‘Hollywood's hot dads’: tabloid, reality and scandal discourses of celebrity post-feminist fatherhood

Abstract

Contemporary celebrity culture is rife with mediations of fatherhood, and the figure of the celebrity father has become a staple presence within the tabloid, reality and scandal media forms (Negra and Holmes 2008) through which celebrity is currently and widely circulated. Examples discussed in this article range from 'high-end' Hollywood actors such as Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt whose prominent positions in popular consciousness today are sustained as much by their tabloid media presence as by their cinematic roles, 1 to figures such as Hulk Hogan and Snoop Dogg whose public profiles have been boosted by celebrity reality television, to US president Barack Obama whose public identity has also been articulated via the mediating channels of celebrity culture. All have fatherhood and a conspicuously paternally inflected public image as the unifying trope of their celebrity, in line with what seems to be the increasing necessity for male celebrities in postfeminist culture to sustain a paternalised tabloid media presence. By demonstrating qualities of nurturance and sensitivity germane to a cultural climate in which ideal masculinity is affirmed through publicly showcased fatherhood, the marquee value of male celebrity can be maintained. 2 The discursive intersection between mediated fatherhood and male celebrity will be examined here through analysis of a selection of examples from the tabloid media's assiduous and prolific documentation of celebrity fatherhood. They have been chosen from various media forms germane to the textual dissemination of celebrity culture and include television news items, paparazzi photojournalism, celebrity gossip publications, sanctioned celebrity profiles, and celebrity reality tv. Specifically a spate of such television series in 2008-9 (such as Hogan Knows Best, Snoop Dogg's Father Hood and Run's House, and most recently Meet the Hasselhoffs and Peter Andre: The Next Chapter) in which fatherhood is candidly foregrounded, via the frank paternalisation of the celebrity subject. I have been necessarily selective in choosing these sites of analysis and case study texts, but all are taken from the realm of the popular, the mainstream and the high profile. Each exemplifies a broader trend within media discourses of celebrity fatherhood, and each is symptomatic of the structuring tendency to paternalise male celebrity in postfeminist media culture. This article seeks both to illustrate the trans-mediation and representational ubiquity of celebrity fatherhood in contemporary culture, and to interrogate the significance of the celebrity father to current cultural conceptualisations of gender. The cultural profusion of postfeminist fatherhood and its valorisation in celebrity culture is conceptualised here as symptomatic of a climate which assumes the 'pastness' (Tasker and Negra 2007, p. 1) of a 'selectively defined feminism' (Ibid., p. 1), which is 'taken into account' (McRobbie 2004, p. 255) while the burden of representing feminist politics is bypassed. Consequently, a politicised stance on...

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“…Scholarly attention has also been paid to the phenomenon of 'celebrity fatherhood', whereby male celebrities' paternal identities have been strongly emphasized in tabloid media (Hamad, 2010). Analysis has also been done across a range of popular US films from the twenty-first century, including historical epics, war films, westerns, bromantic comedies, male melodramas, action films and family comedies (Hamad, 2014).…”

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