From Clooney to Kardashian: reluctant celebrity and social media

In this paper, we examine social media forms in relation to similarly multimodal, contingent understandings of contemporary celebrity and the politics of what we term ‘celebrity reluctance’. This wavering response to celebrity – a double-facing mode of celebrity performance in which the celebrity is disinclined to perform, yet performs nevertheless – reveals the privilege that constitutes such positioning. After all, to occupy a position of reluctance or hesitance is to have the privilege to be reluctant. Approaching celebrity as a space of fluid negotiations, we examine celebrities’ first tweets on, and commentaries about, Twitter, as a means by which to demonstrate how celebrities negotiate their degree of reluctance to engage with the fields of power at play in social media interactions. In the second half of the paper, we argue that such positioning needs to be read alongside its celebrity social media ‘other’: the enthusiastic, entrepreneurial adoption of social media, best exemplified by the Kardashian family and their manifold social media endeavours. In their self-characterisation as social-media-made celebrities and external characterisations of them as the de facto media sell-outs, the Kardashians, as unreluctant celebrities, become the exceptions that prove the rule, inversely defining the privileged, reluctant expressions of more ‘accepted’ stars.