People Like Us: Pop Divas’ Image Deglamourization by Digital Influencers

ABSTRACT

Digital influencers who spread information about pop divas approach the deglamorization of their lives by paratextualizing activities carried out by them in their daily routines. Accordingly, this current study advocates that this deglamorization process points towards the “topification” of divas’ bodies, since it highlights their urgency to distance themselves from the utopianism required to keep their bodies as glamorized bodies. Thus, its aim is to analyze how Brazilian digital influencers paratextualize pop divas deglamorization process by subjecting influencers’ discourse to Foucault’s Discourse Analysis. The herein analyzed research file comprised news reports published on gossip blogs about pop divas. Results have evidenced two discursive formations: the first one refers to the formation and promotion of pop divas’ image and the second one reveals the support given to them. This result has shown that influencers paratextualize the deglamorization of pop divas by humanizing them.

KEYWORDS
Pop Divas; Digital Influencers; Paratext; Utopian Body; Foucault

RESUMO

Influenciadores digitais que propagam informações sobre divas pop abordam a desglamourização de suas vidas, paratextualizando as atividades que realizam em seu cotidiano. Neste sentido, argumentamos que essa desglamorização aponta para a topificação dos corpos das divas, pois evidencia a urgência delas de se distanciarem da utopicidade exigida para que seus corpos continuem glamourizados. Diante disso, este trabalho analisou como influenciadores digitais brasileiros paratextualizam a desglamourização de divas pop. Analisamos o discurso dos influenciadores por meio da Análise de Discurso Foucaultiana. O arquivo de pesquisa foi composto por notícias publicadas em blogs de fofocas sobre divas pop. Nossos resultados apontaram para duas formações discursivas: a primeira diz respeito à constituição e propagação da imagem das divas pop, e a segunda revela o suporte dado a elas. O resultado demonstra que os influenciadores paratextualizam a desglamourização das divas pop por meio da enunciação de sua humanização.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE
Divas Pop; Influenciadores Digitais; Paratexto; Corpo Utópico; Foucault

1. INTRODUCTION

Consumer Culture Theory’s (CCT) perspective about the association between celebrity mediation and consumption has highlighted the active role played by mediating agents in this process, mainly by celebrities, who have great influence power (Phillipov & Gale, 2018) and who belong to a class comprising different representatives, such as pop divas.

Pop divas refer to female gender representativeness in the music industry; they are featured as charismatic individuals (Cardoso, 2008) involved in an aura of glamour (Thomson, 2006), who express their femininity in their artistic performances, shows, and music videos, as well as in their own songs (Henn & Gonzatti, 2019). They are important social figures because they have great influence power (Tennent & Jackson, 2017) and act as role models (Franssen, 2020; Hackley & Hackley, 2016) by actively taking stands, usually without bothering to express their ideologies in their performances (Milanez & Gonçalves, 2018). The search for news about pop divas’ lives is a remarkable reality in nowadays’ society (Radford & Bloch, 2012; Turner, 2006), and it arouses media’s interest in creating and marketing content about them (Marwick & Boyd, 2011).

Pop divas have, throughout their history, been involved in controversies and situations that end up catching public’s attention (Ouvrein et al., 2017). Given their influencing ability, pop divas’ behavior is always analyzed by both consumers and media; it happens because they get more susceptible to criticism and to questionings about their own convictions as they are followed by these individuals (Tennent & Jackson, 2017).

Thus, one can see a contradictory process to celebrity status that ends up showing the dark side of pop divas’ lives, rather than pointing out the victories, luxuries, and perfection of these celebrities’ private lives (Skalin, 2020; Franssen, 2020). Deglamorization, which can be seen in news reports about the distance from glamour in celebrities’ private lives, is an example of this process.

Accordingly, there is significant outspread of news exposing depressive issues, suicide attempts, and sexual abuse experienced by pop divas, who often have their bodies criticized for not meeting beauty standards, such as being thin and showing a “flat stomach”.

