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'Just Like Us'?

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'Just Like Us'? ‘Just like us’? Investigating how LGBTQ Australians read celebrity media Lucy Watson A thesis submitted to fulfil requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney 2019 Statement of originality This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. A version of Chapter Nine appears in the book Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture (forthcoming), edited by Anthea Taylor and Joanna McIntyre. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged. Lucy Watson 25th September 2019 i Abstract In the 21st century, celebrity culture is increasingly pervasive. Existing research on how people (particularly women) read celebrity indicates that celebrity media is consumed for pleasure, as a way to engage in ‘safe’ gossip amongst imagined, as well as real, communities about standards of morality, and as a way to understand and debate social and cultural behavioural standards. The celebrities we read about engage us in a process of cultural identity formation, as we identify and disidentify with those whom we consume. Celebrities are, as the adage goes, ‘just like us’ – only richer, more talented, or perhaps better looking. But what about when celebrities are not ‘just like us’? Despite relatively recent changes in the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) life in the media, the world of celebrity is an overwhelmingly heterosexual one. Queer media studies indicate that it is common for queer readers to subvert understandings of media, and seek out a subtext, by appropriating mainstream texts to read them as if created for a minority audience. Where LGBTQ life is represented in the media, studies have critiqued it for being overly normative, or placed affective value on the normativity of this media. This research, then, places qualitative audience research in conversation with theories of affect in order to understand how LGBTQ people read celebrity media, and to discover to what extent, for LGBTQ people, celebrities are ‘just like us’. ii Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without my supervisor, Dr Megan Le Masurier. She’s the reason I have taken this career trajectory. Her confidence in me and my abilities, her guidance, and her complete dedication to my work has been indispensable throughout this process. I’d also like to thank my associate supervisor, Professor Annamarie Jagose for her advice and feedback at crucial moments, and staff in the Media and Communications department, particularly Dr Penny O’Donnell, Dr Benedetta Brevini, Dr Jonathon Hutchinson, Professor Gerard Goggin, and Dr Fiona Giles. A big thank you to my 61 participants, without whom this thesis would not have been possible. My fellow PhD friends have provided me with so much support over the last few years, in particular Dr Grace Sharkey, who has been my best cheerleader, and Dr Rafi Alam, for listening to my rants. Also thanks to Pat Horton, Dr Jaya Keaney, and Sam Sperring, for learning with me along the way. Thanks to my parents for their support in this process, and especially my brother, Tom, for beating me to the Dr Watson title, and for proofreading at the eleventh hour. To my friends: Alex, Annie, Avani, Bebe, Bec, Bryant, Frankie, Hannah, Lara, Liz, Mariana, Matilda, Max, Nick, Nina, and especially Liv and Lucy. Thank you for your moral support and emotional labour in putting up with me over the last few years. Finally, to Kristen Stewart. iii Table of contents Statement of originality i Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: Literature review 13 Chapter Three: Methodology 70 Part One: Queerly reading celebrity 86 Chapter Four: “If Britney can make it through 2007, I can make it through today”: The camp/melodramatic reading of celebrity 87 Chapter Five: “She’s unapologetically human, and sexual, and queer, and disgusting”: Celebrity transgression, apology, and the de/attachment of shame 115 Chapter Six: “She’s too funny to be straight”: Speculation, subtext, and gossip 133 Part Two: Reading queer celebrity 169 Chapter Seven: “Wow, I’m actually reading about a celebrity who is in a relationship with, or dating, a woman”: LGBTQ celebrities, representation, and belonging 170 Chapter Eight: “You’re probably only five make-out links away from a really famous queer person”: LGBTQ micro-celebrity and the intimate micro-public 208 iv Chapter Nine: “It was nice for me watching that, because she was very calming”: Affective responses to celebrity marriage equality activism 231 Chapter Ten: Conclusion 252 References 259 Appendices 283 v Chapter One Introduction In 2010, while grappling with my own sexuality, I attended a Sydney Film Festival screening of The Runaways, starring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, who have