Stark raving fat: Celebrity,cellulite,and the sliding scale of sanity

The economy of Britney: Crisis as currency

There is no American star better poised than Britney Spears to personify and embody these anxieties about madness, weight, and gender, what Kathleen LeBesco (2004) has termed the ‘revolting body.’ Yet, despite the associations of cultural bankruptcy that accord with the revolting body, ‘The Britney Spears Phenomenon’ also demonstrates a form of highly valued agency in relation to fat oppression. Among the plethora of examples I could choose that might indicate the degree to which Britney Spears’s body is both an object of fascination and disgust and thus critical to the Foucaultian forces of power-knowledge-pleasure (Foucault, 1979, 1980) that are intrinsic to her enduring celebrity, I turn not to the gossip websites like TMZ (www.tmz.com) and Perez Hilton (perezhilton.com), the entertainment shows, the tabloids, or even an episode of South Park where a cartoon Britney in dismay at the hounding she receives from the paparazzi takes a shot gun and blows her head off (though I’ll come back to South Park in this article). Instead, I rely on my students. When teaching an undergraduate class on gender and celebrity, I asked students to compile a fame profile on a contemporary or historical celebrity of note: Britney Spears was the most frequently chosen subject of study. This was in early 2006, prior to what E! Television called ‘Britney’s craziest year ever’ in 2007 (E! True Hollywood Story, 2008), when she stumbled through the VMA awards, shaved her own head, bashed a truck with an umbrella, swam in the ocean clad only in her bra and underpants, passed out while partying in clubs, flashed her crotch on multiple occasions, ⁴ and – worst of all sins – gained weight. It was also prior to her 2008 potential suicide attempt, her crazed custody battles with K-Fed, her ‘spiritual wedding’ to paparazzo Adnan Ghalib, and her mediated, if not necessarily medical, diagnosis for manic-depressive disorder and/or post-partum depression. ⁵ In 2006, my students were virulent in their distaste of her, and so choosing to write about Spears was often an exercise in expressing disgust publicly. By and large the students considered her, in their words, ‘trashy’ and ‘without class,’ lightly veiled terms indicating that Britney’s bare-footed visits to gas stations, her wearing of cut-off jeans and see-through tops, and her penchant for greasy home-style foods marked her as a classed and Southern subject meriting derision. By 2007, when Spears weighed an estimated 160 pounds, I had to block students from selecting her as an object of study, since even a fairly moderate weight gain marked her as a female body ‘deserving’ of contempt. As Milly Williamson (2010: 119) has noted and as my students’ reactions revealed, ‘underlying the gendered treatment of Spears is more than a hint of class prejudice’.

In Britney Spears’s version of rampant appetites and poor white trash that, as Jeffrey A Brown (2005) notes, is equaled in the United States only by Anna Nicole Smith, we see the perfect illustration of how social class separates from money, since Britney’s personal fortune is estimated at $150 million (Norbom, 2009). ⁶ According to Portfolio Magazine, The Britney Empire contributes $120 million to the US Economy annually (McDonald, 2008). Portfolio Magazine termed her earning power the ‘Britney Industrial Complex’ and suggested that the appearance of disaster that hung to Britney functioned as a clever device to draw more attention to her and, thus, more money to her coffers. ‘To the casual tabloid reader,’ writes Duff McDonald of Portfolio,

Britney Spears’ life looks like a train wreck. To the Britney Industrial Complex, comprising everyone from paparazzi to perfume vendors, she is a gold mine. Whether she’s shaving her head or battling for custody of her children, Britney seems to grow more fascinating (and to some people, more lucrative) every time she stumbles. Recent court documents suggest she’s amassed a $125 million fortune and continues to rake in about $737,000 a month, or nearly $9 million a year. But that’s chicken feed compared with the overall Britney economy. (2008: para 1)

Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper was somewhat awed by Britney’s financial power, noting:

Her career appears to be fading, her home life is in ruins and fears are growing for her mental health following her committal to a psychiatric hospital. Yet even as she teeters on the brink of disaster, the troubled Britney Spears is doing more than most to prop up the equally faltering US economy. (Goddard, 2008: para 1)

In this regard, though Spears herself may personify what Kathleen LeBesco (2004: 58) critiques as the ‘failed citizen’ due to her rising girth and unstable sanity, the larger corpus that is Britney Spears plays a critical role in the nation-state’s financial health.

