Kevin’s Predicaments

Power and Celebrity across the Political and Media Fields

Bibliographic Data

ID12977438
AuthorsGeoffrey Craig (0000-0002-8888-1820, Medway School of Pharmacy, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume19
Issue1
Pages24-41
Publication date2013-11-07
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe International Journal of Press/Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1940-1612 • E-ISSN: 1040-1620
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1940161213508813
OpenAlexW2023910077
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited22

This article grounds the concept of political celebrity in the contexts of the differentiated media or journalistic field, and it also investigates the functions of political celebrity in the exercise of political leadership where individuals must negotiate the relationship between the political and media fields. Through a discussion of the changing political fortunes of former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, the power of political celebrity is attributed to particular structural negotiations between the political and media fields, and also to exploitations of the temporality of political cycles, and the ephemerality of the currency of political celebrity. It is also argued that political celebrity is an unstable phenomenon, partly because it encapsulates a tension between different conceptualizations of subjectivity, where the positing of an autonomous, authentic self competes with a more situational and performative understanding of the self and that this latter understanding of political celebrity is exacerbated in the contexts of post-broadcast democracy

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Media studies · Negotiation · Performative utterance · Phenomenon · Political communication · Political economy · Political science · Political subjectivity · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Temporality · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Social Media and Politics

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