In 2009, shortly before the launch of the scholarly journal Celebrity Studies, I took a quick look at the academic field of celebrity studies. Now, five years later, the journal is serving up scholarship that virtually defines that field. One of its finest studies centers on a British citizen named Pippa Middleton:
“And bringing up the rear: Pippa Middleton, her derrière and celebrity as feminine ideal,” Janet McCabe [pictured here], Celebrity Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 2011. The author, at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, explains:
“The celebrity of the Middleton curves has something important to tell us about celebrating the feminine ideal, which is compelling enough to psychically entangle us and from which we are not entirely able to free ourselves. Intoxicatingly presented, persuasively offered as about modern feminine accomplishment, her image is embedded in and through prevailing norms of the feminine self: not only her body (slender, fashionable, attractive), but also her lifestyle choices (health and fitness, leisure and work, social ambition and fashionable restaurants, consumerism and eligibility for marriage).”
Here is an image of the beginning of the study:
BONUS: A scholarly television news report about Pippa Middleton: