The dissonant personas of a female celebrity

Amyand the public self of Amy Winehouse

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5675203
AutoresBronwyn Polaschek (Victoria University of Wellington, autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen9
Número1
Páginas17-33
Fecha de publicación2018-01-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCelebrity Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1939-2397 • E-ISSN: 1939-2400
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/19392397.2017.1321490
OpenAlexW2620365224
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas12
Referencias citadas32

Celebrities strategically perform their public selves in a culturally constrained context. A celebrity from a marginalised group may find that the persona they seek to construct is dissonant with prevailing social discourses and as a result their celebrity image becomes imbued with meanings contradictory to those they intend. This article uses the growing literature in persona studies to analyse and compare the public self created by the late British musician Amy Winehouse during her lifetime with the persona assembled posthumously by the filmmakers of the critically acclaimed documentary Amy. The article argues that while Winehouse presented herself in terms of excessive performativity, the film relies on the archetypal construct of the creative woman as a victim. In an act of public absolution the filmmakers seek to rescue Winehouse from her trainwreck tabloid image, but their cinematic depiction of a psychologically damaged feminine subject obscures the rebellious agency that was central to her self-presentation. The production and critical success of Amy is an exemplary case study of a wider cultural pattern in which the subversive persona created by a transgressive celebrity is displaced by a conventional persona that is produced by influential intermediaries and functions to reproduce dominant social discourses

Aesthetics · Art · Celebrity culture · Consonance and dissonance · Depiction · Humanities · Linguistics · Media studies · Performative utterance · Performativity · Persona · Semiotics · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Music History and Culture · Philosophy