The body beauty standard applied to pop divas enables perceiving that they are trapped in human and normal bodies, as well as that they are often required to change and present their bodies according to what is required. This requirement and demand for bodily beauty reminds us of Foucault (2013), according to whom, although we live in topic and limited bodies, the pursuit of the utopian perfect body is inherent to human beings. Thus, divas’ bodies can be considered a topic body, whereas demands for body beauty framing represent an impossible-to-achieve body status, i.e., a utopian body.

Thus, the body must abandon its tópos and cease to be a body in order to be perfect. The pursuit of perfection (Ferreira, 2017) is evident in contemporary media discourses that often promote beauty standards, due to the idea that bodies should be objects for public criticism and judgments (Drake & Radford, 2021). This idea gets more and more normal as time goes by if one takes into consideration that we live in a mediatized world connected through social medias (Franco & Leão, 2016; Couldry & Hepp, 2013), which are strongly body-related, relationship and perfect-life discourse feeders, mostly powered by digital influencers.

Digital influencers can be defined as a group of users who built their fame through digital media and who started to use their communicative skills to produce content for specific audiences (Karhawi, 2017). Influencers who manage gossip pages create content about other celebrities and turn them into engagement generators for their pages. Thus, they perform a mediation process that makes contacts between objects and consumers possible.

Media objects, which are herein mediated by digital influencers, correspond to a class of products that are different from conventional goods and services. Gray (2010) has classified them as texts, since their consumption process, as well as that of literary texts, requires a certain degree of interpretation.

Accordingly, the current research takes as basis the study conducted by Genette (1997), who advocated that all texts are surrounded by paratexts, which are complementary contents capable of providing an expansive nature to literary texts, as well as of giving meaning to and explaining their content (Genette, 1997; Genette & Maclean, 1991). Based on this idea, Gray (2010) has improved and expanded the concept of paratext, as well as applied it to entertainment industry’s objects. This factor enabled the current study to suggest that the content created by digital influencers, in the form of gossip about pop divas, is a paratextualization type.

We acknowledge the importance of social studies about celebrities (Azevedo et al., 2018), since day to day celebrity gossip is turned into a component of our culture (Turner, 2010), as well as the contradictory aspect of it, since the narrative of divas’ perfect life currently faces a parallel deglamorization narrative (Skalin, 2020), which is a relevant object of media industry. Celebrity gossip spread by digital influencers are herein understood as paratexts, since they are contents surrounding a given media object, which, in its turn, is a text (Gray, 2010). In light of the foregoing, the aim of the current study was to investigate how Brazilian digital influencers paratextualize pop divas’ deglamorization process.

The relevance of the current study lies on the innovative and pioneering manner it associates concepts such as Paratext and Utopian Body and promotes the dialogue between the Foucauldian theory and the methodological apparatus based on the aforementioned author - i.e., the FDA (Foucauldian Discourse Analysis). This study is part of a research agenda that takes the media (i.e., digital influencers) as mediating agents of consumer relationships (Humphreys, 2010; Hirschman & Thompson, 1997) in order to investigate consumption phenomena, based on CCT. According to this process, influencers insert their own layers of meaning by pointing to the opposite direction of the impartiality advocated by the most traditional currents of press studies (Sobande et al., 2020; Gaião et al., 2012; Arnould & Thompson, 2007; 2005). Based on this understanding, the current study reflects about influencers’ meanings, positions, and opinions towards pop divas - in the current case, about their paratextualization activity. On the other hand, it highlights current issues observed in society, such as the standardization of beauty industry (Foster & Pettinicchio, 2021) and the pressure it puts on celebrities (Ferguson et al., 2020; Rocha & Frid, 2018).

