She’s a Slave 4 Us:
The Media’s (Mis)Treatment of Female Celebrities and the Case of Britney Spears
[Author’s Note: I originally wrote this as a 25-page capstone research paper my junior year of college for my Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality degree. It is long, uses some jargon, and may require a small amount of media studies and women’s studies knowledge. I try to write my papers in a way that is accessible to those who are not studying what I am studying and I try to break down the theories I reference throughout the paper. I hope that that comes across here and that this is an engaging read for anyone who is interested in the intersection of media studies and feminism, celebrity culture, and Britney Spears. #FreeBritney]
Introduction:
From television and film to social media, from music to tabloids and celebrity journalism, the mediascape is diverse in the content it produces and the audiences it reaches. However, despite the diversity in form, intention, and distribution of media content, all forms of media share a common goal: making meaning. In the introduction to Stuart Hall and the Circuit of Culture, authors Matthew W. Hughey and Emma Gonzalez-Lesser define media as “the means of channels of mass communication through which news, entertainment, education, propaganda, and personal information travel” (Hughey et. al 3) and as a “powerful force that not only reflects a view of the world back to us but can shape how our world is engaged and reconstructed” (Hughey et. al 3). When it comes to the media’s business of making meaning, according to Stuart Hall’s theories of encoding and decoding, as summarized by Hughey and Gonzalez-Lesser, the media encodes messages into its content that is then the content consumers’ job to decode. No matter what content the media is producing, the industry’s end goal is to make meaning and to disseminate meaning to its audiences.
One of the many ways the media makes meaning out of creating content is by seeing celebrities and influencers as content generators and therefore, subjects onto which meaning can be projected. Ever since the beginning of contemporary celebrity culture in the early 20th century, the public and private lives of female celebrities have served as fodder for the types of meaning-making projects the media takes on. When female celebrities do not ascribe themselves to the normative assumptions held by the public, the media attempts to make new meanings out of them and shape how the general public perceives the non-normative nature of the celebrity in relation to their normative assumptions. Normative assumptions of race, gender, and sexuality held by the general public — such as the idea that white women must be “virtuous” — dictate how the media makes meaning out of female celebrities.
The trajectory of Britney Spears’ career in the 2000s is a prime example of how the media treats female celebrities as subjects for this meaning-making project. Spears’ 2003 Primetime interview with Diane Sawyer for ABC News and every Us Weekly Cover featuring Spears from 2007 to 2008 serve as two sets of media texts that highlight the media’s treatment of Spears. Paying attention to Spears and how the media has attempted to make meaning out of her career, we see how the media is invested in producing and reproducing normative claims of race, gender, and sexuality. In this essay, I employ close reading and textual analysis of the two sets of media texts and a comparison of how the media makes meaning out of Spears’ white womanhood as opposed to female celebrities of color as my primary methods. In doing so, I aim to shed light on the nature of the media’s manipulation of female celebrities for the paradoxical purposes of shaping the public’s assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality, as well as creating content that fits into the pre-existing normative assumptions of these three categories.
When it comes to research on celebrity and fame, media studies is rife with historical expositions of celebrity as a social status, critical analysis of the benefits and downfalls of fame, and case studies focusing on certain celebrities and their rise/fall in the media. As important as such forms of research are in studying celebrity through a media studies lens, oftentimes research that takes these forms either leaves out certain classes of celebrities or views them from a very limited point of view. One such case is female celebrities as an understudied and misunderstood group of people. Media studies research on the history of celebrity status has had monolithic views of celebrities that group them all under the umbrella of celebrity, without engaging in how celebrities have differently gendered experiences in the media. Critical analyses of the benefits and downfalls of fame have done the same — rarely, if ever, engaging in how the effects of celebrity differently affect celebrities of different genders.
When such research on female celebrities has been done, it typically has not engaged with the role that race plays in the differently gendered experiences of celebrities unless it is specifically about celebrities who are women of color. Media studies as a field is lacking in exposition on how female celebrities are treated in and by the media and how different elements of female celebrities’ lives, such as race and motherhood, can play roles in the lived experiences of female celebrities. Questions of how the media views and treats female celebrities (as an isolated group outside of as well as in comparison to male celebrities) today are touched on but remain mostly unanswered by research on celebrity status, fame, and even female celebrities. This paper aims to expand on previous research on the category of female celebrity with a focus on constructions of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as the process of encoding and decoding messages within media content.
