Entertaining lesbians: Celebrity, visibility, personhood, politics

The phenomenon of lesbian celebrity---instances where a celebrity is known to be and does not deny being a lesbian---like celebrity in general, crystallizes moral definitions and redefinitions of personhood. Yet for lesbians, this cultural form takes on a decidedly political import, insofar as questions concerning social membership are raised with every appearance of a lesbian celebrity and the ensuing controversy. Certainly, the entire category of celebrity is extremely mutable and telling of more general features of social organization and cultural reproduction. But from the perspective of lesbian celebrity, these characteristics demand an inquiry into various intersections of popular conceptions of sexuality and gender with the representational practices and structures of the mass media. Moreover, these encounters are dynamic and thus point toward various cultural changes that work upon and may alter the definitions of homosexuality and femininity, the two factors that conjoin in configurations of lesbians and lesbianism.;The dissertation considers five aspects of lesbian celebrity. The first chapter deals with visibility politics and the place accorded celebrities as symbolic representatives of lesbian personhood. Another considers the cultural, economic, and technological changes in the past two centuries that provide the preconditions for lesbian celebrity. A third examines the opposition to celebrity during the formative years of the gay and women's liberation movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and its effective reversal due to a politics of self-invention, which involves attention to ones self-image. Another analyzes revisionist attempts to find precedents far lesbian celebrity in the biographies of women who lived before contemporary definitions of lesbian identity existed, or before the concept of liberation was applied to homosexuality. The final chapter investigates various techniques for image management that have been deployed in the process of producing lesbian celebrity, as exemplified by Martina Navratilova.