Celebrities and politics: Representation struggles in arenas of public intervention

Abstract

In the context of the protest against the recent Iraq War, some art and entertainment celebrities have used their access to mass media to publicly contest the legitimacy of governmental action. By doing so, they have turned themselves into new spokespeople, claiming to be more authentic intermediaries for the will of the voiceless. This paper – based on sociological interviews with various types of art professionals – focuses on how these representational claims were constituted and how they competed, objectively and sometimes explicitly, with the prerogatives that politicians hold by virtue of their election. I first analyze the public posture adopted by the artists. They fashioned themselves into “celebrity citizens,” which enabled them to assume a role of popular representation while maintaining a clear separation between this public function and their regular professional activity, in their particular art world. They based their legitimacy to talk politics on their access to and influence over extended audiences. The second section of this paper analyzes how the public of the arts is thus symbolically converted into a political public. In giving themselves a mission of political and civic education, the artists participated in publicly designing and promoting a new model of the “good citizen” mirroring their reinvention of the “good representative.”

Citation

Roussel, V. (2013), "Celebrities and politics: Representation struggles in arenas of public intervention", Voices of Globalization (Research in Political Sociology, Vol. 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 107-128. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0895-9935(2013)0000021009