At the height of her fall into weight gain and madness, Spears had something on the order of two dozen paparazzi encamped on her doorstep; X17, the agency producing the majority of paparazzi images, reported that in 2007 it earned $3 million from the sale of Britney-related images, equaling 25% of their annual income (Hirschorn, 2007). Indeed, X17 has a specialized squad of Brazilian paparazzi, the MBF, exclusively dedicated to following Britney and capturing her in lurid or dazed poses. In early 2008, following several crises and collapses and a possible suicide attempt, the star re-entered treatment, began taking medication for bi-polar disorder, eschewed her ‘bad’ friends, and recommitted to a life of father-enforced balance and low-calorie eating. The paparazzi dwindled to a half dozen hopeful photographers, all keening for a return of the Britney salad days.

The economy of Britney rose again in 2008 and 2011 when the star released new albums that climbed to the top of the charts and occasioned greater paparazzi scrutiny to determine if Britney’s weight loss and comeback would be successful. The paparazzi’s zealous attentiveness toward Britney inadvertently created a new diagnostic function, since photographers have been called upon to provide state’s evidence about the star’s relative level of sobriety and to furnish photographic proof that can attest to (or dispute) her soundness as a mother. In Touch Weekly, for example, thus provided a juridical, economic, and therapeutic form of confirmation when it reported on its June 23 2008 cover, ‘Britney’s DRINKING AGAIN!’ and in the accompanying article showed the star in close up, large white arrows pointing to pimples on her cheeks, chin, and chest that purportedly indicated how alcohol had compromised her kidneys’ ability to eliminate bodily toxins (In Touch Weekly, 2008: 29). Too numerous to detail here are also the blog postings that keep regular check on Spears’s size and sanity. As just one example, ‘The Skinny Website’ (theskinnywebsite.com/site/), a blogspot for gossip about celebrities and body size, runs a regular feature called ‘Britney Spears Weight Update’ (http://theskinnywebsite.com/site/2010/03/britney-spears-weight-update/), with captions like, ‘Is it my imagination, or does it look like she has gained a little weight back recently?’ (17 March, 2010).

Off with her head

As much as she is castigated for her rampages and bad choices, for her poor mothering skills and inability to regulate her partying, for her weight gain and crazed behavior, Spears is often depicted as a victim, the poor, innocent, and often infantile, girl who is made into mince-meat by the paparazzi’s relentless pursuit. Like jackals with a taste for blood, the ‘paps’ in their hunger for her image are often perceived as intent on robbing Britney of her very soul – leading, in one case, to the impassioned plea from a Youtubing and sobbing Britney fan, Chris Crocker, that we all ‘Leave Britney alone! Please! Leave Britney Spears alone right now!’ (2007). If representation functions as a form of cultural punishment, it is also the source of, if not salvation, then perhaps redemption, and I use these religious-coded words deliberately, for in many ways Spears’s star-text plays out a mythic narrative that discursively resonates in the iconographic archive of gender and identity (see also Redmond, 2008).

By way of application of this idea, I want to turn to a different pop culture phenomenon’s making of the Britney myth, South Park. Airing on Comedy Central and created, written, and produced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the animated series has since its debut in 1998 been considered the avatar of biting social cynicism and witty irreverence. Celebrities often serve as the brunt of Parker and Stone’s humor, the vainer or more outrageous the celebrity the better (such as Paris Hilton who, in ‘Stupid Spoiled Whore,’ encourages all the girls of South Park to become ‘skanks,’ or Mel Gibson, whose ‘The Passion of the Jew’ episode features an ongoing gag in which the cartoon Mel smears the walls with his own fecal matter). In March 2008, South Park (2008) premiered ‘Britney’s New Look,’ which promised to skewer Britney’s ever more frightening appearance and behavior changes. The episode starts out in good South Park form, with the boys captivated by a TV news update called ‘Britney Watch’ that breaks into the show they are watching (a none-too-riveting Democratic primary debate between cartoon versions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton). ‘Britney Watch’ depicts a stolen image of a cartoon-Britney, who, in trying to get away from it all by escaping to the Colorado woods, inadvertently ‘takes a piss’ on a ladybug. ‘She’s such a trainwreck!’ says one of the kids’ fathers derisively. While Britney’s body is freeze-framed in mid (urine) stream, the anchorman notes, ‘She appears to have gained weight!’ The reporter in the field agrees, ‘That’s right, Ron, she’s really chubbed up, and if you zoom in on her face, you can see she’s got some zits!’ These combined atrocities of public urination, weight gain, and facial blemishes collectively add to the ‘trainwreck’ that is Britney. The anchorman announces that the photo of the starlette was taken by an amateur photographer, and the news program paid him $100,000 for the image. Predictably, this news puts the full Britney economy in action and sets off a virtual bounty hunt for more photos of the celebrity, who is encamped in a local hotel. The boys are as eager as any of the rest of the mob of swarming photographers to get a picture of Britney, their passion for her image unmitigated when one of them, Butters, sappily admonishes in Chris Crocker fashion, ‘Maybe it’s finally time for us to just leave her alone.’ Their answer to Butters? ‘Don’t be such a pussy.’

The boys have a secret weapon that neither paparazzi nor the mass of amateur photographs possess – they can pretend that they are Britney Spears’s kids. Upon entering her hotel room, Cartman, the mean one, says, ‘Alright lady, just flash us your crotch or something.’ The despondent Britney, who believes her sons have come to see her, responds in sadness, ‘I’ve got a better idea.’ She takes a rifle, puts the barrel in her mouth, and pulls the trigger. The gun and her bloody arm fall into the foreground of the screen while the four boys of South Park stand wide-eyed and speechless for a full 20 seconds, almost a life-time in TV textual time. Though Britney has blown the top of her head off, she is not dead. And, in fact, the program’s signature sensationalism exerts itself in full gory glory here, when we are asked to watch her tongue hopelessly trying to form words through the open bloody cavity that used to be her brain. We are seven minutes into this episode, and aside from this repeated lurid image of the decapitated but still partially sentient Britney, little in the remaining text offers us much that feels familiar.

As Britney continues to be followed by camera-wielding fiends, the episode becomes increasingly serious and somber, the boys more and more desperate to save her. They attempt to flee with her to the North Pole, only to be discovered by seemingly the mass of humanity, which converges on Britney with flash-bulbs popping like bullets (mediated representations that equate camera flashes to bullets are a fairly common trope as, for instance, in The Bodyguard [1991] or Delirious [2006]). Most remarkable about this scene is the seeming democratic plurality represented by those taking pictures of Britney: grandmothers offer cameras to grandsons, Republican good ole boys mix with effete urbanites. The celebrity stands helplessly (and head-lessly) in their midst, then falls to the ground writhing in pain, as the primal horde marches ever closer, their cameras snapping picture after picture, each shot leading to her demise.

Finally, she is dead. But this is no tragedy, for we are told that her death has been the point all along. Britney Spears, the townspeople tell Kyle and Stan, is a sacrificial figure, who must be killed to protect the integrity of the food supply. ‘Throughout history,’ says one adult character, ‘people have found it necessary to engage in human sacrifice.’ So they ‘pick one lovely girl, adorn her with jewels, treat her like a goddess, and then watch her die.’ Another character continues, ‘We Americans like to think we’re more civilized now, but the truth is our lust for torture and death is no different than it was in gladiator times.’ A third adds, ‘Only difference is that now Americans like to watch people put to death through magazines and photographs.’ A fourth finishes, ‘Britney was chosen a long time ago to be built up and adored, and then sacrificed, for harvest.’ As this narrative passed between characters testifies, the sacrifice of Britney is a communal, and even democratic, act arrived at through consensus among a populous.

Nevermind that human sacrifices were more a hallmark of the Iron Age than the Roman Empire (where they were outlawed in 97BCE; Nasrallah, 2011: 151). Or that in the latter half of 2008, the train-wreck Britney was seemingly replaced by a resurrected and newly slimmed version of the pop star. We (literally) get the picture – and with it, a rather somber and thoughtful commentary – about the place of actual feminized celebrities in the collage of postmodern imagery. She who is celebrated and mediated must be both idealized and destroyed as the continuation of a talismanic pact between pleasure and pain, feast and famine, life and death, and precarious life-in-legend. In this case, then, even thin-ness is not enough to save the star since she feeds a public hunger that must be symbolically governed through her sacrifice. Indeed, as Chris Rojek notes about celebrity more broadly, ‘status-stripping ceremonies’ that are ‘typically focused on the body’ manifest in both ‘auto- and exo-degradation’ (2001: 82). So, claims Rojek, ‘the mortification of idealized masculine and feminine celebrity constructions’ requires a ‘scouring of the body, which includes ripping, cutting, shedding, flailing, and, conversely, overeating, addiction, agoraphobia and claustrophobia’ (2001: 82). The overweight, bepimpled, and headless Britney, who is here killed by the camera’s gaze, works in and through a larger set of images that fix the meaning of gender ideals through degradation.

That South Park and I are both satirizing such a practice doesn’t undo its saliency, for embedded in the notion of both fat and fame are the very ways in which stars constantly reinforce our notions of the normal at the same time as they explode the boundaries of the normative. In our present historical moment where pictures proliferate at the speed of light, images become the necessary conveyances of both praise and punishment that, in Harper’s words, ‘guarantee a celebrity’s “reality” as a suffering subject “just like us”’ at the same time as images contribute to the perception of ‘artistic authenticity’ (2006: 316). Such ideas lead to a rather sobering thought that, as David Samuels (2008a and 2008b) eerily suggests and as South Park presciently, if heavy handedly, foretells, ‘when Britney Spears fulfills her apparent fate and dies in a fiery car crash or overdoses on prescription medication, it will be surpassingly strange if MBF misses the shot’.

In charting the rise and fall of these stars, in documenting every mistake made, pound gained, and gaffe committed, we might argue, then, that a community of the anonymous finds its own call to meaning and purpose – to surveil the famous and, in so doing, to use their plights and delights as moral currency, cautionary tales of excess that both shock and inspire. Importantly, feeding the incessant hunger that produces the symbolic currency and catastrophe of Britney is precisely what gives her star-power value. Her symbolic death through the image perpetuates her ongoing life in images. That the certainty of fame in this South Park depiction finds its saliency largely through a cycle of violence suggests we are not so far removed from a mythological iconographic regard toward women that vacillates between idealization and denunciation. No longer just Madonna and whore, we have Britney, extreme in both the madness of her mind and the largeness of her body.

‘I looked like a fat pig:’ Agency in the empire of images

But Britney Spears is no vestal virgin, bound for sacrifice. She is both creator of the image and beneficiary of its currency, the Economy of Britney assuring her continued value. In many ways, this idea of keeping tabs on women by turning them into image is depressingly familiar. In these debates about the female celebrity’s appearance and the degree to which that appearance evidences madness, we see a discourse that reasserts a crisis-as-currency logic as well as the restrictive dichotomous iconography of Madonna/whore that has straitjacketed women for millennia. Classic film theory posits the woman as the object of the gaze, who in her spectacular to-be-looked-at-ness passively receives the active and affirming gaze of the looker, always coded male (Berger, 1972; Mulvey, 1975). Many theorists have problematized this dynamic (Mulvey, 1981), in particular seeking to account for male to-be-looked-at-ness (Neale, 1983), or female gazing (Gamman, 1988), or a queer-butch gaze (Halberstam, 1998). But in this context of the female celebrity image, we need a theory of the gaze that helps reveal the complicated nuances existing between objectification and image. Ann Kibbey, for instance, suggests that the power of image and the woman’s incarnation through image-ness ‘paradoxically have the power to ideologically displace the material means of the production of images to herself as object’ (2005: 40–41). In this respect, women-as-image potentially possess ‘a controlling power as the source of images’ (2005: 41). Or, in other words, even if the ideology of the gaze forever positions the to-be-looked-at in the position of feminine objectification, the gazed-at’s ability to control, seduce, or even direct the gaze provides some degree of agency, making it impossible to theorize only about the dichotomous power-arrangements of seeing agent and looked-at object.