2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

The content created by digital influencers (Colucci & Pedroni, 2021) about pop divas can be understood as paratexts (Gray, 2010). It happens because, as products of the entertainment industry, pop divas are intensely promoted through information (i.e., texts) about their performances and behaviors, as well as about their personal lives. This process leads them to expose a deglamouralized aura (Skalin, 2020) that is judged by society, which often takes them as perfection models (Franssen, 2020). According to this process, pop divas are taken as bodily representations of this expected perfection (Foster & Pettinicchio, 2021). Consequently, they face a material impossibility in terms of a body that is only taken as physical and topic. This factor encouraged us to analyze this possibility based on divas’ ability to exist through the production of utopian bodies (Foucault, 2013). The current section addresses these ideas in order to work on this web of conceptual relationships.

2.1. Digital Influencers

The emergence of web 2.0 (Jorge, 2020; Childers et al., 2019) enabled new possibilities for social participation. This factor has directly implied the decentralization of content creation power (Jenkins, 2015), as well as configured a new world of influences and endorsements (Childers et al., 2019), wherein ordinary people have gained visibility and started to have the so-called celebrated status (Cocker & Coronin, 2017). Among them, one finds digital influencers (Nascimento et al., 2020; Senft, 2013).

Digital influencer is a label applied to a set of personalities such as bloggers, Instagrammers, YouTubers, and TikTokers (Colucci & Pedroni, 2021). These individuals are high-level social media users, who turn the online environment into their work environment and whose fame derives from the internet (Silva & Campos, 2019; Abidin, 2018). They are considered micro celebrities (Delbaere et al., 2021) and reliable opinion formers (De Veirman et al., 2017), since they hold an influence position on their digital platforms, where they collect followers (Vrontis et al., 2021; Senft, 2013).

Initially, anyone can manipulate the internet and have a login on a given social network (Karhawi, 2017); the monetization of this action is what separates ordinary users from influencers, since they trade their influence (Karhawi, 2021). Influencers create authentic content (Colucci & Pedroni, 2021) that are fully personalized, attractive, and engaging in order to be able to attract and retain their audience, and it turns them into promotion channels and information amplifiers (Abidin, 2018).

Overall, the content produced by influencers is of the multimedia type, i.e., they coexist on different digital platforms, as well as in different formats, such as YouTube videos, Instagram photos and blog texts (Karhawi, 2017). Blogs are a social media type featured by the everyday life narration format (Erz & Christensen, 2018), which combines image and audiovisual artifices (Jorge, 2020).

The blogosphere is a space for discussions managed by professional influencers. They are communication means accredited by consumers, traditional media, and by the market (Karhawi, 2017). This space enables influencers to present facts to the public, based on a magnetic and intimate narrative that encourages consumers’ involvement in and reflection about it (Jorge, 2020).

Influence status’ maintenance depends on influencers’ content views. Accordingly, influencers articulate and create strategies to get more and more visibility to their contents (Cotter, 2019; Thompson, 2008). Contents created by digital influencers often comprise the appropriation of other texts, such as news from the entertainment industry, and it features their production as the creation of paratexts capable of completing and enriching the consumption of these products.

2.2. Paratexts

Gray (2010) has named the products of the entertainment industry as texts because, similar to literary texts, these products also need meaning in order to be consumed. Texts from the entertainment industry awaken consumers’ feeling of pleasure and fannish, and they enable them to experience the consumed object at several contact levels provided by paratexts. Paratexts are complementary contents that help consumers during their experience (Gray, 2010).

According to Genette (1997), it happens in literary texts through Peritexts, which help readers’ first contact with the text, such as its title, as well as through Epitexts, which are found outside books’ pages, such as book reviews. On the other hand, the objects of the entertainment industry comprise Entryway Paratexts, such as trailers or musical album previews, which present and influence the way the text will be consumed by creating situations that lead to its effective consumption; as well as “in Media Res” Paratexts, such as interviews or post-credits scenes from Marvel movies, which reach consumers after the consumption of the main text (Gray, 2010). Paratexts enable readers to follow a given path in a fluid and light way, since their function lies on dampening consumers’ contact with the text by presenting a sort of recipe that helps them to move from the tangible to the fictitious world.

