When Celebrity Women Tweet: Examining Authenticity, Empowerment, and Responsibility in the Surveillance of Celebrity Twitter

• Main Author: Wood, Megan M.
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholar Commons 2013
• Subjects: gender; post-feminism; race; social media; Twitter; Communication; Women's Studies
• Online Access: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4855; http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6051&context=etd

This thesis is a textual analysis of stories in online celebrity news articles about celebrity women and their use of Twitter. It adds to the burgeoning discussion about gendered and racialized bodies online using scholarship from critical feminist, surveillance, and digital media studies. Throughout, my work attends to notions of authenticity and surveillance, examining how what I term a "call to authenticity"--the use of technologies of self-surveillance to verify "authentic" displays of the self--serves to animate contradictory post-feminist paradigms of femininity which function together to discipline and subjugate femininity. I ask: How do post-feminist questions of empowerment and responsibility become articulated when individuals operate the technologies that functionally surveil them? What are the particular implications of surveillance for gendered and racialized bodies when thought about in the context of a post-feminist culture? What might a focus on the relationship between surveillance and post-feminist logic uncover?