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This article offers a new perspective on the much-discussed phenomenon of the 'Bond girl' through an exploration of photographic artwork produced in later life by two notable Bond girls: the two 'golden girls' of Goldfinger (1964), Margaret Nolan, who appeared in the film's credit sequence, and Shirley Eaton, who played the character who suffers skin suffocation by being painted gold. It is a remarkable coincidence that both women turned to photographic artwork as a way of reflecting back on their careers and on their youthful positioning as sex symbols, exemplified by their highly publicised appearances in Goldfinger. This article places their 1960s iconicity into dialogue with their retrospective, reflective artwork which is by turns critical, celebratory and ambivalent about their past lives as Bond girls. Nolan's feminist-inflected photo-collages render her previous glamorous image uncanny through unsettling and subversive juxtapositions whereas Eaton's digital remixing of old images alongside contemporary self-portraiture occupy the territory of star glamour more comfortably but extend it by showing the golden girl as older woman. Nolan and Eaton's artwork provides valuable insights into the experiential dimensions of having been a Bond girl, with their creative response through art presenting certain complexities and nuances that written or spoken accounts might not access in quite the same way. In that respect, this article, alongside its specific insights into Bond girls, demonstrates the value for researchers in engaging with such material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, proto-punk rock musician Iggy Pop has regularly appeared onscreen in supporting and cameo roles. While a rock star's presence across media is hardly novel, the brevity of Pop's screen performances rests its meaning and value upon a rejection of conventional stardom, persisting through the peripheries of moving image media rather than building a marquee status. This article explains the economic and cultural logic of such appearances via the work of Pop's manager, Art Collins, who focused on maintaining Pop's status through a combination of decisively brief screen appearances and song licencing that augmented his existing persona. Using archival and textual analysis of Pop's and Collins's endeavours, I argue that Pop's case lends insight into a managerial approach to stardom prevalent across entertainment media industries wherein stars are expected to maintain market presence across media contexts rather than pursue fame within a delimited cultural field. A growing managerial logic in entertainment media culture shifted the status of stars from workers contracted to autonomous industries to flexible labourers whose efforts are rendered in the service of self-branding. These developments made the cameo performance into an ideal labour strategy that maximises a star's flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the changing star image of Kate Winslet as she enters middle age. It interrogates the media reception of her recent work and off-screen image, considering how discourses around women's agency, visibility, and opportunity in the wake of #MeToo and #TimesUp have impacted this reception specifically in relation to age. Taking Winslet's work in the HBO series Mare of Easttown and the independent film Ammonite as case studies, the article maps her contemporary star image in relation to gender and ageing from 2020 to early 2022. It argues that the rhetoric of #MeToo and #TimesUp has both challenged and reinforced strands of her star image focussed on notions of desirability and gendered and raced body image ideals. Whilst the 'post Weinstein' era has in some instances produced new opportunities for older female performers like Winslet, the article considers how discourses on age, visibility, and value nevertheless maintain barriers for older female stars in the contemporary screen industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of a star’s image is a complex process, and one element that plays a fundamental role in this is clothing. Cary Grant, a legendary actor of classic Hollywood cinema, is remembered not only for his acting but also for his impeccable style and elegant wardrobe. However, what sets Grant apart is the fact that his clothing choices, particularly those linked to his on-screen roles, often challenged traditional gender stereotypes, making new statements about the intersection of fashion, identity, and expectations. In examining Grant’s filmography, we can observe that his on-screen wardrobe intentionally diverged from conventional norms, challenging not only the established notions of men’s clothing but also the traditional associations with power and status. In movies such as Holiday (1938), directed by George Cukor, Grant often wore outfits that are in contrast with his character’s actions. In this movie, Grant portrays a wealthy businessman who challenges the expectations of high society. He rebels against the norms imposed by his bride-to-be, engaging in childish activities with his future sister-in-law. The juxtaposition of his appearance and his rebellious personality challenges the expectation that men should always present themselves as serious and composed. In other movies, such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), directed by Howard Hawks, Grant wore female pieces of clothing. He plays a paleontologist who is forced to wear a woman's dress. While the initial use of cross-dressing serves a comedic purpose, it evolves into an exploration of gender identity. Initially, the act of wearing a dress is met with reluctance and awkwardness. However, as the character becomes more comfortable with this unconventional attire, a newfound confidence is reflected in both his demeanor and movements. The use of cross-dressing in movies has a rich history, often employed for comedic effect. However, in Grant's performances, it transcends mere humor to become a vehicle for exploring deeper themes of gender fluidity and identity. Cary Grant’s public image was intricately tied to his personal life and clothing choices, making his style not only a personal statement but also a key component of the public imagery associated with him. Beyond the screen, his fashion sense became iconic, influencing the perception of masculinity and style during his time. This opens to new analyses of the role of clothing in gender expression and performance in cinema, as Grant’s deliberate deviations from societal norms prompt a reconsideration of the relationship between attire, identity, and societal expectations. In view of this, it is possible to argue that Grant's on-screen sartorial choices challenged the status quo and, at the same time, invited the audience to question pre-conceived notions of gender roles. It is for this reason that the paper, using the methodology of fashion theories, focus on the actor’s ability to seamlessly integrate unconventional clothes into his roles to demonstrate a blended understanding of fashion’s potential as a tool for social expression and commentary. The aim will therefore be to demonstrate that Cary Grant not only left an indelible mark on film history, but also contributed to a broader conversation on the intersection of identity and style.

Remedios Amaya was the first Roma woman to represent Spain at the Eurovision Song Contest. Chosen because of her ethnicity, Amaya's Romani heritage was meant to commemorate the Samudaripen/Porajmos (Romani Holocaust) in the year Munich hosted Eurovision (1983). Despite efforts to foster an image of modernization and progressive values, the hostile reception that followed her performance being awarded zero points contributed to the perpetuation of various stereotypes of Romani women. Analyzing press reviews of Europe's most popular music program, my aim is to explore the perceptions of non-Roma commentators with regard to the selection and reception of a Romani singer as Spain's representative. Looking at reception studies and stardom, this article will analyze the intersection of ethnic and gender stereotypes in relation to a female Roma artist during the early years of Spanish democracy. It will explore the hypersexualization and exoticization of Amaya's TV performance, which revived the image of the Gitana, a trope that under Franco embodied the image of an idealized Spain. Widely exploited by the tourist industry, Roma culture (or more precisely, the naturalization of certain stereotypes assigned to Gitanos) was blamed for reviving the association with the recent dictatorship, thus displaying the persistence of Spain's unresolved past and ambivalent cultural identity that still destabilizes Spaniards with regards to their status in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media influencers, content creators and micro-celebrities can be read as new forms of contemporary celebrity, and yet their rise to fame can be traced back to a century-old film star system. With this in mind, this introduction to the Special Issue on 'Social Media Influencers' offers a brief overview of pre-existing fame cultures, the importance of public curiosity and the significance of authenticity, or at least the perception of authenticity, to old and new forms of fame alike. The article concludes by offering an overview of each original contribution in the volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how new media technologies remediate traditional cinematic modes of stardom, specifically in and through small towns in India. Through two case studies, it explores registers of stardom that have emerged through the short video sharing app TikTok – both on the platform and in its filmic renditions. The first case looks at the cinematic construct of a TikTok star, which fuels the formal and narrative force of the 2019 film Bala (dir. Amar Kaushik). Bala illustrates how cinema can self-reflexively interweave traditional tropes with new media technologies. The second case features a 'real-life' TikTok star and political aspirant who brings into focus the political and electoral valence of TikTok stardom in the town of Adampur, Haryana. The cinematic is central to this narrative, where cinephilic nostalgia indicates a shared cultural intimacy between the political candidate and her followers and helps further her political ambitions. While the real TikTok star, Sonali Phogat, directly addresses her constituency, lip-syncing to old movie songs in 15-second videos, her reel counterparts pay homage to their cine-ancestors, 15 seconds at a time. In a setting where 'the star' has traditionally been understood through the prism of cinema, this article brings to light shifting registers invoked through the platformisation of the star and the cinematic in small town India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soil-derived dissolved organic matter (DOM) has a significant impact on aquatic ecosystems. Identifying the fluorescence signatures of DOM from different soils in river and sea waters can provide valuable insights into its migration patterns. This makes crucial