Each paratext is built by meanings (Gray, 2010); they are always a reinterpretation carried out through content appropriation. Paratexts can be created by different authors, such as the entertainment industry that follows marketing logic to encourage consumption through movie trailers, for example; by consumerswho follow a non-marketing logic to encourage consumption - these paratexts are created as fan expression forms based on the emotional involvement that may or may not imply financial gains for the brand, although it is not usually their goal (among them, one finds memes, which are humor figures, images and short videos created by internet users, as well as fanart, which are the artworks, drawings, or montages created by fans based on using their fannish objects); and finally, by the media, whose paratexts follow a mediating logic, which is inserted between consumers and the text, and gives an opinion about the text. According to this logic, digital influencers echoing the news about pop divas paratextualize - and, thus, re-signify - their public image, and this process gets even stronger when it comes to addressing their ordinary lives.

2.3. Pop Divas’ Deglamorization

Celebrities are “human brands”, since their image is a valuable intangible asset (Thompson, 2006); they are known, mediated (Van Den Bulck et al., 2017), marketing constituted (Hackley & Hackley, 2016) and massively produced (Turner, 2010). These individuals can belong to the most varying categories, such as influencers (Al-Emadi & Yahia, 2020) and pop divas.

Pop divas are female representatives of the musical genre, who are endowed with charisma (Cardoso, 2008) and glamour (Thomson, 2006), and who evoke their femininity through shows, music videos, and songs (Henn & Gonzatti, 2019). In addition, they are seen as role models (Franssen, 2020; Hackley & Hackley, 2016), since they are activists who express their ideologies through their performances (Milanez & Gonçalves, 2018).

Divas’ image pervades different meanings (Henn & Gonzatti, 2019) in the imagination of people, who believe that they should not deviate from pre-established behavioral patterns (Ouvrein, et al., 2017). Therefore, divas tend to be part of a cultural process of constant redefinition of images attributed to them (Turner, 2006).

Initially, the celebrity identity should be built based on individuals’ prosperity, achievements, beauty, and success stories (Lewallen et al., 2016); however, divas’ success is naturally cyclical and has opposite poles, since aspects, such as insecurity, low self-esteem, and personal problems, also surround their success. Thus, divas create their brands by incorporating values such as effort, self-acceptance, trust and continuous improvement (Franssen, 2020).

Thus, celebrities’ fame navigates between their rise and fall (Cocker et al., 2015) and it often evidences aspects that bring them closer to “human reality”. Divas’ humanization becomes the core value of celebrities’ image (Franssen, 2020). Divas choose to reveal their personal problems to help others (Seo & Hyun, 2018) and the disclosure of these issues enables their fans to feel closer to them, as well as rules out negative stereotypes (Wong et al., 2017).

Breaking divas’ glamorous life status (Seo & Hyun, 2018; Thomson, 2006) enables rebuilding the meanings attributed to the story of these celebrities who are trapped in a paradox, since society shows the desire and even fetish for their decline, and when these celebrities overcome their problems, over time, they are also applauded by the public (Franssen, 2020).

Contents promoted in the media such as interviews conducted with divas who address personal problems like bipolar disorder (Wong et al., 2017), eating disorders, depression, drug addiction (Franssen, 2020), who had their sexuality exposed (Tsai, 2012) or their intimate photos leaked (Marwick, 2015), or who admit to be under pressure to fit a certain beauty standard (Ferguson et al., 2020; Rocha & Frid, 2018) point towards divas’ deglamorization, since they evidence aspects that go against their glamour status and introduce a new celebrity production scenario.

