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Celebrity work: Celebrity Forum introduction

At the time of writing, the US is at the polls making a decision about their next president. Many may cast their vote based on judgements about policies, track records and their ideological vision for the future of the country. Equally, however, the celebrity work each campaign has performed over the past few months to secure a particular image of each candidate may be the factor that sways millions of voters (Redmond 2010). The forms of labour that go into the creation, promotion and maintenance of a celebrity image extend well beyond the performances on screen, on stage or on camera that we witness, and encompass vast industries and a multitude of players – from social-media managers (Kreiss 2012) to journalists, entourages and ultimately the fans and citizens who consume the celebrity persona (Hills 2006). As the current elections attest, the work of celebrity has profound social, economic and political implications for society. The three essays in this volume of Celebrity Forum each engage with issues of celebrity work, offering insights into the nature, impact and forms of work that not only produce celebrity, but are discursively productive sites of power themselves. Opening the issue, Simone Natale’s essay utilises tools from celebrity studies to reconsider spirtualist mediums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as products of various techniques of celebrity work. Indeed, Natale’s essay prompts us to consider the way in which celebrity work includes the efforts to disguise or hide the forms of labour and transactions they are reliant on: from the managers who organised tours to their very performances, Natale argues that spiritualist mediums were ‘marketed commodities who struggled to demonstrate that they did not pertain to the market’. Much like in the current US elections – where the candidates strive to have a ‘presidential air’ – Natale’s analysis suggests that the effective denial of such celebrity work was also a key source of spirit mediums’ power: their denial of the market acted as a sign of good faith and honesty that underpinned the effectiveness of their performances. Performance and self-presentation are the central concerns of Patricia and Teresa Neville’s entry on the Irish pop twins ‘Jedward’. A product of reality television, John and Edward Grimes’ celebrity work includes a form of submission: to the processes of transformation and self-presentation that are required of the newly minted reality television ‘celetoid’ (Hearn 2006, Turner 2006). Neville and Neville argue that the Jedward story takes the ‘processes of “self-presentation” and “self-commodification” common to all reality TV formats to new heights’ by forging a new, singular, identity for the twins that reinterprets twinship as a ‘talent’ to be paraded for the viewing audience. For Neville and