assessing the contributions of pH, salinity, and other milieu parameters to the variability of DOM optical properties. Present study investigates the changes in DOM of Chernozems under varying salinity using UV–visible absorbance spectroscopy and 3D-fluorescence spectroscopy coupled with parallel factor analysis (EEMs-PARAFAC). Water-extractable organic matter (WEOM) extracted from soils of two field experiments of contrasting land use: long-term bare fallow (LTBF) and annually mown steppe (Steppe), was used as a proxy for DOM. Diluted extracts were incubated with varying NaCl concentrations in the dark and then examined. Steppe WEOM exhibited fair constancy of optical parameters under increasing salinity, while significant changes of the optical indices and of PARAFAC components's loadings were observed for LTBF WEOM. The remarkable stability of the Steppe WEOM can be attributed to its chemical diversity. Two distinct and sufficiently stable humic-like PARAFAC components have the potential to serve as markers of Chernozem DOM. The findings clearly demonstrate that salinity itself slightly reduces absorption and fluorescence and changes some optical indices of WEOM of Chernozems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In (media) popular music, “personas” are usually media personalities. They mainly appear in mass media. As the media landscape has changed over the last 150 years, so have the media appearances of these musician-personalities - from sheet music to radio, records, film, television, music videos and finally YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Popular music is dominated by stars, media personalities who present a musical performance - but the way this performance is presented has varied historically. In “old” media, record companies had considerable power with regard to access to markets, but also regarding production, marketing and perpetuation of star images. This has changed dramatically with the rise of the internet and various social media platforms. Now potentially everyone has access, everyone can present oneself publicly, everyone can have his or her “15 minutes of fame” (Andy Warhol). The article describes these transformations to the principle of stardom using a case study: the creation of the German entry for the Eurovision Song Contest in Rotterdam 2021. The previously unknown singer Jendrik Sigwart talks about his application on TikTok and in particular about the production of a music video for it. His application on TikTok for one of Europe’s oldest TV events is an interesting moment in media history, in which old narrative strategies mix with new ones.

In (media) popular music, "personas" are usually media personalities. They mainly appear in mass media. As the media landscape has changed over the last 150 years, so have the media appearances of these musician-personalities - from sheet music to radio, records, film, television, music videos and finally YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Popular music is dominated by stars, media personalities who present a musical performance - but the way this performance is presented has varied historically. In "old" media, record companies had considerable power with regard to access to markets, but also regarding production, marketing and perpetuation of star images. This has changed dramatically with the rise of the internet and various social media platforms. Now potentially everyone has access, everyone can present oneself publicly, everyone can have his or her "15 minutes of fame" (Andy Warhol). The article describes these transformations to the principle of stardom using a case study: the creation of the German entry for the Eurovision Song Contest in Rotterdam 2021. The previously unknown singer Jendrik Sigwart talks about his application on TikTok and in particular about the production of a music video for it. His application on TikTok for one of Europe's oldest TV events is an interesting moment in media history, in which old narrative strategies mix with new ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes two recent biopics, Judy (2019, Rupert Goold) and Blonde (2022, Andrew Dominik), which reimagine the icons from the Hollywood Golden Era, Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe respectively, under the prism of the #MeToo movement. By examining the way in which these movies treat abusive experiences within the film industry, along with their placement in the public arena, this paper exposes how contemporary biopics dedicated to female movie stars face the consequences of #MeToo in Hollywood. In terms of textual construction, both movies presumptively adopt a female perspective in portraying actresses’ experiences of exploitation –such as sexual harassment, eating disorders, substance abuse, and more– under a male-dominated Hollywood studio system. Meanwhile, directors’ articulated intentions, promotional campaigns, reviews, and film critiques seeking to convincingly place the films in the domain of public discussion around #MeToo. Despite this ‘feminist’ assumption, this article will argue that these movies, while appearing to confront and re-address injustices in Hollywood through revisiting the mythical narratives of well-known female stars, fail to challenge the melodramatic victimization plot familiar in traditional biopics about women. In doing so, it will explore how they reinforce a representation of the female Hollywood star after #MeToo as a mentally troubled woman struggling to survive in an exploitative film industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguably no Chinese stars have sparked as much domestic controversy as Zhang Ziyi, nor have any achieved the same level of international recognition. Amid a growing interest in the study of East Asian stars, existing scholarship has addressed, at length, the major controversies that have surrounded Zhang Ziyi. However, little attention has been paid to the changing construction of Zhang's star persona in recent years, during which time she has begun to assume a more active role in television and on social media platforms. This article addresses this gap in literature and explores the ways in which Zhang Ziyi has reinvented her image using emerging media practices, including making use of television genres, Weibo entries, and WeChat public accounts. Zhang's foray into small screen entertainment is not only useful for understanding the role that television and digital media play in reconstructing film stardom, but it also showcases the drastic changes in media ecologies that have occurred over the past decade in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uncovers the national deployment of cuteness in the multi-year birthday celebrations of the enormously popular child star Shirley Temple during the Great Depression in the United States. These widely publicized media events promoted the ideology of consumerism through Shirley Temple's brand cuteness, addressing the prevailing anxieties about poverty and patriarchal capitalism in the 1930s. Moreover, Shirley's brand of cuteness necessitated material protection for the child by promoting that if the little girl is "cute"—––innocent, pure, vulnerable, and loyal to the father figures–––, the adult would love her and indulge her with material abundance. Shirley Temple epitomizes girly cuteness and embodies the hope of girls and women for being rewarded by patriarchy. I use archival research and textual analysis to investigate how Fox film studio packaged Shirley's stardom around her birthdays in her movies, media profiles, and publicity stunts between 1934 and 1940. The primary sources include Shirley's movies, mainstream newspapers, women's magazines, fan magazines, and the motion pictures trade press. This study fuses cuteness theories with girls' studies to discuss the temptations for girls and women to perform cuteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrew Spicer, Sean Connery: Acting, Stardom and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), pp. 336, ISBN: 9781526119117 (hb), £20.

This article offers a cultural analysis of Diane Keaton's later career that teases out the age/gender interactions of the roles she has played past her mid-fifties. Drawing on both age and gender theories, our analysis of Keaton's late-life characterizations explains the actor's transformation into an icon of a positive and desirable form of female aging. At the same time, it observes the normative aspects of gendered old age that are also perpetuated through Keaton's late-life representations of aging femininity, and which troublingly reiterate Hollywood's normative white heterosexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the theatrical activities and connections of famed Hollywood film producer David O. Selznick. Based on a study of archival materials and articles in the contemporary U.S. press, the author reconstructs Selznick’s relationship to the theatre and argues that it was characterised by ambiguity. On the one hand, the producer used the theatre as a source of acting talent and a training ground for honing the skills of his contract actors; on the other hand, the theatre represented a burden in terms of time and financial resources, and its positive impact on Selznick’s business and creative activities was limited, given its relatively modest audience appeal, especially compared to the mass appeal of mainstream Hollywood cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Netflix series La casa de papel and Élite as examples of 'media convergence' in which content flows between several industries and creates synergies that cannot be fully explained by a television studies framework of analysis alone. By the same token, the methodological tools of traditional star studies may not provide the best lens for analysing how the actors of these series, most of them unknown until recently, have suddenly become global stars. I argue that these two series have made prominent the formation of a new paradigm of stardom, which I call 'Insta-flix celebrity', that compels us to develop new conceptual frameworks to theorize how multiple media – in this case Netflix, cinema, Instagram and fashion – participate in a transmedia ecology that has altered established relationships between production and consumption of media texts. Insta-flix celebrity is a phenomenon that affords audiences novel opportunities to interact with media content. With their active participation, consumers decide which stars to follow and which clothes to buy while also engaging with the series' content and adding their own two cents – comments and social media discussion that can make or break a star, a show or a fashion brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the growing body anti-fan studies, this article tries to fill the gap of empirical studies on Chinese anti-fandom by investigating the textual dislike of traffic stars – those who usually are good-looking and possess a huge fan base yet are perceived to lack good texts. This form of stardom has proliferated in China since its emergence in 2015, usually involving high traffic of fans, metadata