What’s new pussycat? A genealogy of animal celebrity

Abstract

Animal celebrity is a human creation informing us about our socially constructed natural world. It is relational, expressive of cultural proclivities, political power plays and the quotidian everyday, as well as serious philosophical reflections on the meaning of being human. This article attempts to outline some key contours in the genealogy of animal celebrity, showing how popular culture, including fairground attractions, public relations, Hollywood movies, documentary films, zoo attractions, commercial sport and mediatised moral panics -particularly those accompanying scientific developments such as cloning -help to order, categorise and license aspects of human understanding and feelings. The nature of [animal] charisma and celebrity are explored with assistance from Jumbo the Elephant, Guy the Gorilla, Paul the clairvoyant octopus, Uggie the film star, Nénette the orang-utan and Dolly the sheep. It argues that the issue of what it is to be human lies beneath the celebritised surface or, as Donna Haraway noted, the issue 'of having to face oneself '.

The Tropes of Celebrity Environmentalism

“…What Nick Couldry (77) terms "the hidden injuries of media power" affects things, places, and animals as much as humans. Blewitt (78) has traced how animal celebrities such as Uggie (a dog), Jumbo (an elephant), Guy (a gorilla), and Dolly (a cloned sheep) can work as ciphers for telling us something about what he terms the "human socially constructed natural world. "…”

Éléphants vedettes de théâtre: Mlle. Djeck ou la starification animale dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle

“…Toutefois, comme John Blewitt (2013) ou Antoine Lilti (2014) l'ont mis en lumière, la vedette n'est pas seulement caractérisée par l'idée de particularité, car c'est dans l'équilibre entre le commun et/ou ordinaire et l'entièrement extraordinaire que cette figure se situe. À la fois singulière et semblable aux autres, la personne célèbre s'avère essentiellement ambivalente.…”

“…7 Le recours à cette caractéristique comme réclame visant à encourager la promotion d'animaux en figures publiques, puis en célébrités, se consolide avec le temps au point de devenir une stratégie mise en place de manière itérative. Djeck et Jumbo au XIX e siècle, mais aussi le gorille Guy, exhibé au zoologique de Londres entre les décennies de 1960 et 1970 jusqu'à sa mort en 1974, ont été fréquemment décrits avec des adjectifs cherchant à souligner une corporalité imposante qui les rend singuliers(Blewitt, 2013). Néanmoins, l'anatomie divergente n'est pas, en elle-même, le seul élément déterminant la célébrité des individus-animaux plus haut mentionnés,…”

Killers: Orcas and Their Followers

“…Above all, the Shamu effect is produced via what I have called elsewhere (2013: 4) the "repeatable uniqueness" of the celebrity figure: here more specifically the iconic figure of the celebrity animal, which operates as both an ideological conduit for self-perpetuating "family values" and an affective mirror for generally rose-tinted human perceptions of themselves (Blewitt 2013;Giles 2013). "Repeatable uniqueness," of course, is by no means limited to animal figures, being an integral part of those wider media processes by which celebrities--which nearly always means human celebrities--are rendered simultaneously special and banal.…”