Extraordinary acts and ordinary pleasures: Rhetorics of inequality in young people’s talk about celebrity

Abstract

In this article, we start from the problem of inequality raised by the existence of a class of celebrities with high levels of wealth and status. We analyse how young people make sense of these inequalities in their talk about celebrity. Specifically, we revisit Michael Billig's Talking of the Royal Family, and his focus on rhetorical strategies that legitimate inequalities of money and power. As he argued, in comparing their lives with those of the rich and famous, young people are making sense of the massive disparity between the two, often replacing envy or anger with pleasure in being 'ordinary'. We extend Billig's work by looking at a larger class of public figures than royalty, including those with a more permeable border between 'them' and 'us'. In so doing, we expand his categories and attend to the relationship between the gender of celebrities and contemporary rhetorics of inequality.

Celebrity and power: fame in contemporary culture, 2nd edition, by P. David Marshall, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2014 [1997], 290 pp., £26.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-81-669562-1

“…celebrities; p. xxxii), to a 'presentational cultural regime', where individuals have the capacity to construct 'micropublics of associations' (p. xxxiv) and create their own public personas using digital culture. Persona studies has the potential to be a rich and valuable school of thought, although I wonder about its place alongside scholarship which suggests celebrity studies needs to embrace social theory (Couldry 2015) and consider social and political context (Harvey et al 2015), due to its emphasis on individualism and self-management.…”

Music as Labour

“…As was the case in my previous study, all interviews were recorded, transcribed and subsequently analysed using discourse analysis. Discourse analysis has a long history of exploring how inequalities are constructed and negotiated in talk (Harvey et al, 2015) and therefore serves as a useful interpretative framework. Discourse analysis attempts to uncover patterns in talk by identifying recurring themes and tropes.…”

The discursive production and maintenance of class privilege: Permeable geographies, slippery rhetorics

“…Van Dijk, 1992). In fact, after some years of neglect or oversight, class-focused analyses in the journal have only fairly recently started to pick up (most notably, Bennett, 2013; Callier, 2014; Harvey et al, 2015; Turgeon et al, 2014). Here, we sense that discourse studies is coming into line with – if not completely keeping up with – wider public concerns regarding the aggressive stratification and expanding inequality of so many contemporary societies (see Thurlow and Jaworski, 2017b, for more on this background).…”