Because of Stuart Hall’s research on media production, we know that the media is not just involved in meaning-making but centers processes of meaning-making in its production of content. Hall’s theories on encoding and decoding suggest that the process of media production is not linear. Rather, it is a circuitous process in which both media producers and audiences play active roles. The media encodes messages into its content that is then disseminated, following the rules of language that are at play, and the message is made consumable. Next, audiences receive the content and actively decode the messages within it. At times, due to the varying positionalities of audiences, the messages that are decoded are not the ones intended by the media producers. Finally, audiences respond to the messages they decoded — which gives agency to a subset of people previously believed to be objects onto which meanings and messages are thrust — media is reproduced, and the cycle repeats (Hall 260). Spears’ career and the media’s making of meaning out of it is a perfect example of this repetitive process, which can be seen in the 2003 interview with Diane Sawyer and the series of Us Weekly magazine covers that feature Spears.
Britney Spears was born on December 2, 1981 to James and Lynne Spears in the small town of Kentwood, Louisiana. At a young age, Spears began showing interests in gymnastics, dance, singing, acting, and performing and at eleven years old, secured a role on the television program “Mickey Mouse Club,” on which she remained for two years alongside celebrities Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake. By seventeen years old, Spears was signed to Jive Records and released her debut single “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” which went platinum and thrust the teenager into superstardom. During the beginning of her career as a teenager, Spears portrayed herself to the public as a good, virginal, Southern girl who would wait until marriage to have sex. Because of her “good girl” persona, Spears was viewed as a good role model for young girls across the country. However, once Spears began to embrace her sexuality, dress more provocatively, and enter relationships with men — most notably, Justin Timberlake — in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the media’s representations and the public’s perceptions of her changed. By 2003, after several chart-topping albums, being named one of the most powerful celebrities in the world by Forbes, a very public breakup, a scandalous performance with Madonna, and the loss of her good girl persona, Spears’ life, image, and career became the site of much public scrutiny and speculation with the media playing a large role in the deterioration of the superstar’s image (“Britney Spears’ Biography”).
‘Are you that innocent?’: Britney Spears’ 2003 Diane Sawyer Interview
In 2003, ahead of the release of her album In The Zone, Britney Spears was interviewed by Diane Sawyer for a Primetime special on ABC News. The interview promised to “set the record straight” and that there would be “no holds barred” (Britney Spears — Interview with Diane Sawyer). Throughout the forty-five-minute special, Diane Sawyer asks Spears questions about the popstar’s personal and professional lives, with themes of relationships, sexuality, family, and Spears’ position as a role model for young girls being the central focus of the conversation. At times, the conversation takes upsetting turns for Spears as Sawyer asks increasingly personal questions about her sexual relationships and the tough year the star had, causing the then 21-year-old to cry at one point and ask to change the subject at several others. Complete with a tour of Spears’ home, the interview keeps its promise to display “Britney uncensored” (Britney Spears — Interview with Diane Sawyer).
After a pre-recorded voiceover introduction, Diane Sawyer welcomes the audience to the Primetime special, saying “tonight we go exploring ‘Destination Britney’” (Britney Spears — Interview with Diane Sawyer). Keeping with the program’s promise to show “Britney uncensored,” Sawyer is unmoving in her line of questioning throughout the interview and makes her disdain of Spears and Spears’ behavior obvious. The interview takes place right around the time of the popstar’s rebrand from a young, virginal it-girl to a woman coming into her sexuality, unafraid to embrace it. Sawyer does not hide how she, nor the media, views Spears’ sexuality, beginning the special by calling Spears “racier than ever” (Britney Spears — Interview with Diane Sawyer). Setting the tone for the rest of the conversation, as it constantly returns to Spears’ sexuality, Sawyer’s initial questions and tone express Sawyer’s aversion and shock towards Spears’ coming into her sexuality. Sawyer holds up prints of several of Spears’ magazine covers (Fig. 1) from earlier that year in which the singer poses in various states of underdress and asks Spears’ “what happened to [her] clothes,” “what is this about,” and “is it about shocking people” (Britney Spears — Interview with Diane Sawyer).
