Recently, sociologists, media scholars and culture theorists have worked to describe the ways that neoliberalist redefinitions of identity politics appear in media designed for millennial generation consumers. As branded commodities, and with the aid of continuous and converged media, celebrities connect to the identity construction of fans in ways that have never appeared before (Marwick, 2011; Marwich and boyd, 2015). As a result, those who are successful in exploiting the shift in pop culture toward fan obsession play a key role in determining how hegemonic representations of race and gender are constructed for their fans in the post-race and post-feminist world. Our paper addresses the particular ways in which Justin Bieber, as a celebrity practitioner, embodies the neoliberalist understanding of race and gender, including new hegemonic forms of gender crossing. We not only speak to the jokes appearing on the original airdate of March 30, 2015, we also examine how the program is discussed and promoted online via news articles and Comedy Central’s website.
About the presentersImaani El-Burki
Imaani Jamillah El-Burki is a media scholar whose work investigates intersectionality. Her research examines the ways in which media representations of various social groups become visual, textual and linguistic expressions of both dominant and peripheral definitions of difference. She currently a Professor of Practice in the Department of Journalism & Communication and the Africana Studies Program at Lehigh University.
Rachel R. Reynolds
Rachel teaches in the Graduate Program in Communication, Culture & Media at Drexel University. (http://drexel.edu/coas/academics/gra...)
She does cultural studies work on African (Nigeria/Cameroon) national media and arts, as well as the representation of Africa and Africans in media worldwide. She also looks at immigrant media in the United States and especially immigrant youth and their influences within American culture. Her most recent project, however, investigates how popular and news media portrays Violence Against Women.