own prestige or actions. The role that men play across the celebrity gossip genre is that of supporting actor.

Meanwhile, women take center stage. The faces of female celebrities, in various stages of jubilation and defeat, beam out at us from the covers of these magazines. Headlines herald the excitement and tragedy of female life. From breakups to baby bumps, dates to diets, friendships to feuds, these magazines investigate and celebrate women's triumphs and challenges, all narrated from a female point of view. These magazines tell star stories, stories that have long been told about the rich and famous, but they do so in a way that specifically speaks to the experiences and concerns of women. Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines is, therefore, not only a study of fame and an industry that both perpetuates and benefits from it, but is also a study of the ways in which ideas about fame influence ideas about femininity. Further, because this narrative emphasis, as chapter 2 will demonstrate, works to attract a predominantly female audience, this book takes as its starting point the idea that celebrity gossip magazines are a form of women's popular culture.

Loving (and Hating) Celebrity Gossip

I began my study of celebrity gossip magazines as a fan of the genre. While working at a museum in suburban New York, my female coworkers and I would spend our breaks and lunch hours debating the merit (or tragedy) of Jessica Simpson's frocks, or empathizing with Jennifer Aniston, or worrying over Kristen Stewart and her angsty expressions. We were often most intrigued, however, by the genre's depiction of pregnancy – from the so-called “bump patrol,” relentlessly eyeing celebrity midsections, to tales of Nadya Suleman, aka “Octomom,” who was notorious for giving birth to octuplets in 2009, to, my personal favorite, a story entitled Bagel or Baby?, which wondered aloud whether a particular starlet was with child, or had simply consumed a carb-heavy breakfast.

I was particularly struck, and troubled, by the genre's depiction of Nicole Richie. A fan of Nicole since her performance in the reality show The Simple Life, I had watched the magazines attack her for her weight (first too heavy, then too thin), her alleged drug use, and her run-ins with police. But then, in 2007, a magical thing happened – or so the magazines would have us believe – Nicole Richie became pregnant. No longer portrayed as an anorexic party girl, Nicole had transformed into a bubbly earth mother complete with goddess gowns and arm jewelry.

Nicole was one of the first celebrity women, but certainly not the last, to undergo such a mommy makeover in the celebrity gossip press. This transformation narrative, a kind of contemporary fairy tale, was the starting point for my research. I tracked the magazines' portrayals of pregnancy and discovered that mothers were either presented as heroes, failures, or, like Nicole, transformed transgressors. These pregnancy narratives seemed to lay out a specific set of narrow, heteronormative rules and moralities for how to be a good mother, and thereby a good woman, in contemporary American culture. Famous moms-to-be who didn't abide by these rules were cast as selfish, reckless, and unattractive.

But while this research revealed much about the ideological messages embedded in celebrity gossip narratives, it did little to explain why women, even those media-savvy women with whom I'd worked, including self-avowed feminists like myself, continue to seek out, read, and enjoy these texts. What I found as a scholar was quite different from what I had enjoyed as a fan. Once eager to read the magazines, I was now disheartened. Here were images of mindless women, obsessed with overpriced shoes, unfaithful men, and plastic surgery. Here the shame of cellulite, the success and (more frequent) failure of heterosexual romance, and the joys of motherhood, were neurotically discussed, week after week. Here were magazines about some of the most professionally successful, economically influential, and culturally powerful women in the world, and all we could talk about was their latest trip to Jamba Juice? Something, I thought to myself, was seriously wrong here.

To better understand the duality of my researcher–reader position, I turned to other feminist media scholars who had come before me. I was particularly moved by the work of Janice Winship, whose 1987 book, Inside Women's Magazines, critically examines the ways in which popular magazines teach their readers important lessons about gender. In the book's preface, Winship reflects on her own position as feminist, scholar, and reader:

On and off I've been doing research on women's magazines since 1969, originally for an undergraduate dissertation and then for a PhD. For about the same number of years I've also thought of myself as a feminist. It was never easy, however, to integrate those two concerns … ‘Surely we all know women's magazines demean women and solely benefit capitalist profits. What more is there to say?’ I experienced myself as a misfitting renegade who rarely dared to speak up for magazines, however weakly.

Yet I continued to believe that it was as important to understand what women's magazines were about as it was, say, to understand how sex discrimination operated in the workplace. I felt that to simply dismiss women's magazines was also to dismiss the lives of millions of women who read and enjoyed them each week. More than that, I still enjoyed them, found them useful and escaped with them. And I knew I couldn't be the only feminist who was a ‘closet’ reader. (1987: xii)

Indeed, Winship is not alone. In her 1994 book, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media, feminist cultural critic Susan Douglas comments on her own conflicted experience:

When I open Vogue, for example, I am simultaneously infuriated and seduced, grateful to escape temporarily into a narcissistic paradise where I'm the center of the universe, outraged that completely unobtainable standards of wealth and beauty exclude me and most women I know from the promised land. I adore the materialism; I despise the materialism. I yearn for self-indulgence; I think the self-indulgence is repellent. I want to look beautiful; I think wanting to look beautiful is about the most dumb-ass goal you could have. The magazine stokes my desire; the magazine triggers my bile. And this doesn't only happen when I'm reading Vogue; it happens all the time … On the one hand, on the other hand – that's not just me – that's what it means to be a woman in America. (1994: 9)

These authors' words reassured me that my own double-edged relationship with gossip magazines was not some kind of bizarre anomaly, but a tension that has motivated feminist media scholars to turn a critical eye on the popular texts that simultaneously attract and outrage us. And, indeed, as I would come to learn in speaking with readers, women outside of the academy often feel this uneasy tension in their everyday lives.

