Just Like Us: Celebrity Gossip Magazines in American Popular Culture.

Abstract

Just Like Us: Celebrity Gossip Magazines in American Popular Culture By Andrea Marie McDonnell Chair: Gerald Patrick Scannell

This dissertation investigates the industrial production, editorial content, and reader reception of celebrity gossip magazines in the United States. Pairing interviews with editorial staff and female readers with an analysis of the written and visual content of the magazines themselves, this project provides an in-depth account of celebrity weekly magazines: how they are produced, what they contain and how audiences interpret them. Just Like Us examines the pleasures that female audiences associate with celebrity gossip magazine reading and finds that women who enjoy the magazines are not ideological victims, but rather active readers who use the genre’s ambiguous nature as a way of generating conversation, managing relationships, and pleasurably negotiating social norms. This study also considers celebrity gossip magazines as part of a larger body of popular cultural texts for women, which I call the popular feminine, and examines the ways in which these texts have been historically trivialized, through the discourse of private life, in a way that brands both female audiences and the texts they enjoy as “trash.” Finally, Just Like Us considers the impact of celebrity gossip on the mainstream news media and suggests that celebrity magazines transforms “private” topics into public matters, thus redefining news as human interest with an emphasis on female life.