The focus on Spears’ sexuality does not end with the questions about the magazine covers or questions about her music video. Later in the interview, Sawyer probes Spears to talk about her relationships with various men, most notably Justin Timberlake with whom Spears had a very public breakup the year prior. The focus on Justin Timberlake in particular is uncomfortable and upsetting for Spears. Sawyer attempts to get Spears’ side of the breakup and the story behind “Cry Me a River.” However, Sawyer sets up the conversation in an accusatory manner, saying that Spears clearly hurt Justin. Sawyer continues this line of question by asking Spears what she did to him, rather than allowing the popstar to tell the story in her own way. Sawyer then goes on to ask Spears how many people she has slept with, bringing the conversation yet again to Spears’ sexuality and sex life. The topic of virginity also comes up as Sawyer reminds Spears that the singer once said that she would like to wait until marriage to have sex but that she admittedly had sex with Timberlake. Sawyer asks Spears what she would say to her younger self and her little sister about this. In doing so, Sawyer insinuates that having premarital sex and not holding onto her virginity is something to be ashamed of and that that is something she should warn her younger self, sister, and young fans against (Britney Spears — Interview with Diane Sawyer).
Sawyer’s line of questioning throughout the interview turns from questions about Spears’ sexuality itself to questions about why Spears acts the way she does when she supposedly knows that she is viewed as a role model to young girls. Sawyer continuously tells Spears that young girls emulate her behavior, to which Spears repeatedly makes clear that that is not at all what she wants nor is her responsibility. In response, Sawyer brings up the wife of the governor of Maryland, Kendall Ehrlich, who said she would violently shoot Spears for being a bad role model. When Spears expresses that she is upset that someone would harness such violent thoughts about her for just being herself, Sawyer defends the wife, saying that Ehrlich said such a thing “because of the example for kids and how hard it is to be a parent and to keep all of this away from your kids” (Britney Spears — Interview with Diane Sawyer).
Britney Spears’ interview with Diane Sawyer is a prime example of the media attempting to make meaning by producing content out of female celebrities. In the case of this interview, the media — using Diane Sawyer as its primary actor — attempts to make meaning out of Spears’ sexuality and all the different ways her sexuality affects her personal and professional life. Sawyer’s constant questions about regrets and whether Spears believes that she has gone too far are reflective of how the media views white women’s sexuality — as something meant to be sacred, protected, and unexpressed. Sawyer’s positionality as an older white woman herself, one who is disgusted by Spears’ sexuality, allows her to act as a foil against Spears’ non-normative version of white womanhood that is rooted in expressing sexuality. In showcasing Sawyer’s dislike of Spears’ sexuality and in juxtaposing Sawyer’s acceptable version of white womanhood against Spears’, the media encodes messages regarding normative white womanhood for audiences of Primetime to decode.
In “The ‘Offending’ Breast of Janet Jackson: Public Discourse Surrounding the Jackson/Timberlake Performance at Super Bowl XXXVIII,” Shannon L. Holland explores how normative assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality, as well as the intersection of these three categories, were repackaged by the media through how news outlets reported on Janet Jackson’s infamous “nip-slip” at the 2004 Super Bowl. Although Holland’s essay focuses specifically on Black women’s sexuality, the tropes that follow Black women, and Janet Jackson’s scandal, she articulates how media coverage has the power to shape how we view the world and reinforce stereotypes. While Holland’s main focus is on the ways in which Black women are viewed as hypersexual deviants, she briefly mentions how, in contrast to Black womanhood, “true womanhood” is viewed as lying in white, middle-class femininity and encompasses chastity, purity, piety, and domesticity (Holland 132). This “true womanhood” is what Britney Spears, as a white, middle-class woman is expected to embody.
