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Female stardom was an essential component to the star system and film industry in Hollywood’s Golden Age. During the postwar era, one of the most influential female stars was Academy award winning actress, Audrey Hepburn. Hepburn’s emergence in the industry, as well as her branding as a “postwar Cinderella,” was representative of the emerging intersection between fashion and film. The association of Hepburn’s stardom with the two mediums --- especially to that of haute couture --- was solidified through her association with French couturier and close friend, Hubert de Givenchy. However, Hepburn’s agency becomes subverted in scholarship and popular culture by her established label of “Givenchy’s muse” which was originally implemented by the couturier himself. Though the Hepburn-Givenchy collaboration pioneered a new mode of female stardom through the relationship between stars and fashion, Hepburn’s efforts are too often dismissed when archival evidence from the special collections of distinguished directors who worked with Hepburn exposes traces of her star labor. Using primary sources such as production files, correspondence, and contracts from these male collections, this thesis aims to reframe Audrey Hepburn through a methodological approach that has yet to be considered in existing scholarship when analyzing Hepburn’s agency and image as a star. The collections act as evidence of Hepburn’s collaboration, yet her stardom becomes even more complex when it must be traced through this gendered lens as her name becomes tethered to not only the directors and the studio system, but also to Hubert de Givenchy.

In this dissertation, I study Italian female film stardom through an interdisciplinary approach which aims to focus on gender representation and production practices of the 1960s. This decade is relevant to the investigation of postwar rhetoric in the national effort to promote modernization and progress. In fact, it is precisely in the 1960s that the social fabric began to unravel, laying the foundations to the legislative changes of the 70s which would grant essential women’s rights, such as laws on divorce, abortion, and reproductive rights. Among my primary concern is the investigation of female stars as a vehicle for social change as they offered unconventional lifestyles that promoted, in newspapers and magazines, discourses on gender-power dynamics which focused on women’s inequality in terms of work harassment, rape, marriage, and motherhood. In addition to establishing the historical significance of the phenomenon of female stardom in Italy this dissertation also tackles the crucial question of why traditional historical narratives focusing primarily on the corporeality of female stars have paid little to no attention to their everyday, gendered lives. With the analyses of the three case studies of Jennifer Jones, Marisa Solinas, and Stefania Sandrelli, I seek to construct a coherent narrative of female stardom which focuses on the opportunity for self-representation and self-determination these actresses had in the film industry. Finally, this dissertation argues that, contrary to the prevailing belief that there was no star system in Italy and that female stars thus exercised no control over their careers, there were indeed complex and widely varying degrees and modes of control through which women could resist the process of their commodification.

From the medieval era to the 1950s, European and Euro-American cultures often accused Jews of “deviant” masculinity—asserting that Jewish men lack penises or even menstruate, while deeming Jewish women “mannish.” These masculine stereotypes reinforced the racial stigma on Jews, who were often deemed nonwhite or not-quite-white “Asiatics,” “Semites,” or “Orientals” until the 1950s. Although (light-skinned) American Jews are usually considered white today, debates linger about where Jews “fit” racially—for example, when the 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally chanted “Jews will not replace us.” These questions link with ongoing stereotypes of deviant Jewish masculinity, like media images of nebbishy Jewish men or aggressive Jewish women. Yet feminist scholarship on race and masculinity often overlooks Jews by conflating them with white gentiles. And despite the masculine stigmas on Jewish women, studies on Jewish masculinity tend to examine only men. Likewise, Jewish studies rarely analyzes how anti-Semitic ideas about race or masculinity impact Jews of color. These gaps limit analysis of Jews and race even as anti-Semitism regains public attention in the United States and Europe. Millennial Jewish Stars: Masculinity, Racial Ambiguity, and Public Allure fills these gaps by examining six young Jewish stars in the U.S. media: the mixed-race rapper Drake, comedic rapper Lil Dicky, film actors Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, and TV comedy duo Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. I study how these stars repackage historical notions of Jewish race and masculinity to comment on white male supremacy. In turn, these cultural commentaries fuel each star’s appeal. Using a “star studies” methodology, I analyze each star’s performances (films, TV shows, music videos, stand-up sets, and podcasts) alongside interviews, social media posts, and publicity materials. I advance Jewish, feminist, queer, and critical race studies by showing that the racial position of American Jews is best studied through the lens of masculinity alongside color: Although my six Jewish stars are deemed white or black by skin tone, they also face the notion that Jewishness is a bodily (racial) trait visible through abnormal masculinity.Chapter two analyzes Drake, a top-selling rapper of black gentile and Ashkenazi (European Jewish) descent. Though embracing Judaism as a religion, Drake downplays bodily definitions of Jewishness to avoid connotations of deviant Jewish masculinity. This strategy helps Drake build an alluring image that balances stereotypes of black and white gentile masculinity. Chapter three examines the Ashkenazi comedic rapper Lil Dicky, who mocks himself as a wimpy Jewish loser. This emasculated Jewish image appeals to white male fans who themselves feel emasculated by men of color and women of all colors. Chapter four studies Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, whose comedy series Broad City is hailed as a feminist triumph for depicting women who enjoy “masculine” sexual escapades and bathroom humor. Jacobson and Glazer achieve this groundbreaking appeal by reclaiming the “beautiful Jewess,” a stock figure from European plays, operas, and novels of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The beautiful Jewess is at once exotically seductive and monstrously masculine, a gender style that fuels Jacobson and Glazer’s comedy. Chapter five addresses the comedy film star Seth Rogen, who uses stereotypes of weak, perverse Jewish masculinity to craft an endearingly boyish image. This reputation helps Rogen appeal to white straight men by performing characters who balance respectable, straight married life with fun, youthful “bromance.” Chapter six analyzes Zac Efron, a film actor so muscular, white, blond, and blue-eyed that many fans struggle to believe he is Jewish. Efron’s roles exaggerate many anxieties about millennial white, straight, gentile masculinity, only to comedically resolve those anxieties. For example, Efron’s characters confront the twenty-first-century social critiques and economic changes that complicate young white, straight, gentile men’s career prospects. Efron can play such roles only because he does not fit bodily (racial) notions of Jewish masculinity—yet his characters often fix their problems by learning from pudgy, emasculated Jewish sidekicks who do fit these racial stereotypes. By studying these stars, I advance the way Jewish, feminist, queer, and critical race studies analyze race in media texts. I especially identify how masculine stereotypes continue to matter alongside skin color in the racial perception of American Jews, positioning Ashkenazi Jews both inside and outside U.S. notions of whiteness. My study also extends scholarship on Jews of color and on racialized female masculinities.

