Files

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the representational biography of Britney Spears and our parasocial interactions with her throughout the early 2000s. Drawing on tabloids and other media sources, I examine the ways in which popular media, working alongside a lucrative paparazzi industry, exploited the female “trainwreck” archetype at the height of Spears’s public mental health crisis circa 2007 for profit. Though celebrity relationships with paparazzi and tabloids can be symbiotic, this relationship mutated into a parasitic disease and Spears became the involuntary host for an industry over which she had little to no control – one that was predicated on her ongoing exploitation. This thesis also analyzes Spears’s celebrityhood through the psychosocial framework of parasociality, which demonstrates the level of intense fanaticism and emotional excess underlying our engagement with Spears as a public figure. The overarching aim of this thesis is to dissect the production and consumption of the trainwreck archetype in order to illuminate our voyeuristic fascination with and complicity in Spears’s mistreatment by the media. My intent is for this project to be an indictment of our society’s obsession with publicly crucifying vulnerable people, particularly women, when they no longer fit the mold we’ve created for them in our minds.

Details

Actions

PDF

from
to
Export
Download Full History