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Spectacular Manhood and Girlhood: Celebrity Studies and Girlhood Studies Come of Age
DECONSTRUCTING BRAD PITT. Edited by Christopher Schaberg and Robert Bennett. New York: Bloomsbury. 2014.
SPECTACULAR GIRLS: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture. By Sarah Projansky. New York: New York University Press. 2014.
Celebrity studies as interdisciplinary scholarship has come of age, as the books under review here indicate. Over the last half century, a vast study of celebrity, fame, stars, and entertainment industries has emerged to investigate how "the star intervenes and functions on every level of life, the imaginary level, the practical level, and especially on the level of the dialectic between the imaginary and the practical."1 Yet scholars of celebrity culture can still find themselves on the defensive, facing charges of "zany doings" and "trendy jargon," as did the editors of Deconstructing Brad Pitt when they tried to organize a 2005 conference panel on the "cultural logic of Brad Pitt" to explore masculinity, sexuality, white- ness, celebrity, philanthropy, the American West, and national identity.2 As Su Holmes and Sean Redmond reported in the 2010 inaugural issue of Celebrity Studies, the first academic journal devoted exclusively and explicitly to this work, "in the media's bludgeoning of the idea for the journal, we knew that the critical worth of Celebrity Studies was being proven. . . . s]tudying the impact of celebrity culture on everyday life was touching a raw nerve at the symbolic centre of celebrity production."3 Yet the tide has turned as scholars, literature, organizations, and conferences devoted to this work proliferate: the two books under review here-Deconstructing Brad Pitt and Spectacular Girls-are part of this shift and exemplify the complex politics of gender, race, class, age, and sexuality laid bare by such work.
While the classical Hollywood studio system provided the original impetus for the study of celebrity culture, the subfield now encompasses a more nuanced and wide-ranging understanding of who is a celebrity, what it means to be celebrated, and the kinds of new and old media platforms and industries that create and sustain celebrity studies, including print culture, television, the music and recording industries, sports, and social media. As the technologies and platforms proliferate, the study of media and its celebrities grows, playing a decisive role in newer interdisciplinary...