Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For this project, we parallel Carnie Wilson and Anna Nicole Smith, for both women have become culturally notorious not for sheer talent or award winning skills, but rather, for the ridiculous antics their bodies have performed. From fat to thin, to the exploitation of their fame and their self-promotion, the public and private worlds of these two women are very similarly framed by the popular press. More than being made similar in how we dismiss them, these two women have manipulated their own excessive performances to yield the very fame that causes their dismissal. This is worth examination, for if one could manipulate their own cultural construction by ignoring the cultural rules for appropriate performance, there is a degree of resistance within such a gesture. Therefore, if celebrity bodies can perform excess that successfully resists, can less recognizable women also reclaim such spaces for the production of stronger, more salient identities? Further, the identification of which cultural boundaries Anna and Carnie push against and ignore are also key elements to understanding the critical discourse surrounding them. While seemingly succumbing to the system, they also expose its rules, further amplifying the normative ways in which women’s bodies are constructed and maintained.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: From its debut in August 2002, The Anna Nicole Show put the public into a near tizzy—and not just because of its popularity, its strange hybrid genre of reality TV/sitcom/celebrity profile, or the banality of its content, but rather because of the body of its star. In this paper, I contend that the body of Anna Nicole is viewed as problematic because it is more than just that of a notorious celebrity; it is a body that is multiply transgressive, in which dominant ideologies of femininity, bodily discipline, and social class converge and conflict. Drawing on the works of Foucault, Judith Butler and Susan Bordo for my theoretical framework, I provide a textual analysis of both the program and the popular criticism to reveal that as a body that trangresses many cultural norms and therefore hints at the abject, while simultaneously remaining “intelligible,” Anna Nicole’s body generates a controversial figure that both defies and reinforces her socially prescribed positions. The investigation into the harsh reaction to this particular presentation of the female body serves as a case study into the ways in which society still works to maintain specific forms of disciplined, docile bodies.