Riina Yrjölä, MA
Doctoral student
Political Science / Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä
Email: riina.yrjola@jyu.fi
Research interest
Coming Soon to the Screens Near You: Celebrities, Politics and the Battle of Hearts and Souls. Celebrity Politicians’ Role and Impact in the Postmodern Societies’ Political Context
Abstract
Within Western democracies there is an intense debate taking place among citizens, politicians and academic researchers on the increasing electoral withdrawal and growing apathy about political affairs in general: the public life seems to be steadily eroding and the relationship between shared action and collective identity slowly breaking down. Citizens are becoming political consumers who no longer ‘buy’ ideological packages, but are mobilisable around strings of single issues and political personalities who represent these issues in a distinctive manner in media. Thus to understand the complex mutuality of contemporary political and media systems is becoming paramount to catch more breadth and complexity of the current politics where the difference between public/private and celebrity/politics are merging. In this context the rise of ‘celebrity politics’ is not only an important, but still a neglected topic among academic researchers. By labelling popular culture and celebrities as only ‘entertainment’ which works apart from conventional politics, especially the scholars of political science have failed to capture a critical part of the representational dimensions of mediated politics works and the significant role of celebrities in setting up political frames and agendas for increasingly cynical citizens.
By bringing into the analytical framework of politics celebrities and their representations and narratives in two political campaigns for Africa – Live Aid (1985) and Live 8 (2005) – the objective of this research is to uncover an answer to the following question: ‘How do celebrities contribute to the understanding of the global political issues through their media representations and what relevance and impact celebrities have in the contemporary political agenda setting?’ In addressing this main thesis question, the more immediate research questions are:
- What is the relationship between celebrities and traditional politicians and the power they hold?
- To what extent and in which issues is the political currently mediated through celebrities and celebrity discourse?
- What function do celebrities play in contemporary politics?
- How do celebrities build the public face for Africa in media on issues such as development and poverty?
- What effects do celebrities have in the ways people understand ‘political’ and ‘political action’?
To understand how things take a meaning, it is necessary to analyze the structure of the imaginative processes – practices that reside in the very style in which statements are made, of grammatical, rhetorical and narrative structures they compose. Treating representations as an act of power which create realities, this research aims to build on Gramsci’s writings on hegemonic theory (2000, 2005), which refers to an idea that civil culture, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, literature – as well as celebrities and their representations – are contested battlegrounds in the hegemonic struggle to achieve societal consent or transformation. By deploying a multi-perspectivist approach which treats culture, society and celebrities as a field of contestation with forces of domination and resistance, co-optation and upheaval, this research aims to provide a more fruitful and dynamic model to analyse the new ways how postmodern politics is produced and challenged by the actors from the fields of popular culture and entertainment.
Keywords
Celebrity politicians, the marketing of politics, political identity and popular culture