Such normative assumptions of womanhood, specifically white womanhood, have been duplicated and reinforced by the media since the beginning of contemporary celebrity culture in the early 20th century. In her article “Enduring Dilemmas of Female Celebrity,” Karen Sternheimer explores how, throughout the 20th century, media depictions of female celebrities were paradoxically both reflective of how the general public viewed women and manipulative over these views. The portrayals of female celebrities shifted and changed throughout the century and kept with how the American public’s views on women shifted during times of war and peace. Despite these shifts and changes, women’s virtue was always linked to the home, their family, their submissiveness, and their virginity. Although at times, strong, independent women would be trendy and viewed positively, the most favorable depictions of women would always be those who were virginal, devoted to their husbands, and not as successful as their male counterparts (Sternheimer 49). During the times in which women were viewed positively by the general public, the media more frequently framed independent women as morally bankrupt and threatening towards “unsuspecting” men (Sternheimer 48).
Sawyer’s distaste for Spears’ newfound sexual nature is reflective of the historical trends in media portrayals of female celebrities that Sternheimer explores in her text, as well as the general public’s normative assumptions of white womanhood as being virtuous, innocent, and asexual until marriage. In repeatedly questioning Spears’ choices to be sexual even though the artist previously promised to remain a virgin — which was in line with normative assumptions of white womanhood — and making her disdain for the popstar obvious, Sawyer — as an actor for the media — encodes the messages that Spears’ sexuality is abnormal, shameful, and to be othered. Sawyer’s line of questioning and accusatory tone with Spears further reflects how the media attempted to make meaning out of Spears in the early 2000s. Because Spears did not follow the formula for white people crafted by the media, the media attempted to make an example out of her. The media showed the general public that when a white woman celebrity does not subscribe to normative assumptions of race, gender, and sexuality, this must be investigated and shamed into correctness, or the person at fault will be exiled by the media.
What is particularly notable about the interview is not just the conversation itself, but the format and airing of the special. Such a televised interview spot is typically reserved for world leaders and those running for office, not a popstar. In a post-9/11 world, during which the United States was fighting a war with Iraq, why were Britney Spears’ sexual relationships big news? In “We Love This Trainwreck: Sacrificing Britney to Save America,” Anna Fisher compares media discussions on Britney Spears in the 2000s to media discussions on President Bush during the beginning of the Iraq war. Fisher argues that with the rise of “infotainment” and Americans looking for a distraction from the war, the media used Britney Spears as a scapegoat for President Bush, projecting all of the United States’ discontent with the war onto Spears and her failures. Spears’ image was sacrificed, and the popstar vilified for her personal issues, which were menial compared to the atrocities of the war. On the other hand, Bush was able to retire from the presidency peacefully, having faced very little scrutiny — especially relative to the amount of scrutiny and criticism Spears received. Fisher describes Spears’ failures as “‘an attractive sacrificial substitute’ for Bush’s diplomatic failures” (Tiger 312). What is being substituted is Bush as the exciter of violence with Spears replacing him as what is ultimately wrong with America.
Because the United States, the country and its media, could not bear to face the atrocities caused by its president, nor the atrocities plastered across news coverage of the war, it turned its eye towards a more menial tragedy to absolve itself of blame and guilt. Spears’ downfall acted as a form of escapism and as scapegoating for the United States. In featuring Spears on Primetime and using her as a distraction from the war, the media again made meaning out of the singer. This time, the meaning was that Spears’ deviation from normative assumptions of race, gender, and sexuality is just as, if not more, important than the United States’ involvement in the war.
From Britney’s “Wild Nights” to Her “New Life”: An Exploration into Britney Spears’ 2007 and 2008 US Weekly Covers
The media’s attempt to make meaning out of Spears’ in the 2000s were not exclusive to her televised interviews; rather, throughout Spears’ career, particularly in 2007 and 2008, tabloids played a large role in the media’s production of Britney Spears content. Between 2001 and 2018, Spears was featured on the cover of at least thirty-five Us Weekly magazine covers with seven of these covers being published in 2007 and 8 (“Britney Spears’ Us Weekly Covers Through the Years”). These seven publications cover themes of romantic relationships and sexuality, familial relationships, and mental health and illness.