orientation and mega publicity in the media. By drawing on one of Gray's anti-fandom categories 'bad object', this article examines anti-fans' discourses about the 'badness' of traffic stars. Using anti-fandom of Cai Xukun as a typical case, I present how anti-fans frame the 'badness' as due to attributes of both Cai himself (misalignment of achievements and talent, plagiarism, being unpatriotic, femininity, sexually suggestive performance and being a bad role model) and his stardom (capital operation by the culture industry). As such, we shall see how this anti-fandom takes on a critical perspective towards traffic stars. These attributes together constitute the site for 'coalitional dislike' towards Cai, and by extension traffic stardom in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is it about girl stars, from Shirley Temple to Jodie Foster, that intensely and ambivalently capture the cultural imagination? I argue that child stars, often described as transitioning into adulthood too quickly or staying too long in childhood, challenge damaging social norms of bodily and behavioural development in ways that are sympathetic to disability experience. I use disability studies' theory of 'crip time' and Kathryn Bond Stockton's notion of the political potential of children 'growing sideways' alongside the case study of Patty Duke to demonstrate this productive subversiveness. Duke's star persona, centred on her portrayal of the young deaf, blind, and uncommunicative Helen Keller in William Gibson's Broadway play and Arthur Penn's subsequent film, reveals the parallel developmental non-normativity of disability and child stardom.Through contradictory primary and paratextual evidence surrounding The Miracle Worker and Duke's stardom, the application of crip time to notions of childhood celebrity, and a contextual understanding of public discourse surrounding childhood during the 1960s, I find that Duke and her characterisation of Keller embody a rejection of conventional understandings of 'growing up'. Duke's ambivalent childhood celebrity fractures the constructed ideal of normal development, revealing possibilities for valuable experience beyond the pressures of ableist notions of linear growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I attempt to study the different determinants of cinematic masculinities, the gendered bodies of male performer figures and their changing patterns with reference to film dance from the 1980s-1990s period of Bengali popular cinema. This paper explores how the inclusion of performative male bodies in the dance numbers brought a distinct imagination of masculinity and flamboyance, thereby disrupting the established idea of the bhadra (the polished and gentle class of Bengal) hero of Bengali cinema. In the first section of my article, I focus on how the disco sensation and its cinematic registers took a new form with Mithun Chakraborty's figuration in Bengali film dances. The second section studies how this pattern of dancing male bodies and its flamboyance changed in the later period when the imagination of a working class male protagonist intervened in film dance in the 1990s. In brief, I try to read the shifting imaginations of masculinities in Bengali film dance from the disco flamboyance and 'global-national-popular model' of Mithun Chakraborty's star persona in the 1980s to the more localized and hybrid form of dance idioms in Prosenjit's iconic film roles in a later period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to reimagine the function of the dancing body of Sitara Devi in the topography of Hindi popular films from the 1930s to 1950s. A legendary Kathak dancer, Sitara Devi started performing in films during her teens, and essayed multiple roles as an actor, singer and dancer. Her film career was on high tide during late '30s and '40s as she acted in a number of films including those which transpired through her collaborations and associations with celebrated filmmakers such as Mehboob Khan, K. Asif and Nazir Ahmed Khan. While most of her films have not survived in their material form, historical readings of Indian cinemas have also – broadly speaking – circumvented the question of dancing bodies, and the import of Sitara Devi's star-persona in films. My enquiry, therefore, concerns film historiography and I use the gender lens to refocus the debates on cinema onto matters of women, performance, and on/off-screen figurations, and the films in which Sitara Devi played decisive roles fuel such explorations. I consider Ashish Rajadhyaksha's article on Indian Filmography, which defines the work of the 'filmographer' as a 'Sitara Devi Problem', as a point of departure, and discuss her surviving films, alongside Saadat Hasan Manto's landmark writing, Stars from Another Sky, to arrive at the larger 'problem' of historical analyses. I remap Sitara Devi's presence in the texts, and her absences in film discourses, to rethink film histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the cultural emergence and ramifications of two linked masculine cultural types: the 'wife guy' and the 'family defender'. A cultural figure defined by an avowedly uxorious disposition and the public celebration of his spouse, the wife guy is a prominent exemplar of 21st century celebrity masculinity. This article argues that the wife guy typifies the strenuous lengths mainstream popular culture goes to negotiate the intractable 'problem' of the ambitious and achieving woman and to ratify couplehood as a safe harbour in a post-#MeToo mediascape suffused with heteropessimistic