This suggests that though the camera’s eye still represents a phallogocentric gaze that objectifies the woman, in being mindful of that eye – and even in manipulating it – the excessive/fat female celebrity body can function as a site of agency that is ratified by the power to command the gaze. The economy of looking thus established disrupts active/passive positions between the masculinized gazer and the feminized gazed-at, suggesting that the gaze can be earned and controlled. This, in turn, allows the celebrity to govern the gaze through the power of her visuality, a form of empowerment that reinforces legitimacy as both a star and a self. We often think of the celebrity, particularly when female, as embedded in what Susan Bordo (2003) calls an ‘empire of images,’ where proliferation and use is beyond that celebrity’s control. Conceptualizing images as both objectifying and potentially empowering, as a form of reward as well as punishment, opens a new relationship to the gendered power of images.

Beleaguered tabloid princess Britney Spears provides a prime mediated site to see how the Empire of Images can be converted through the Economy of Britney. Perhaps the crowning visual moment attesting to ‘fat’ Britney’s ‘insanity’ and ‘loss of control’ is iconographically captured in images of her using an electric razor to shave her head. Following Britney on this night in Los Angeles, paparazzi photographers captured the star in mid-shave, a dazed and seeming trance-like glare making her vacant gaze appear eerie. Britney commentators have oft noted that when the star is blonde she is happy, brunette she is sad, and pink she is crazy (Eliscu, 2008). Few popular culture pundits had thought to theorize the meaning of a bald Britney, although scholar Milly Williamson rightly notes that the ‘media treatment of Britney’s shaved head’ reveals a ‘misogynistic attitude toward the pop star, who is judged by a set of paradoxical standards that she is seen to be failing’ (2010: 219). Further, given the long-term iconographic implication of tousled hair as evidence of women’s excess sexuality or imperiled sanity, Britney’s decision to eliminate her hair altogether seems a provocative pose of refusal, a proverbial flipping of the bird to the image machine, all while using the apparatus of her own currency, the Economy of Britney, to carry the message.

With differing degrees of success, Spears has also used the Economy of Britney to her own ends through the very agents of her capture, the paparazzi. According to the celebrity blogosphere consisting of tabloids, gossip websites, and general discourse, Spears is widely reported to sleep with members of the paparazzi or to depend on them for help and sometimes companionship, even as she conducts interviews with news anchors, such as Matt Lauer or Diane Sawyer, in which she ‘takes on the tabloids’ and asks to be left alone. Indeed, Matt Lauer’s 2006 interview with Spears was noteworthy for the way in which, as Matt Lauer said incredulously, ‘We have to beg people to do interviews, and it seems like you’re anxious to talk.’ Spears responded, ‘I think 90% of the world would agree that the tabloids (in hand gestures indicating broad air quotes) have gone a little far with me lately, and it’s time for me to speak up a bit. You try not to respond to trash, because that’s what it is, but I think they’ve crossed the line a little bit’ (Dateline, 2006). (See also Samuels’ (2008b) ‘Shooting Britney’, or the website BuzzFeed’s documentary telling of ‘Britney Spears Most Craziest Moments’, available at: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/britney-spears-most-craziest-moments-a-collection-bu, accessed January 28, 2009). When she developed a more intimate relationship with paparazzo Adnan Ghalib in early 2008 – even, apparently, symbolically marrying him in a ceremony held on a beach in Mexico – she also used Ghalib to restage unflattering shots of herself, so as to better monitor her public image.

A case in point is Britney’s 2007 song and accompanying video ‘Piece of Me’ from her sixth album Blackout, where Britney challenges an interpellated paparazzo (here standing in for public opinion), with lines that include:

I’m Miss bad media karma

Another day, another drama

Guess I can’t see the harm

In working and being a mama

And with a kid on my arm

I’m still an exceptional earner

You want a piece of me.