Much like Sawyer’s Primetime interview, Us Weekly also shows an interest in Spears’ family life, however, the tabloid exhibits a much stronger focus on this aspect of Spears’ life and career than the interview. Out of the seven magazine covers on Spears between 2007 and 8, one of them is exclusively related to her family. However, three others reference her family members and question her relationship with her family (“Britney Spears’ Us Weekly Covers Through the Years”). Us Weekly’s June 25, 2007 cover (Fig. 2) about Britney Spears centers on the star’s mother. An image of Britney Spears and her mother, Lynne Spears, holding hands and forcing smiles for a camera graces the cover with the title “Her Mother’s Side of the Story: Lynne Spears Breaks Her Silence to Us on the Pain of Britney’s Struggles and the Fight to Mend Their Bond” (“Britney Spears’ Us Weekly Covers Through the Years”). There is not much to the cover beyond the image of the Spears women and the title; smaller stories about Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, and Angelina Jolie are left to a side column of the cover. The main draw of the publication for audiences is meant to be Spears and her mother’s tumultuous relationship.
In his book The Exile of Britney Spears: A Tale of 21st Century Consumption, author Christopher R. Smit explores the rise and fall of Spears’ career and the roles that media players and audiences alike played in Spears’ downfall and mental breakdown in the late 2000s. Smit explores the role that celebrity journalism played in particular in the chapter “The Family.” Drawing on Stuart Hall’s theories of encoding and decoding as well as the circuitous nature of media production in which audiences are just as powerful as media creators, Smit explains how celebrity journalism does not actually tell audiences anything about celebrities and audiences do not actually know as much about celebrities as they think. Rather, Smit says, “what we really know is how people talk about [celebrities]. What we know is based in a sort of conversational reality” (Smit 18). Smit goes on to talk about celebrity journalists’ coverage of Spears’ relationship with her mother saying:
Some reporter says that Britney’s mom and her have a falling out, that money-talk was involved and that they are not on speaking terms. This reporter is actually not a reporter at all. Instead, she acts as a sort of ignorant interlocutor, a craftsperson whose art is paraphrasing and partiality (Smit 19).
Smit is correct in his analysis of celebrity journalism, especially as it pertains to reports on Spears can her mother. Us Weekly’s coverage on Spears and her mother does not actually give the two women space to tell their story, rather, the tabloid crafts a story that is encoded with messages that are up to audience members to decode and internalize as true. Audiences do not get to know anything about Spears and her mother — they just know what Us Weekly wants them to think they know. Because Us Weekly, and other tabloids like it, are the primary source for celebrity news and information and they convince audiences that they can get to know everything there is to know about celebrities by reading these publications, they can sustain themselves and continue the cycle of media production and meaning-making.
Unlike the interview with Diane Sawyer, Us Weekly’s coverage on Spears focused on the status of Spears’ mental health. Out of the seven magazine covers published about Spears in 2007 and 2008, four explored topics regarding Spears’ mental health. The first of these publications, published on March 26, 2007 and entitled “Hollywood’s Drug Problem” (Fig 3), was not exclusively about Spears. The cover features side-by-side images of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan, with Spears in the center. The title is laid in all-caps above the three women’s heads with the words “Who’s using? It’s not just who you think. Inside the dark world destroying the lives of today’s top stars” overlaying the images, right below their faces (“Britney Spears’ Us Weekly Covers Through the Years”). The title and subtitle frame the three women while Hilton and Lohan frame Spears, making her face the center of attention on the cover. The text “Who’s using? It’s not just who you think,” leads those who see the cover to wonder if the three women on the cover are the ones using drugs. In centering Spears, Us Weekly encodes the message to audiences that Spears has fallen victim to a drug epidemic in Hollywood and that drugs are ruining her life. Because those who view the tabloid — maybe in passing while in line at a grocery store or on the table in a waiting room — may not open up the magazine and read its contents, they will be left with just the image of Spears on the center of the cover and the assumption that she is ruining her life with drugs.
The other three covers on Spears’ mental health are exclusively about investigating the status of her mental health as she had her very public downfall in late 2007 and early 2008. The first of these three was published on November 19, 2007 and is entitled “SICK!: Brit Slammed by Parenting Coach” (“Britney Spears’ Us Weekly Covers Through the Years”). Subtext under the title includes the line “Mental illness signs worsen” (“Britney Spears’ Us Weekly Covers Through the Years”). On this cover, Spears is pictured out in public, dressed in a pink leopard print bodysuit with a mesh lining that exposes her midriff and chest and fishnet tights. This cover focuses both on alleged signs of Spears’ mental illness as well as on her parenting capabilities.