affect. First emerging to identify a social media influencer subtype, the term has accrued a more expansive usage and is now routinely applied to men operating at higher echelons of stardom. Overlapping in many ways is what we term the family defender, which marks a point at which an association with one's wife takes on attributes that converge with toxic masculinity, justified through rhetorical claims centred on defence of the family. We see the wife guy and family defender as marking different points in a spectrum of masculine performativity operating within the heterosexual marital union. This article uses several celebrity case studies to chart different points on this continuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Post-millennial Tamil cinema has seen a marked increase in casting women as protagonists or in pivotal roles. In a historically patriarchal industry that rests on an almost sycophantic male star system, this proliferation of women characters has proven significant in expanding the possibilities of female stardom. In turn, the potential of women stars and women's narratives participates in and showcases the broader globalising impulses of Tamil cinema in the twenty-first century. This paper focusses on two actors – Jyothika and Nayanthara – who have been instrumental in bringing to the fore a new figure in Tamil cinema, i.e. the 'lady (super)star'. This paper theorises their rise to stardom as a set of complex negotiations between their personal and professional lives while navigating and resetting the boundaries of the 'good Tamil woman'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the film Pathaan, at the time of its release in 2023, was read in terms of its overt political messaging and against the backdrop of a majoritarian political culture, this article sees Pathaan's political work as more subterranean. Pathaan functions as a kind of memory box connecting viewers through a web of sensed memories, which I call caramel connections, of cinema and their unspoken connections and implications of heterogeneity. The film's self-aware engagement is with both the history and the memory of an older Bollywood cinema: its earnestness, its disinterest in aesthetics and politics of realism claims the space of popular culture as political outside the binaries of left and right. Shah Rukh Khan is a star who has functioned as an emotive vehicle for transitional moments in India. What kind of transitional moment do Pathaan and Khan see themselves as travelling through? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the affective haptics created between star and spectators via the body of Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) in Pathaan. The screen reverberates with the cinematic materiality of his body and constructs a closeness with the viewers to revel in its spectacularity. Pathaan's intertextuality with SRK's stardom and the surrounding paratexts before, during and after the film's release further deepen this spectatorial experience. The screen fairly sizzles with anti-ideological fervour via this body, resulting in an embodied and affective film experience that, rather than its diegesis, becomes the vehicle for the film's politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Francoist regime in Spain (1939–1975), it was extremely challenging for women to gain visibility in the public sphere and to obtain professional recognition. In the Spanish film industry, women rarely had creative roles. This article focuses on the creative practices of two outstanding female stars, Sara Montiel and Marujita Díaz, who assumed significant control over their films in the 1960s. Our research dialogues with feminist perspectives on female authorship in film history, and with theories about stardom and authorship from the field of star studies to analyze Montiel's and Díaz's creative and industrial strategies to take control of their own careers. The patriarchal pressures they had to overcome evidence the lack of study and cultural legitimization of their creative practices. The recovery of these silenced stories contributes to contemporary debates about female stars and power in film industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hugh Grant's career and persona have undergone a cultural, personal, and professional shift since the 2010s. During a period of semi-hiatus from acting, Grant became associated with politics as he campaigned for the protection of privacy and opposed Brexit. At the same time, his image has been reshaped through fatherhood, often depicted by the press as the reason behind his 'comeback'. Since Florence Foster Jenkins in 2016, he has turned towards more 'serious' roles and distanced himself from his romcom persona. Focusing on his most recent roles in film and television, this article analyses the star's performances and dissects the ambiguities and tensions at play in Grant's ageing white 'English' upper-class image. Although inextricably associated with the romantic genre for years, I suggest that Grant's acting style and persona are more in a state of perpetual flux, attached to the past yet increasingly layered with enjoyment for the craft as he ages. At the intersection of gender, ageing and star studies, this article shows how an ageing persona is (re-)established on screen, and how Grant's characters within his films and television series might render a different image of white, privileged, English masculinity in contemporary times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay addresses the intersection between