Abstract
Reviewed by: Jamii Claiborne, Associate Professor of Digital Media at Buena Vista University, USA
In her first book, Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines, Andrea McDonnell takes on our celebrity-obsessed popular culture and, in particular, the “hot-pink headlines” of the tabloid magazines that narrate it. Her study of these magazines resonates with incredible depth, a dash of humor, and perhaps most interestingly, a genuine empathy for the female readership of which she is a part. Her perspective as a fellow fan of the genre opens a unique and frankly fresh take on critical inquiry into “the popular feminine.” This framework lays bare the tensions of modern readers’ love or hate relationship with the genre and uses those tensions to create important research questions and areas of investigation.
McDonnell sets out on a semantically simple quest to “understand why celebrity gossip magazines matter” but uses her unique perspective to quickly complicate it (p. 1). Her critical examination of the genre and its readers is multifaceted and nuanced. To truly understand the pleasure that is derived from celebrity gossip magazines, McDonnell takes a holistic approach, coming at the genre from production, content, and audience angles. The book contains multiple theoretical and analytical perspectives and works in content analysis, audience research, and more, to sort through and provide some answers to why young women are so attracted to these magazines and what purpose they serve in their lives.
In Chapter 1, McDonnell presents an historical and cultural context for celebrity gossip magazines as gendered texts. She borrows the term “the popular feminine” from the work of Tania Modleski and uses it expertly to reveal the way the gendering of particular texts, including celebrity gossip magazines, matters to their societal value (p. 26). McDonnell explores the historical marginalization of feminine texts as trivial fluff both in popular and academic discourses. She notes that the contemporary conversation about celebrity gossip magazines as “trash” or “trashy” follows suit and continues the devaluation of all things female (p. 39). Also worth noting in this chapter is McDonnell’s explanation of the traditional feminist line of critique of women’s magazines that focuses almost solely on the problematic and patriarchal messages designed to confine women but often ignores or renders passive the droves of female consumers who read and experience pleasure from them. By contrast, McDonnell’s book consistently incorporates the active audience through interviews with female fans, the first of which appear in this chapter.
Chapter 2 focuses on the production of celebrity gossip magazines. Through interviews with editors of these magazine and detailed visual analysis, McDonnell posits that celebrity gossip magazines are carefully constructed to not only privilege a specific set of topics that attract a specific type of female reader but also “stitching those readers” into the narrative through visual and rhetorical strategies (p. 44). McDonnell’s textual analysis is on stage in this chapter. She quantifies content and determines the most frequent topics covered in the magazines (relationships, pregnancy, and body image), decodes the visual tropes of the genre, and analyzes the rhetorical device of direct address often employed by these magazines. Ultimately, these lines of inquiry lead to the conclusion that magazine creators meticulously construct a feeling of belonging and “extended family” amongst their readers via their deliberate design (p. 62).
Having established the connection that is felt between readers, McDonnell uses Chapter 3 to introduce what she deems “the paradox of the ordinary celebrity” (p. 66). She convincingly argues that celebrity culture in general, and gossip magazines in particular, have worked to make celebrities ordinary, authentic, and relatable. By giving audiences sneak peeks into celebrities’ everyday lives through photos, readers are invited to see them as “just like us” (p. 74). Suddenly the magazine serves a key role as the mediator, even guide, who helps us access and cultivate relationships with celebrities. McDonnell smartly pushes this notion by employing the work of Raymond Williams and his concept of the “knowable” (p. 80). Through analysis and interviews, she reveals how celebrity gossip magazines create a “knowable community” of celebrities with whom readers can identify, and in turn, allow readers a space to share and discuss their own experiences (p. 80). In short, the female readers see their lives in the lives of these celebrities and discuss them with fellow readers, often opening up important dialogues about the circumstances, and challenges of contemporary female existence.
Chapter 4 returns to the tensions between the seemingly regressive topics of celebrity gossip magazines (boys, babies, and bodies) and the pleasure smart, career-driven women take in reading them. McDonnell first reviews the codes of meaning that exist in these magazines, including confining moral lessons in sexual behavior, marriage, and beauty maintenance. McDonnell again pairs content analysis with audience research to discover that these moral stories do put pressure on women to fit into unrealistic norms and invite them to judge not just the celebrities who don’t match up but also the ordinary women in their own lives. While most of this is ground covered by other feminist analyses of female texts, McDonnell adds to the complexity of how readers actually resist these messages. Through her reader interviews, she discovers active ridicule of celebrity gossip narratives and their narrow gender messages. She even uncovers readers’ outright rejection of the antiquated and limiting gender ideologies the magazines perpetuate.
In Chapter 5, McDonnell explores the tricky question of truth in the genre. She situates “truth” in the historical and political context when these magazines emerged (the era of Bush “truthiness”; p. 113) and deconstructs the practice in the magazines of “editorialization” (p. 114). She establishes the ambiguity the magazines seem to acknowledge and the added pleasure a reader can derive from being a sort of truth detector. While this chapter does move forward her powerful argument of the active role of readers, it does seem less central to the book’s core ideas.
Ultimately, McDonnell achieves what she’d hoped for, a thorough examination of these magazines and their meaningfulness from all angles in an effort to understand the love or hate relationship readers often have with them. After an intricate weaving in of many threads of discourse and inquiry to craft her answers, McDonnell concludes that women’s conflicted relationships with these texts are indicative of their complex relationships with most mainstream media and with cultural notions of femininity in general.
Part of the pleasure in reading McDonnell’s work comes from the structure she employs that guides readers through what must have been something similar to her own research process. She offers the questions that arise from the previous answers, so that the reader is invited to constantly be asking, much in the way McDonnell likely did, “but what about … ?” Because she’s been there already, McDonnell is able to anticipate the readers’ next set of questions and provide satisfying answers.
Finally, while McDonnell’s primary research certainly and appropriately occupies the bulk of the book, there is a strong undercurrent of scholarly connections and critical conversation. She applies critical cultural theories from foundational media scholars like Umberto Eco, Raymond Williams, and more, and positions her work precisely in the feminist tradition of critical analysis of women’s texts, including Janice Radway’s romance novels, Ien Ang’s Dallas, and work on soap operas. By doing this, what some may think McDonnell lacks in breadth (only 1 year of magazines examined, only a handful of editors interviewed, and only one small focus group of readers queried), she makes up for in depth of analysis that is situated in central ideas of the discipline and existing scholarship. McDonnell succeeds in not only plumbing the complexities of meaning making in celebrity gossip magazines, but she reminds us how critical and culturally meaningful the careful and serious study of “the popular feminine” can be.