Brenda R. Weber outlines the connections between fame and motherhood for female celebrities in her article “Always Lonely: Celebrity, Motherhood, and the Dilemma of Destiny.” Weber argues that celebrity mothers must constantly make clear to the media that they are willing to give up their careers if asked to choose between family and fame. Weber explains that throughout history, fame and motherhood have been deemed incompatible with one another and famous women who are mothers are punished for seeking fame (Weber 1113). This history outlined by Weber is mirrored in Us Weekly’s exploration into Spears’ parenting capabilities. With its November 19, 2007 publication, Us Weekly both speculated on the state of Spears’ mental health and her ability to care for her children. While, out of context, the image of Spears leaving a bar dressed in a provocative outfit could be seen as a typical image of a Hollywood celebrity enjoying a night out, the tabloid chooses to include it on a cover story about the star’s mental health and family. In doing so, the magazine, without saying so explicitly, sends the message to its viewers that Spears is mentally ill, irresponsible, and unfit to be a mother.
The next Us Weekly cover featuring Spears, published two months later on January 21, 2008, is entitled “Time Bomb: New Details on the Night” (“Britney Spears’ Us Weekly Covers Through the Years”). On the cover is a picture of a seemingly distressed Spears driving a car, yelling while looking at the road ahead of her. In this magazine, Spears’ relationships with her children, her mother, and her ex-husband are used against her. Subtext that reads “Jayden’s terror, Kevin’s desperate call to Lynne, inside the locked bathroom” sits directly under the title (“Britney Spears’ Us Weekly Covers Through the Years”). Much like the previous publication, Spears is depicted as a bad mother. In naming Spears’ family members — her oldest son, Jayden; ex-husband, Kevin; and mother, Lynne — Us Weekly attempts to gain credibility with its audiences. The simple act of naming three people close to Spears and saying that they were concerned by her behavior encodes the message to viewers that Spears is unfit to be a mother and is indeed having a mental health crisis that needs to be addressed.
The final Us Weekly cover about Britney Spears’ mental health was published April 14, 2008 and called “Living With Mental Illness” (Fig 4). Whereas the previous two covers used images of Spears where she looked unfavorable and irresponsible, this cover features a professional headshot of Spears in which she is made up, well-lit, and looking directly at the camera. Unlike the other two photos, this one does not look like a paparazzi image, it was planned and purposeful, and she looks put together. The magazine cover promises to explore Spears’ new life under conservatorship with her father, her therapy treatment, and her mending relationship with her sons (“Britney Spears’ Us Weekly Covers Through the Years”). She is no longer the hysterical, irresponsible, mentally ill popstar unfit to be a mother that she was just months prior. Now that she has relinquished control over her life to her father and has stepped out of the limelight instead of trying to be famous and a mother, Us Weekly has decided that she is deserving of empathy. This cover is meant to be part of Spears’ redemption arc. This is the final book in the saga of Spears’ mental health. Now that the saga is ending, Us Weekly can tie up the story with a bow and promises of a happy ending that will then pull audiences in for one last story about Spears before she is old news.
Us Weekly’s coverage of Britney Spears plays a very unique role in the media’s attempts to make meaning out of Spears. In the chapter “Mass Magazine Cover Girls” from her book Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture, Sarah Projansky looks at mass-market magazines as a means of studying the increase in attention to celebrity girls in the 1990s. Projansky discusses how tabloids are central to celebrity culture and are ubiquitous — they are at the front of every grocery store, all over newsstands, and splayed on the tables in all types of waiting rooms. Unlike what we choose to watch on television, we see tabloids no matter where we go or if we even want to or not. Projansky’s work suggests that “the ubiquity of images of girls does not necessarily mean girls have power, but rather that the contemporary media’s fascination with girls is linked to a feminization of the concept of celebrity, and that the tension between can-do and at-risk in depictions of girls relates to a ‘dichotomy between idolization and denigration of stars’” (Projansky 59).