the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok and Pinterest social media platforms and a contemporary religious leader/teacher who exploited them to rise from subalternity to the status of a deified celebrity. It examines his underprivileged disciples and followers and rival formal and informal levels, within Indian Sufi circles. Employing a combined perspective of ethnography, media studies and textual analysis, I discuss the transformations engendered by this social media celebrity and the impact of neo-liberalism on religious teacher–disciple (peeri–mureedi) relations. I show that this transformation involved a commodification of peeri–mureedi relations, leading to a neoliberal morphing of religious practices into marketable products. In so doing, I provide a critical reading of Mazzarella's social media as "re-enlightened" or "inclusive capitalism" that gives voice, agency and new economic possibilities to capitalism's most marginal subjects, who aspire to break the grip of what I term the "economies of despair". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Woman is considered a transnational category in US and European cultures in the early 20th century. We will address the specific treatment this figure received in German popular culture, and its visual representation through the iconic image of Louise Brooks, who came to Hollywood from Kansas through dance. Her training centered on modern dance as a combination of body-centered athleticism and, paradoxically, Orientalist inspiration. Appearing as a dancer with Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies confirmed Brooks' status as a beauty who met Florence Ziegfeld's famously high standards for "female pulchritude". A contract with Paramount followed, but in 1928, with her Hollywood career stalled, Brooks departed for Germany. On the European screen, her image was constructed to represent heightened beauty and bodily freedom that might incite spectators' recognition of The New Woman's erotic appeal across gender difference; nevertheless, limits to such fluidity and freedom were inscribed in the narrative arcs of Brooks' most famous characters. The analysis of her image and her signature haircut in German magazines will show how Brooks could not escape cultural categorization and an anxious force field of signification, notwithstanding her transnational stardom. All of these shaped the production and reception of Louise Brooks in the Weimar Republic within silent feature film as an historicallybound showcase for modernity in its complex relation to New Women and transnationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports stars and heroes have always been a product of the times in which they have existed and, as such, athlete stars, largely constructed by and through the media, have evolved over time. In particular, the meanings of characteristics that have defined stars of different generations have changed as society’s expectations and social norms have evolved. This can be understood through Richard Dyer’s (1998) star theory, which states that to cultivate their stardom a celebrity must resonate with the ideals, values, and spirit of the time.

Stephen Chow is one of the most commercially and critically successful comedians in Hong Kong’s film history, but his popularity and legacy in other East Asian countries remains understudied. As the South Korean media nowadays still often mention him in their comedy discourse, this article seeks to shed light on Stephen Chow’s stardom, or more precisely, memories of his stardom in South Korea, which endured through the 1990s until the early 2000s. It analyses the YouTube channel B-rated Review, a highly active and popular Korean vidding community for Stephen Chow, on which amateur videos that remix and review his twentieth-century movies are published and discussed. Through the lens of participatory culture and participatory memory, this study examines the discursive strategies employed by the vid creator and commenters to collaboratively define, translate, and interpret Chow’s sense of humor in the South Korean context. It discusses how they borrow the Korean neologism byeongmat as a foilto argue for the sociocultural relevance of Stephen Chow, and how they use his comedies as a device to evoke nostalgia for their lived experiences. This research, arguing that vidding is a participatory process of not only cultural production but also cultural memory making, demonstrates the active role of user-generated activities in (re)localizing international stardom across time. It seeks to contribute to the belatedly expanding body of literature on Stephen Chow from an intercultural, digital, and audience-centered perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shrayana Bhattacharya's book Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence is about women in contemporary India, how their gendered existence is shaped by patriarchal structures of exclusion and censure, and how women often use fandom (for Shah Rukh Khan) to build communities of solidarity and togetherness. This review article uses the book's analysis to move the discussion of stardom beyond the star's romantic appeal to women, to contextualize Shah Rukh Khan's appeal in the broader milieu of precarity, alienation and heightened misogyny produced by neoliberalism. Ironically, the very culture that is responsible for the misery of women, has also created an unstable public that is putting real, violent limits to the phenomenon of stardom itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the career of Eugeniusz