Pop divas are produced through media processes, according to which, contents about them are sometimes exposed by the media, regardless of their consent (Turner, 2010; 2006), or they even expose themselves (Franssen, 2020). Therefore, it is possible saying that celebrities’ image is built through at least two media pathways that surround their personal lives and reveal their deglamorization.

The deglamorization process takes place from a certain perspective about divas’ bodies, which are evaluated and judged as worthy of a diva, or not, based on a set of standards that determine the physical and behavioral features to be presented by them as human bodies, although based on a utopian logic.

2.4. Utopian Body

We live in a society driven by an industry focused on beauty standards (Foster & Pettinicchio, 2021), where everything changes and is uncertain because of it, where individuals do not think twice before despising or excluding bodies that do not meet the standard in place, at the expense of profitability (Mears, 2011). According to Foucault (2013), executing power over individuals’ bodies lies on controlling their usefulness and on excluding those who do not comply with it.

Female bodies are shaped and subjected to a type of monitoring to meet the established beauty standards. Oftentimes, the pursuit of this standard is purposely linked to the achievement of happiness (Gill, 2017); thus, individuals’ bodies must meet the standards built through social relationships (Foucault, 2013). However, just as society is fluid and formed by changes, patterns are established in their relationships (Foucault, 2014).

According to Foucault (2013), our idea of body takes place through at least two different ways: the first one refers to our limited perspective, whereas the second one is based on discourses capable of configuring and defining what our bodies are. Our tangible body - which we can touch, feel when we get hurt, or see in the mirror and acknowledge as real, ´resent, and physical - is topic. However, our idea about our individual and topic bodies is limited since we only have visual access to fragmented parts of them.

Even when we look in the mirror, what we see is just the reflection of the part in front of the object; it does not truly represent what we really are, because it is just the represented image of our topic body. However, although the reflection in the mirror shows our bodily ‘topicity’, it is also a utopian place disconnected from us, which becomes unreachable (Foucault, 2013).

Bodies in utopian places are luminous, pure, agile, and beautiful. The utopian body is a perfect body; however, when it is placed in a space of perfection, it ceases to be a body (Foucault, 2013). Body perfection (Ferreira, 2017) is increasingly promoted through media discourses that define, allocate and turn bodies into public objects available for people’s judgment (Drake & Radford, 2021). This process is intensified on a daily basis since we live in a society surrounded by the media; thus, virtualization becomes an imminent and fundamental feature of this society due to technological advances (Jenkins, 2015) and it implies social relationships ruled by the mediatization process (Franco & Leão, 2016; Couldry & Hepp, 2013).

According to this process, discourses are established in society (Foucault, 2017), and media discourses define the elements accounting for featuring the bodies that fit the established standard (Zhang & Haller, 2013). Thus, more and more discourses are produced to guarantee the usefulness of bodies (Yngfalk, 2016), i.e., if a given body standard is economically useful, individuals are encouraged to meet this standard.

The body is affected by suggestions about what the perfect body would look like (Ferreira, 2017). This standard is defined by the beauty industry, which accounts for determining what bodies should be considered beautiful and ugly; thus, it creates a system to encourage individuals to incorporate daily practices to bring them closer and closer to the perfect body (Viotto et al., 2020).

Body perfection is evidenced through a discourse that goes against what Foucault (2013) said about the body: the perfection of the topic body is simply unattainable since our bodies are naturally imperfect and places we cannot escape from. However, the body can express itself through utopias, since individuals wear makeup, get tattoos or wear masks in their continuous pursuit of perfection.

By expressing these utopia types, individuals acquire a new and more beautiful body that is closer to the established standards, i.e., a utopian body. This body, in its turn, occupies a place that extrapolates space, the world, and that belongs to the world of dreams and imagination; this new body is in a place different from our topic body (Foucault, 2013).

The utopian body represents a perfect, glorious, brilliant place that is close to what we call soul or Psyké, which gives us access to our ideas about a perfect world (Miranda, 2000), to ideas that cannot exist anywhere else; moreover, this body, that does not exist anywhere, becomes an invisible and incorporeal element (Foucault, 2013).