Looking back, I realize now that my inability to register my affection for celebrity gossip in light of my textual findings stemmed from deep-seated assumptions. As a media scholar, I had been taught to look to the text. This is precisely where I began my investigation and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I arrived at the conclusion that many before me had also reached. What I found in celebrity gossip magazines were themes of patriarchy, ideology, stereotypes, and problems. But my problematization of celebrity magazines was not a personal epiphany. Rather, it was an effort to apply long-standing critiques of popular culture, which I had been taught and subsequently adopted.

The type of ideology critique that I engaged in is indicative of the academic study of popular culture in general, and women's popular culture in particular. Early scholarship in the field of mass communication was riddled with an academic worry over how “ordinary people” would deal with the problem of the popular (Scannell, 2007). Scholars working in the Frankfurt School tradition dubbed the popular “mass culture,” and argued that popular forms of entertainment were inauthentic distractions, ideological traps. By the 1960s, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams had begun to push back against the assumption that “mass culture” was inherently bad, making a claim for the value of the ordinary and the everyday. Hoggart and Williams argued that culture is not the province of the elite (the opera, the ballet, the sonnet), but rather the fabric of everyday life (the local custom, the inside joke, the neighborhood pub), a thread that “pervades all human artifacts and practices” (Scannell, 2007: 114). Their work laid a foundational path, debunking the authority of official culture and paving the way for the emerging field of cultural studies.

During the 1970s and 1980s, as second-wave feminist scholarship grew up in academia, feminist media scholars took up the project of the popular, with a specific focus on female audiences. Writers such as Angela McRobbie, Lynn Spigel, and Charlotte Brunsdon fought to gain recognition for the popular music, magazines, and television programs that mattered to women and to justify the value of the academic study of those texts. Since that time, feminist media scholars have examined the production (D'Acci, 1994), content (Coward, 1985; Douglas, 1994; Warwick, 2007; Winship, 1987), and audience reception (Brunsdon, 1978; Hobson, 1980; Morley, 1986) of popular texts. This body of research reflects a tension between a desire to recognize and take seriously the interests and concerns of women and a critical awareness of the way in which the cultural products consumed by women often seem to encourage retrograde representations of gender and frustrate feminist goals.

But while some scholars have acknowledged the paradoxical relationship that female audiences have with the popular feminine texts they love (or love to hate), the academic feminist position on women's popular culture has often been mired in a desire to critique the ideological messages embedded in these texts. At the leading edge of the second-wave feminist movement, Betty Friedan's classic book, The Feminine Mystique (1963/1974), warned of the dangers of popular women's magazines. Since that time, many feminist scholars have focused their attention on the negative aspects of these texts, arguing that they present a narrow, stereotypic, or conservative view of women and their social roles, and therefore have the potential to stymie women's social and political progress (Ballaster et al., 1991; Ferguson, 1983; Tuchman, 1978). Scholars working within this critical framework claim that celebrity gossip magazines rely upon and reproduce narrow versions of normative femininity and point to necessarily problematic features of contemporary mass culture. But, like my own initial critique, many of these arguments are grounded in textual analysis and rarely account for audience interpretation.

While this body of work provides valuable insight into the power, and potential problems, of media messages, it stops short of explaining the appeal of popular texts. Why, if women's popular culture is so bad for us, do we continue to seek it out and enjoy it? Are we masochists, or simply dupes? I do not consider myself either; nor do my friends and colleagues who enjoy Us Weekly, Taylor Swift, and the occasional episode of The Real Housewives. These ideology critiques, then, do not help to explain the meanings and values of these texts within our popular culture; nor do they explain what audiences do with these texts. As Ien Ang writes in her discussion of the television soap opera Dallas, these types of content analyses often lead to a condemnation of women's popular culture as “reinforcers of the patriarchal status quo and the oppression of women” (1985: 119). In order to avoid such critiques, Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines makes a distinction between representations of femininity and the practices that female audiences employ to make sense of those representations, acknowledging that audiences' meaning-making processes are rarely, if ever, acts of careless acceptance.

Within the literature on women's popular culture, two texts stand out for their willingness to confront the troubling tension between ideology and pleasure that resounds throughout the field of feminist media studies: Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and Joke Hermes' Reading Women's Magazines. These works have informed my theoretical and methodological approach to the study of celebrity gossip magazines, as well as the title of this book.