Bodo who was the greatest Polish male movie star of the interwar period, examines the character he created on screen and its connection to Bodo's off-screen persona. It also examines his position in Polish cinema after his death, especially during the period following the fall of state socialism, what is described here as 'poststardom'. It argues that Bodo owed his success to two principal factors. One of them was the conducive circumstances in the Polish film and entertainment industry and his ability to exploit them to the full. Another factor was the match between his artistic persona and certain traits of Polish national character and, especially, the fit between the ideas Bodo embodied in some of his films and the image Poland tried to create during the same period. It also claims that after 1989 Bodo's appeal was augmented because the details of his death, revealed in this period, rendered him the perfect tragic artist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since Disney Princesses were established as a marketing brand in 2000, they have become a famous 'phenomenon' that has been commercially successful, popular, and adored, but one that has also received much criticism from scholars and consumers alike. Although audience research has gained increasing recognition in recent years, this field's attention has focused mainly on the 'West', neglecting Eastern European—including child—audiences. Moreover, while there are several scholarly examinations of Disney Princess films, these studies mainly employ textual analysis (Escalada-Cordova 2018; Whelan 2014; Wilde 2014) rather than conducting empirical research. Instead of reading for the audiences and making assumptions about how they interpret fame from a media text, in this case Disney Princesses, it is therefore crucial to ask audience members themselves, as Sonia Livingstone observes, 'it is established that audiences are plural in their decodings, that their cultural context matters, and that they often disagree with textual analyses' (2008, p. 4). By drawing upon diverse scholarly works within the field of celebrity studies as well as undertaking an audience study with Eastern European—specifically Hungarian—tweens, the objective of this article is twofold. On the one hand, this paper argues that animated characters are indeed entitled to have a fame status. It does so by deploying theorisations that distinguish between heroes and celebrities (North, Bland, and Ellis 2005), celebrities and stars (G. Turner, Bonner, and Marshall 2000), and differentiate among animated characters considered as 'celeactors' (Rojek 2001), or as stars (Ellis 2007; McGowan 2018; 2019). On the other hand, through the analysis of audiences' diverse perceptions of fame, illustrated by Hungarian tweens' understanding of Disney Princesses—an enormous global media phenomenon—this article provides a key case study for the aforementioned argument while highlighting the features of celebrity culture that are specific to Hungary. Taking into account Hungarian tweens' approaches towards Disney Princesses, while considering that Disney is claimed to have 'immense power over childhood culture' (Garofalo 2013) and that '[t]he celebrity is simultaneously a construction of the dominant culture and a construction of the subordinate audiences of the culture' (Marshall 2014, p. 48), this paper starts revealing the diverse ways in which different cultures conceptualise celebrity notions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the memefication of Keanu Reeves in 21st century digital remix culture, exploring the cultural investment in an idea of him as being 'too good for this world'. To reflect on how Reeves, in the middle-aged period of his stardom, has become a receptacle for good will and positive affect, the essay situates his internet stardom in relation to the rise of the 'sad man' meme. Exploring the networked affective processes through which Reeves' star persona has taken on recharged cultural significance, the essay argues that the surge of internet memes surrounding the actor work to articulate cultural anxieties and desires surrounding male stardom in a post-cinematic, #MeToo era. While the essay explores how the cultural adulation of Reeves wards off deep-seated concerns about male stardom as a central site for the reproduction of toxic masculinity, it concludes by sounding a cautionary note about the risks and limitations of such worship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Zhao Dan's (1915–1980) career in film after 1949 to investigate a specific type of stardom unique to Mao Zedong's China (1949–1976). We argue that this new stardom was similar to what conventionally defines stardom, but with an added political dimension: Zhao Dan's acquisition of high political standing in the People's Republic of China (PRC). To arrive at a fuller understanding of the state–artist relationship in the PRC, this article challenges the paradigm of accommodation and resistance between the tyrannical state and subordinated artists, which presupposes a subjectivity or selfhood on the part of artists that pre-existed and was maintained against the intrusive hegemonic ideologies of the state. Instead, we underscore that the making of Zhao Dan's subjectivity in the PRC—his subjectivity-in-stardom in this case—was a dynamic process, a "becoming." Zhao Dan's checkered career indicates that he not only acclimated himself to the ever-changing political atmosphere of Mao-era China but also sought to benefit from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]