Although utopias are non-places, societies tend to share utopias of the body. Sometimes these utopian bodies are highlighted when we use our imagination or when we dream about them; sometimes they go back to darkness, when we wake up and regain consciousness. Thus, we are the ones who create and bring these utopian bodies into existence. Therefore, the topic body is necessary, so that body utopias can come to life; that is the reason why utopias do not rule out the topic body, since the utopian body would not exist without it (Foucault, 2013).

3. METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES

The current study has followed a post-structuralist paradigmatic approach (Williams, 2012) of qualitative nature (Bauer & Gaskell, 2017). The herein adopted method comprised The Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA), which encompasses 4 analysis categories - i.e., Statements; Enunciative Functions; Formation Rules and Discursive Formations - was the method adopted in the current study (Foucault, 2017), as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1
Foucauldian Analysis Categories

The system proposed by de Souza-Leão (Franco & Leão, 2019; De Souza-Leão & Costa, 2018) was herein adopted to operationalize the analysis. Based on this system, analysis categories start from a rational sequence that ultimately enables revealing discursive formations that unfold into function and rule criteria and, finally, into statements (Foucault, 2017).

Figure 2
Analysis Process

Figure 2 presents the implementation of the FDA process, according to which, statements are identified throughout the analyzed corpus, as well as unfold into function and rule criteria. Each function criterion has a corresponding rule criterion. Functions and their criteria are the first to be identified in this process; they are followed by rules and their criteria that, finally, in a funnel-like manner, present bundles that point to discursive formations. Thus, the analysis takes place through five steps, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3
Analysis levels

Celebrity gossip blogs powered by digital influencers were the object investigated in the current research, whose file was built based on three inclusion criteria. The first one concerned the relevance of the blog; the second one corresponded to its publication flow; and the third one referred to the availability of past news in them. The following webpages have met the aforementioned: Área VIP [VIP Area]; Hugo Gloss; Metrópoles [Metropolises]; O Fuxico [The Gossip] and Purepeople.

The selection of divas was based on five criteria. The first criterion corresponded to their ability to be considered divas; the second one referred to the large flow of publications about them; the third one concerned their social performances; the fourth one corresponded to the fact that they were politically engaged; and the fifth criterion referred to the deglamorization practice. The following divas were the ones who met the adopted criteria: Anitta; Demi Lovato; Lady Gaga; Ludmilla; Pabllo Vittar, and Rihanna.

As for the timeframe, the launching of Pabllo Vittar, in 2017, was selected as starting point, since Vittar was the last Diva of the selected ones to be launched in the market. Thus, the current study adopted the timeframe from January 2017 to December 2021. At the time the published news reports were surveyed, we focused on those that were linked to the research problem - and disregarded those of exclusively professional nature, such as awards, promotion of works and releases, among others. This process enabled finding the total number of 677 news items.

4. RESULTS’ PRESENTATION

The analysis process enabled identifying two discursive formations (which will be presented in the following sections) based on bundles of associations they establish with formation rules and enunciative functions - and with their respective constitutive criteria -, as well as with statements. The empirical context of the analysis is presented in the description of these categories. Figure 4 presents the map with bundles that resulted from discursive formations, based on the procedure presented in the previous section (see Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 4
General Discursive Formations’ map

4.1. A Star is Born

The first discursive formation was called A Star is Born. It refers to the way pop divas are built and to how their image is promoted by the media. This discursive formation shows that the image of pop divas is susceptible to actions coming from the media, which investigates and exposes content about them, as well as to divas’ narratives about their lives, since they use the media to create, reinforce, or change their image to society. Thus, this discursive formation is based on two rules which, in their turn, are based on two subject positions.

