Nottingham Trent University, UK
WS130: Re-casting Language and Masculinities
Notions of celebrity offer insights into our contemporary values, beliefs and norms:
mass media images and representations of famous people, stars and celebrities are vehicles for the creation of social meaning. A celebrity always represents more than him- or herself. So celebrity conveys, directly or indirectly, particular social values, such as the meaning of work and achievement, and definitions of sexual and gendered identity (Dyer 1986; Marshall 1997). In ‘housing’ the values, beliefs and norms of the day, celebrity coverage in the media [...] plays an essential role in organising our perception of the world (Evans 2006: 2)
As a celebrity text, Jamie Oliver’s celebrity-chef persona is interesting in terms of its articulation of a youthful and gradually maturing masculinity. This paper focuses on one small segment of that evolving text: an extract from one episode of Jamie’s School Dinners. Though it has a serious agenda (improving the appalling state of food provision in British schools), the TV series as a whole is an elaborate ‘makeover’ stunt. It is of particular interest because of a tension between two conflicting objectives: the maintenance of the celebrity’s persona of likeable ‘ordinariness’ and the unfolding drama of epic transformation that the series demands. At the centre of both are the ‘dinner ladies’, who are both his instruments and his greatest hurdle. Examining the visual and verbal texture of interaction between celebrity chef and working-class cooks, this paper looks at the dinner ladies’ subjection to male dominance and control in the masculine space of a military training school.
Session:
Monday, November 30, -1, 00:00-00:00
room: