Celebrity Culture

Celebrities are everywhere: you love them, you hate them, but you know them. This course examines what it means to be a celebrity and how celebrity is produced, circulated, and consumed within contemporary media culture. We will explore celebrity as a media construction, a discursive effect, and a commodity shaped by the publicity, promotion, and entertainment industries. Taking a critical perspective, the course considers the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of celebrity and asks how celebrity culture shapes contemporary understandings of identity, labor, intimacy, and power.