a notable kiss scene in the film. Enamoured by this kind of queer representation that was explicit, but inconclusive (were they just friends who drunkenly pashed? Were they in love with each other? Did they have sex after that, in between the kiss scene and the subsequent ‘morning after’ scene?) I left the cinema wanting more (as, I’m sure, was writer/director Floria Sigismondi’s intention). Desperate to seek out more of this brief, alluring (alluding) moment of queer representation, I turned to the film’s paratexts, especially press interviews with Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning, to find out more. I turned particularly to Tumblr, where fan-made paratexts were in abundance. These fan-made paratexts included supercuts of press interviews, highlighting every instance of flirtatious tension between the two co-stars, and gifs that turned passing flirty moments into eternally replaying events, imbuing them with more significance as the viewer watched Kristen look at Dakota, over, and over, and over again. I consumed these paratexts at great length, and while I knew Kristen Stewart was confirmed to be dating her Twilight (2008) co-star, Robert Pattinson, these paratexts helped to create a reality in my mind that told me Kristen Stewart was queer. Closeted or bi, but there was something queer here. Later, in 2012, news broke of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson breaking up, because Kristen Stewart had been caught cheating on him with the director of her latest film, Rupert Sanders. I recall at the time gossiping about this incident with a straight friend of mine, who expressed dismay at the cheating. I, on the other hand, was not convinced that cheating had really occurred. In my mind, this media storm was a publicist-driven event to deter from 1 rumours of Kristen Stewart’s queerness. Playfully convinced of a Hollywood Golden Age style studio cover-up, where one scandal (an affair) was ‘leaked’ to replace the far more damaging one (queerness), I told my friend my theory. She was utterly bewildered. Despite having seen The Runaways (2010), that scene didn’t have nearly the same effect on her, and so she hadn’t delved deep into the paratexts as I had, searching for the queerness I so desperately wanted to see. Years later, when Kristen Stewart confirmed her relationship with Alicia Cargile, I received a text message from this same friend that simply read: “You were right.” This story was one of the motivations for undertaking this research. I wanted to see if other queer people developed theories similar to the one I had (with the help of fan-made paratexts) for Kristen Stewart. I wanted to find out how other queer people reacted when celebrities they always ‘knew’ were gay came out, how they felt about openly gay celebrities, if they cared about other celebrities, and why. So I developed an audience research project that set out to answer the central question, how do queer people read celebrity media? Theoretical backgrounds When asked to think about queer people and celebrity media, you might jump to gay men and diva worship: depending on your age and context, you might think Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Whitney Houston, Madonna, or Lady Gaga. But you might also have thought of Ellen DeGeneres, Elton John, or Laverne Cox. Gay people, and men in particular, have a long cultural history with celebrity and star fascinations, from Judy Garland and gay men as ‘friends of Dorothy’ to the contemporary moment, where divas earn their stripes through engaging in gay rights activism (Draper, 2017). But as well as divas, we now have our own lesbian, gay, bisexual, 2 transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)1 icons: being out in Hollywood isn’t as hard as it used to be. So which celebrities do we care about, and why? In How to be Gay (2012), Halperin suggests that there are two versions of gay culture in contemporary society: the original, pre-Stonewall2 culture of a characteristic way of decoding objects from mainstream culture and appropriating them through queering or resignifying their meaning; and the more contemporary explicit ‘identity art’, that is, cultural objects that are produced by and for gay people. He distinguishes these practices by calling the explicit mode ‘culture’ and the implicit a ‘subculture’. Halperin suggests that gay culture is rooted in gay identity, while the subculture is rooted in identification with non-gay subjects or cultural forms. In distinguishing between the two, he asks his readers, “Would you rather listen to Rufus Wainwright or Judy Garland?” (p. 417). Halperin admits that the emergence of an explicit gay culture was “a kind of epistemic breakthrough” for him – the importance of being explicitly visible in a text is something he does not understate (p.
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