I place the origins of the diva in the 19th century artistic movement l’art pour l’art (“art for art’s sake”) in order to show that the diva was born of mechanization and the reaction against it. Therefore, to consider the diva “onscreen” is to acknowledge the very dialectic that birthed this paradoxical prima donna: uniqueness vs. reproduction, private vs. public, ritual vs. politics. I understand the notion of the female voice as a way to anchor the meaning of “diva,” which has come to be used too promiscuously, sometimes denoting just about anyone whose manner of self-presentation puts them on some imagined scale between self-confidence and vanity. I do not aim to offer a strict definition of the term, but I do aim to draw from certain tropes of the presentation of the diva onscreen the contours of particular relations of desire that hem the specificity of what “diva” might mean. The common ancestor of the operatic prima donna, I argue, accounts for many other iterations of the diva type, which goes well beyond singers. The virtuosic female voice has historically been thought of as “expressing the inexpressible,” a melodramatic striving for an unattainable meaning that is also manifest in the grand theatrical postures of 19th century actors, in the violent and tortured D’Annunzian body language of the Italian silent film divas, as well as in the languid and swooning gestures of Hollywood silent film stars, and in popular American singers of the 20th century, such as Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, and Whitney Houston.In this dissertation, I define “diva” as a cultural type that has broadened beyond opera singers to include nearly any woman with a theatrical manner of self-presentation who is narrated as a “public success,” and a “private failure.” Still, I posit that it is crucial to understand the diva’s origins in discourse around female opera singers because the diva’s overdetermined relationship to the notion of presence is determined by a history of ideas regarding the female voice. I divide the dissertation into three tropes surrounding the diva: The Voice, The Narcissist, and The Comeback. Using studies in musicology, and citing a history of ideas about the female voice, including psychoanalytic notions and queer theory, I explain the importance of the fact that “diva” came into currency particularly in association with a series of two-soprano duets in the late 1820s. It is this redoubled and self-referential femininity, coupled with ideas of the female voice as “beyond language” which trouble standard regimes of representation, such as those codified by mainstream cinema. Finally, I use theories of melodrama and cinematic time to explain the meaning of “the comeback” and the diva’s relation to nostalgia and pathos.

In 1990, Michael L. Quinn, in his essay, “Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting,” considered celebrity phenomenon—and its growth in the latter part of the 20th century—and the affect it had on media, society, and the role and performance of the actor. Throughout the first fifteen years of the 21st century, there has been a multitude of film and television stars headlining in Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. Despite this phenomena, there is currently an absence of scholarship investigating how the casting of Hollywood stars in stage productions affects those individuals in the theatre audience. In this dissertation, I identify, using a variety of semiotic theories, ways in which celebrity is signified by exploring 21st century Broadway and Off-Broadway productions with Hollywood film and television star casting.Hollywood is an industry that thrives on perpetuating celebrity. Film and television stars are products that need to cultivate a consumer base. Every star in Hollywood has specific attributes that are deemed valuable; these values are then marketed and sold to the public, creating a connection between the star and certain values. A film or television star is an established actor who has received fame and acclaim for a least one role that was critically lauded, or their past roles become a part of their value and product. Throughout the first three chapters of this dissertation, I explore the types of signification that can stem from product, value, and past roles using a variety of productions as case studies: Equus, Orphans, Sister Act: The Musical, Asuncion, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Fences, Godspell, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, and The Best Man. The first half of each chapter addresses how significations of product, value, and past roles are established, while the second half of each chapter uses the case studies to demonstrate how these significations made prior to the performance and during the performance can affect the perception and reception of an audience member. In my final chapter, I take into consideration how theatrical frames can affect the signification process, and how product, value, and past roles are recalled and signified during the star’s performance using Picnic, Death of a Salesman, and No Man’s Land/Waiting for Godot as case studies. My research found that: The star as a sign is complex and the significations a reader can call to mind are numerous. Preconceived notions and memories affect the audience as a star’s product, value and associations, and past roles become signified thus shaping the perception and reception of both the star and the production.

