Why Do We Get So Mad at Celebrities?

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2024

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I spent years of my life studying celebrity images and what makes them meaningful to us. A celebrity’s actions or words can make or deepen our connection to them — or they can really piss us off. But why? Is it just a classic case of dashed expectations? What makes, oh, Taylor Swift hanging out with Matty Healy so disappointing? For this episode, I asked celebrity feelings expert Margaret H. Willison to come answer your questions about the broad contours of celebrity-directed anger — and work through some very specific examples. I promise: you’ll leave this episode with a more textured understanding of your own celebrity feelings.

Note: This episode was taped before the conversation re: the Met Ball and celebrity silence on Gaza; you can read more about it here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What do Bridgerton, Star Wars, the term goblin mode, and the Barbie movie all have in common?
0:07.5	That's right, they're part of the discourse, the constant, constant online discourse.
0:14.2	They're also all episode topics from my new favorite show, Material Girls, a pop culture podcast that uses critical theory to understand
0:21.9	the zeitgeist.
0:23.4	If you like Culture Study, you have to check out this bi-weekly show hosted by two queer
0:27.4	Canadian academics who love to get to the bottom of why certain things become popular and
0:32.8	what that popularity tells us about society.
0:35.5	Each episode, they tackle a piece of pop culture, whether that's a book,
0:38.9	movie, meme, or song, and ask, why this and why now? And guess what? I was on a recent
0:46.1	episode about athleisure, and let me tell you, these hosts, they do their research. We talked
0:52.8	about post-World War II manufacturing, second wave
0:55.7	feminism, the neoliberal collapse of work and leisure, the rise of Chip Wilson's Lulu Lemon
1:00.8	empire, and so much more. Be sure to check out Material Girls wherever you get your podcasts
1:06.1	or head to materialgirlspod.com to learn more. That's materialgirlspod.com.
1:14.7	So this past spring, I designed and led a course called Taylor Swift and Confessional
1:19.6	Writing. And it was like three to four weeks into this that it became apparent that Taylor Swift
1:26.3	was seriously dating Maddie Healy.
1:28.6	And I was gobsmacked by the degree of grief the people in the class felt.
1:36.8	It was like, can I even be a fan of her anymore? And I had only heard of Maddie Healy
1:43.2	occasionally, like, I've listened to a couple
1:46.2	songs by the 1975 like that was where I was in my Maddie Healy knowledge as well yeah like everyone
1:52.2	who's been to a brewery on one of the coasts yes you know I immediately started looking into it
	...

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