Projansky defines the “can-do” girl and the “at-risk” girl in the introduction to Spectacular Girls. The “can-do” girl is the athlete, role model, hard-working girl, and above all, white. The “at-risk” girl is the teen mom, the disabled, the LGBTQ+ girl, the girl of color. The “can-do” girl represents success while the “at-risk” girl represents failure. Projansky explores the idea that the “can-do” girl can become the “at-risk” girl if she isn’t vigilant and calls this in-between state the “crash-and-burn” girl. This girl was once the “can-do” girl but because of the inability to live with the pressures of being a celebrity at a young age, she crashes and burns — publicly. Projansky explains that can-do/at-risk dichotomy as well as the media’s obsession with girls highlight a simultaneous love and contempt for girls in the media.
The “can-do” girl was the early Britney Spears who starred in the Mickey Mouse Club then became a virginal popstar that young girls could look up to. The “crash-and-burn” girl was the Spears who went back on her word to remain a virgin, who began partying and doing drugs. The “at-risk” girl was the Spears who had public relationship scandals, could not take care of her children, and displayed signs of mental illness. In 2007 and 2008, Us Weekly only wanted to show these latter two versions of Spears. Us Weekly vilified Spears, removed her agency, and painted her as a victim throughout their series of covers featuring her. The tabloid was not in the business of promoting Spears or empowering her. Rather, because the tabloid’s main concern was showing Spears as the “crash-and-burn” girl and “at-risk” girl, the messages that the publication encodes for its audiences that both follow in the trends set by fan magazines in the 20th century that police female celebrities and their virtues as well perpetuate punishment of Spears for not following normative assumptions of white womanhood.
“Have you seen Christina Aguilera?”: The Exoticism of Christina Aguilera’s Sexuality Versus Britney Spears’ White Womanhood
With a kind of agency that is not present in the magazine publications about her, during her interview with Diane Sawyer, when asked where her clothes went, Britney Spears attempted to defend herself by asking: “have you seen…Kate Hudson, she’s twenty-two, she’s in sheets? Jennifer Lopez, she poses very provocatively sometimes. Christina Aguilera. What’s the big deal when I do it?” (Britney Spears — Interview with Diane Sawyer). Spears invokes the name of three of her contemporaries who have not received the same backlash for posing in the same ways that she is beginning to experiment with. While Spears accurately points out a double standard between her treatment by Sawyer and the treatment of other openly sexual women, what she does not recognize is the role that race plays in both the different treatment that they receive and even in her own invoking of them as a method of defense. Out of the three women that Spears names, two identify as Latina. Jennifer Lopez is a Puerto Rican-American and visually not white while Christina Aguilera, although half-white and visually presenting as if she is of European descent, is of Ecuadorian descent on her father’s side (Cartlidge; Christina Aguilera Biography). These two women’s identities as Latina allow them the space to present themselves as sexual, eroticized beings in a way that Spears’ white womanhood would not allow.
Spears’ invoking of Aguilera, in particular, is noteworthy for multiple reasons. The two stars are not just contemporaries but colleagues with similar trajectories that are different from the careers of Hudson, who is a model and actress, not a singer, and Lopez who is older and started as a dancer and actress before singing. Meanwhile, Aguilera and Spears have almost identical career beginnings: both singers began their careers at a young age competing on the television program Star Search before being cast on The Mickey Mouse Club and then recording solo music after the conclusion of the children’s program (Christina Aguilera Biography). Despite the similarities in their career trajectories, there are key differences in both their personal and professional lives that allow Aguilera the space to present herself as a sexual being that Spears did have access to.
Very early in her career as a solo singer, Aguilera leaned into both her sexuality and her Latina identity; meanwhile, Spears, an Anglo-Saxon white woman rebuked sexuality at the beginning of her solo career and did not have a non-white identity to lean into. Aguilera’s Latina identity was key in her ability to lean into her sexuality due to the way that non-white women, Black and Latina women, in particular, are exoticized and subsequently eroticized. In the chapter “The Latin(a) Look: Performing Ethnicity” from Music Video and the Politics of Representation, Diane Ralton and Paul Watson explore Aguilera’s identities and how she navigates both her whiteness and Latina identity. Ralton and Watson explain that both of Aguilera’s seemingly contradictory identities were equally authentic and equally inhabited by the star; therefore, Aguilera was able to present herself as both the desexualized, innocent, white teen popstar who is palatable to mainstream audiences as well as the sexy, eroticized, Latina popstar who embraces her sexuality and can still be accepted as sexual by the mainstream because of her Latina-ness. In their discussion on the different versions of herself that Aguilera presents in her music (the “Anglophone-Aguilera” and the Latina Aguilera), Ralton and Watson write: “[E]ven if this more eroticised version of Aguilera is not reducible at the level of the image alone to anyone gendered ethnicity, it nevertheless remains the case that it is ultimately linked with, and readable as, Latina…” (Ralton and Watson 8). In this excerpt, the authors explain just how Aguilera can occupy space as both white and Latina and that the eroticised version of her is linked to her Latina identity, not her white one.