The song’s video depicts Britney in both provocative and protective stances, dancing for the viewer’s gaze while enacting the seduction and then set-up of a ‘paparazzo perv,’ whom she purports to bed and then dumps, writing ‘sucker’ across his forehead in bright red lipstick. In lyrics to 2008’s ‘Circus,’ Spears pushes her power beyond the paparazzi, directly challenging the fan/viewer with a line that makes clear the distinction between the ordinary fan and the extraordinary celebrity: ‘There’s only two types of people in the world, The ones that entertain and the ones that observe.’

Spears’s bid to be a ‘put-on-a-show kind of girl’ positions her as the deserving – and one could argue, dominating – entertainer and recipient of the gaze, and if weight gain and perceived madness help her draw the gaze, so much the better for the Economy of Britney. Her set up of the binary between entertainers and observers might seem to challenge Richard Dyer’s (1998) oft-cited theorization of postmodern celebrity that it is both ordinary and extraordinary. Yet Spears’s contentious lyrics throughout the entire Circus album had already been cushioned by the release of a ‘candid’ and ‘fully disclosing’ documentary (aired 10 days before the release of Circus) that referenced her ordinariness. In Britney: For the Record, the star defied fatherly advice and let cameras follow her for 60 days so that she might ‘set the record straight’ (Vena, 2008). The documentary is perhaps most noteworthy for the way in which it fails to provide a salacious paratext to the Britney saga (unlike her short-lived reality special Britney and Kevin: Chaotic with then husband Kevin Federline).

As an entry in the record of celebrity, however, Britney: For the Record manages to defuse suspicion of Britney’s motives through its seeming candor, or, as Josh Gamson (2001) has theorized, a representational device that provides a seemingly unmediated insight into a celebrity suspends the degree of further scrutiny the fan is likely to apply. The documentary also depicts the ways in which the star’s excesses of behavior and diet must be controlled, since Britney’s father functions as manager and dictator, determining whom she might see, when she will exercise, and what she will (or cannot) eat. In this case, then, her ‘comeback’ in a thin body is saturated with reminders that without patriarchal control she would revert to a fat (and mad) female body. These modes in which the star contributes to media discourses about the rampant hungers of the fan for the famous (itself a topic for fat studies) do not completely undo celebrity commodification in a period of late capitalism nor do they wholly offset the degree to which the image is both propelled by and exists outside of individual agency, but they do necessarily problematize overly simplified positions of power where one is either a ‘slave’ or a ‘Kingpin’ of image production (Coleman-Bell, 2006: 203).

Leave Britney alone

Female agency in the Empire of Images is thus a possibility, I would argue, even in the context of a fierce misogyny that objectifies, sexualizes, and demonizes women. But such agency always presses against a tide of fear and anxiety that rises up to contain the woman of appetites. Indeed, in the case of Britney Spears, it’s important to ask what particular sort of backstory must occur in order to feel that violent images of her decapitation through suicide/murder are not only acceptable and merited but funny? One answer, I would argue, is that Britney must be made to continually embody threatening forms of excess, from fat to madness, all of which yield an alienation from a ‘true’ self. And indeed, image after image offers evidence of a Britney Spears ‘needing’ to be contained so that she might be herself again. This is a different model than that posed by Jeffrey A Brown (2005) about Anna Nicole Smith, who, he argues, comes to represent an embodied cautionary tale for why middle-class white women should work to control themselves so as not to inadvertently reproduce the classed and raced terms of Smith’s grotesque form. Though Spears shares many of Smith’s excesses, the shame and pity Spears evokes (as demonstrated in many of the materials I’ve considered in this article) are all her own, and thus we do not need pedagogies in how to be different from her since her excessiveness marks her as always already different from the average person. There is ample anecdotal evidence of why we should disdain her: She is a bad mother, in that she is distracted, narcissistic, and careless – plus, as rumor has it, she feeds her kids sugary soda pop and Doritos and took her two-year-old son to the dentist to get his teeth whitened. She is an addict (to adrenaline, alcohol, drugs, junk food, trashy men); she has no work ethic (absent her Mouseketeer and Pop Princess days); she lacks good judgment; she is suicidal; she has unquenchable sexual appetites for both male and female partners; and she is hyper-sexual without being sexy anymore, a particularly damning charge, made worse when her body is fleshier through calories and child birth, although remarkably redeemed through 2008–2009 and 2011 weight losses and (another) come back tour.

On April 23, 2008, Spears graces the cover of Star magazine, while headlines praised ‘My New Bikini Body!’ that included reduced cellulite and losing 20 pounds in 30 days, all of which offered evidence, according to this tabloid, that Spears was fully on the road to recovery (Star, 2008). On December 11 2008, Rolling Stone furthered the cover-as-comeback logic with its appropriation of presidential rhetorics, emblazoning across its cover, ‘Yes She Can! Britney Returns’ (Eliscu, 2008). The star is also featured on Cosmopolitan’s August 2010 cover in a figure-revealing top and jeans, both of which leave ample space to reveal the ‘truth’ of her comeback readiness: a flat midriff, demure belly button piercing, and below-the-bikini-line tattoo (Cosmopolitan, 2010).

Discourses that position Britney Spears’s thin body as ‘comeback worthy’ (which is to say desirable and successful), in contrast to those that regard her ‘fat’ body as crazed (which is to say pathologized and excessive), indicate larger cultural anxieties about the fixity of identity in relation to the malleability of the body. These concerns about the relation between the fabricated and the authentic govern the meanings of the contemporary celebrity, who vacillates between ‘real’ person and concocted image. As Richard Dyer (1994, 1998) and other scholars of celebrity have demonstrated, star bodies often serve as avatars of ideological values, making normative codes intelligible in the way they reinforce and violate tacit cultural codes. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (2006) further contend that such body-based discourses that accrue to celebrities accentuate the way in which the star’s figure comes to represent a form of ‘fleshed perfection,’ even when, as in the case of Britney’s often-recalcitrant body, such perfection is made intelligible through her movement in and out of idealized female embodiment (2006: 122). In either compliance or resistance, it is the female celebrity’s visual wellness that factors as critical to her fame.

The logic implied in Britney Spears’s ups and down on the weight and sanity scale suggest that career success correlates to thin-ness, which, in turn, evidences inner governance. Thus, we see a discourse of celebrity that positions the stage-crafted career as key to the ‘authentic’ interiority of identity. But for all of the talk about how fat is profoundly alienating to the subject and how thin-ness allows for the experience of selfhood, discourses about Britney Spears’s celebrity body also suggest that fat constitutes a piece of evidence straight from her interiority that stage production cannot mask. In other words, fat may be alienating to the experience of selfhood, yet fat is also perceived as an unmediated signifier pure of the distortions of signification. Fat may be disliked, but its meanings in mainstream discourse are rarely interrogated.

In this complicated amalgam of messages, star discourses seem to solidify clear boundaries between truth and fabrication, between insides and outsides, private and public, substance and style, even as these discourses rely upon the blurring of differences to sustain notions of the subject. Indeed, which of these positions is most accurately Britney Spears – the manufactured public image or the frightened, heavy, and perhaps mentally ill young mother – is entirely unknowable, nor, would I argue, is the search for ‘truth’ in this regard a productive enterprise. It is the frisson created between perceived and discursive insides and outsides that contributes to a salient and gendered category of identity for this star. Further, it is the unstableness broadcast through the spectacularization of the star’s body that makes the case of Britney Spears’s perceived fatness and madness a critical register for current moral anxieties related to pathologization and the female body. Though she is applauded for surviving the big C (in this case that is cellulite not cancer), headlines about her body continually remind the reader that shameful cellulite, belly bulges, and dimpled thighs were once present on her body and may re-emerge at any time, their absence not signifying a blank slate but an erased and constantly erupting text that defies conventions of the beautiful and, as we have seen, image-worthy body.