Although Marilyn Monroe was one of the most famous American film stars, and a monumental cultural figure, her film work has been studied far less than her biography. Applying C.S. Peirce’s semiotic categories of icon, index, and symbol, this research explains how Monroe acquired meaning as an actress: Monroe was a powerful, but simplified, public image (an icon); an indicator of a particular historical and social context (an index); and an embodiment of significant cultural debates (a symbol). Analyzing Monroe as an icon reveals how her personal life, which contradicted her official publicity story, generated public sympathy and led to a perceived intimacy between the star and her fans. Monroe’s persona developed through her roles in films about marriage. We’re Not Married (1952) and Niagara (1953) expose the pitfalls of marriage. In response to fan criticism of Monroe’s aggressive persona in these films, however, Darryl F. Zanuck, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), consciously distanced Monroe both from her aggressive persona and her implicit criticism of marriage. Monroe’s films, in particular, The Seven Year Itch (1955), Bus Stop (1956), and Some Like it Hot (1959), also revealed the tensions inherent in postwar understandings of female sexuality. Monroe’s role in her final completed film, The Misfits (1960), both acknowledges and resists her status as a symbol. This film unites Monroe’s screen persona and off-screen life in resistance to conventional values: her character embraces divorce, lives with a man who is not her husband, and openly criticizes men who betray trust. This film most extensively interweaves Monroe as an icon, an index, and a symbol. In so doing, it reveals how Monroe embodied the contradictions inherent in both postwar culture and Hollywood stardom.

Idols of Goodwill: Caring Stars and the Making of Global Citizensprovides a new critical, historical perspective on media celebrity by tracing the emergence of stars as icons of global caring and international community. From early UNICEF educational documentaries featuring Danny Kaye to the on-going celebrity efforts to rebuild Haiti, I document how the discourse of stardom emerged as a powerful cultural technology of global governmentality by providing a material base for international regimes of development in Western contexts. Tasked with shaping global citizens responsive to international institutions and the general welfare of the world, caring stars like Angelina Jolie, Bono, and George Clooney are much more than publicity stunts for global charities, media industries, or the stars themselves. Rather, they are harbingers of global liberalism, helping to harvest the political, economic, and cultural conditions for cosmopolitan world order.

This dissertation addresses the industrial history of American-based celebrity gossip over century, beginning with the first Hollywood stars in the 1910s and reaching into “celebrified” culture of the 2010s. Gossip, broadly defined as discourse about a public figure produced and distributed for profit, can operate within the star’s good graces or completely outside of the Hollywood machine; it can be published in “old media” print and broadcast forms or online and on a phone. Regardless of form, tone, and content, gossip remains a crucial component of the ways in which star images are produced and consumed. The dissertation thus asks: how has the relationship between the gossip industry and Hollywood in general changed over the last century? And what implications do those changes have for stars, those who exploit their images, and media industries at large?

This dissertation examines the films, studio publicity, commercial advertising, and news articles that interdependently create, record, express, and document the career and biography of Hollywood star, Barbara Stanwyck. It details the influence of the history of cinematic technology on her performances and the image her stardom projected, beginning with the composite character established by her work in three classic Hollywood films produced in 1941. In Meet John Doe, Ball of Fire, and The Lady Eve, Barbara Stanwyck plays a double-edged woman who orchestrates elaborate charades that suggest she plays stand-in for these films' directors. Her body takes command of the performance space around her, from city streets to private boudoirs, and her gaze drives each film's narrative. Her authoritative roles highlight the relationship of the persona Stanwyck to the means of that physical image's reproduction---metaphorically as the character appearing to direct the camera's lens and literally as the entity created by technology to be viewed by audiences. An analysis of Stanwyck's strip act in the 1923 Ziegfeld Follies' novelty act called The Shadowgraph explores the link between apparatus history and star persona, identifying the phantasmagoric elements of her performance. Later, pre-Production Code and Code-era films feature Stanwyck stripping in the dark, reiterating the phantasmagoria and decorative revelation aspects of the original Shadowgraph apparatus. Early Broadway burlesque themes continue to influence the construction of her Hollywood persona as changing image technologies serve as prosthetics to her performing body. The screen that allows for the 3-D illusion of her display in the Shadowgraph occurs in later technologies that bear a resemblance to the 1920s apparatus in their obvious manipulation of physical dimensions and body features. In 1950s 3-D and Cinemascope film productions, Stanwyck's appearance bears the mark of the means of its reproduction, rendering a version of Stanwyck easily mistaken for other stars more closely identified with the 1950s notion of female sex symbol. The change in her appearance from the 1920s to the 1940s to the 1950s and early 1960s underscores the significance of mechanical technique to star persona and seals Stanwyck to the technologies of image production.