Unlike the case with Aguilera and her Latina identity, there is no rubric for a white woman, like Spears, to lean into her sexuality in the same way. Further, there is no precedent for a white, Southern, Baptist woman like Spears to lean into her sexuality after publicly denouncing it and saying that she will remain virginal until marriage. Unlike the white women who have come before her who expressed their sexuality, like Kate Hudson, Spears started her career as the innocent good girl and attempted to rebrand into a sexual being. While Aguilera began her career in the same manner as Spears, as the white-passing young, Mickey Mouse Club cast member-turned-popstar, she had access to her Latina identity as a foil for her whiteness. This allowed Aguilera to occupy spaces as both a Latina and a white woman, as both a good girl popstar that needs protecting and an eroticized, sexual being that can show off her curves without being punished. Spears’ whiteness did not allow her the same fluidity between innocent and sexual, therefore when she attempted to shift from the former to the latter, she disrupted the public’s normative assumptions of white womanhood. Because the media acts as an extension of the public’s perceptions, both manipulating and reaffirming these assumptions, the media had no choice but to make meaning out of Spears’ disrupting. This is how Aguilera — and those like her such as Jennifer Lopez — can pose nude and present her body publicly without being asked “what happened to your clothes?” while Spears receives the negative treatment.
Conclusion: The #FreeBritney Movement and The Shifting Power Dynamics in Media Production
Over a decade after the airing of her Diane Sawyer interview and the aforementioned Us Weekly magazine publications, Britney Spears is again the object of the media’s attention — this time for new reasons. On February 5, 2021, The New York Times premiered their documentary “Framing Britney Spears,” a one-hour fifteen-minute exposition on the popstar’s rise, fall, the conservatorship she has been living under since 2008, and the viral “#FreeBritney” movement. In the aftermath of the documentary, the media, male celebrities, and the general public reckoned with just how poorly Britney Spears was treated in the 2000s. Twitter timelines were full of Tweets calling for the media to apologize for Spears’ downfall. Celebrity journalism outlets recalled how they treated Spears twenty years prior. Male celebrities, most notably Justin Timberlake, apologized for their participation in systems of misogyny. Following this reckoning, many began to explore how other female celebrities of the 1990s and 2000s — such as Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Anna Nicole Smith — were similarly mistreated by the public (‘Sorry, Britney’).
What began on February 5, 2021 is an unprecedented reckoning in the mediascape that signifies a change in how media production has changed in the last two decades and will continue to change moving forward. The New York Times documentary is the product of a shift in content-producing power from media elites to the general public. The documentary was catalyzed by the virality of “#FreeBritney,” a social media movement started by two everyday women who believed that Spears was encoding messages calling for help out of her conservatorship in her Instagram posts and began a podcast in which they decode Spears’ social media posts. #FreeBritney starting off as a hashtag and podcast then turning into a widely-known movement and New York Times documentary evidences the accessible nature of social media and the power that it has to amplify the voices of the general public.
With the rise of social media, media is no longer something that is produced by elites then thrust onto the general public for us to decode and react to. Social media allows the general public to not have a larger and more immediate voice and to engage directly with the media that it is consuming. As the world continues to reckon with the treatment of Britney Spears and hold media actors accountable for their treatment of female celebrities, the field of media studies will need to adapt its existing theories to account for the new, more balanced, power dynamics between media producers and audiences. The business of meaning-making is no longer one exclusive to media production companies. Everyday people with access to the internet and smartphones can now make meaning of their own and respond directly to the meanings made by media elites. Everyday people are currently advocating for Britney Spears. If it is true that the media produces what the general public wants to see, it is now up to the media to echo the calls to #FreeBritney.
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