The first rule of this discursive formation is called Famous Coating (R01); it concerns the outspread of contents by influencers, who end up coating pop divas and breaking old beliefs about their lives and fame status. This rule is configured through the exposure of contents (strategy) that communicate (concept) unexpected matters about pop divas, in an uncomfortable or surprising way (modalities); this process emphasizes a kind of famous deglamorization (object), since these contents demystify wrong beliefs about celebrities’ glamorous and perfect lives.

This rule is formed by the information function (F01), which indicates the promoter role played by digital influencers, who spread news about pop divas’ private and professional lives. This function takes shape within the media context (associated field), through digital influencers (subject) who inform the audience about topics (materiality) of divas’ lives that point towards the humanization (referential) of their images and bring them closer to the reality of ordinary people. An example of it, can be seen when digital influencers report that divas suffer prejudice for being women, black, or for being part of the LGBTQIAPN+ community (E06); they are classified as frivolous because they often undergo aesthetic procedures (E04); they face personal issues such as drug addiction and psychological issues (E07); they have their sexual issues exposed, as well as their families’ reaction to their sexual orientation (E10); they have their bodily insecurities exposed (E03) and suffer aesthetic pressure, since they are required to present a body that meets social beauty standards (E05); and they have their intimate photos leaked (E01).

Famous transparency (R02) is the second rule supporting this discursive formation. It is called as such because it reveals the transparency shown by divas when they expose their personal matters to society in order to stay in the trend topics and to gain media repercussion. This exposure (strategy) of themselves (concept) takes place in a tone that is sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes relaxed (modalities), but in any case, these contents also end up deconstructing divas’ famous image (object).

This rule is based on the pop divas’ deglamorizing function (F02), which lies on deconstructing pop divas’ perfect life by exposing their insecurities and bodily “flaws”, as well as by invading their privacy, by attacking them and by exposing their personal issues. This function points towards the deconstruction of pop divas’ perfect life (materiality), through divas’ (subject) transparency, when they disclose - within the context of their personal lives and in the showbiz environment (associated field) - matters associated with their bodies, as well as issues that take away their status of perfect beings, or even when they talk about the support they receive when they face certain problems (referentials). It is possible seeing the exposure of these issues when divas say they are hit by offensive comments (E02) that take shape when they are bombarded by opinions from haters who criticize aspects of their lives (e.g., such as their physical appearance, sexuality, and drug issues), in mockery and chauvinist tone. There is also the exposure of their body issues (E03), such as when pop divas confess to suffer food deprivation in professional and private environments; when they are targeted by offensive comments about their physical appearance (e.g., clothes, hair, and weight). Moreover, they are attacked in a prejudiced way (E06) when they are victims of racial and gender prejudice; they are featured as futile (E04) because they often undergo aesthetic procedures and plastic surgeries and, consequently, they are seen as shallow people associated with the Kardashians. The real issues in their lives (E07) are brought up in divas’ speeches and performances when they refer to personal issues such as drug use, non-self-acceptance, psychological issues (e.g., bipolar disorder, depression, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts), autoimmune disease and prejudice experienced by them. Pop divas’ exposure also comprise sexual matters (E10), since influencers often resonate, in a surprised manner, the fact that pop divas expose their sexual matters (e.g., their parents' reaction to knowing about their bisexuality and their self-acceptance). It also encompasses the pressure posed on their bodies (E05) to reach the established beauty standard - this factor can be seen when they talk about their body dissatisfactions - and the criticism towards their “imperfections” (e.g., weight, stretch marks and cellulite).

4.2. Star orbit

Star orbit is the name given to the second discursive formation revealed in the present analysis. This formation concerns the praise and protection orbiting around pop divas, as well as the support to their behavioral choices and the way they are treated with empathy when they face haters’ attacks. This discursive formation only comprises one formation rule.

Famous support (R03) is the rule substantiating this discursive formation; it refers to the support and defense offered to pop divas by influencers fans, among other celebrities who sympathize with certain unpleasant situations experienced by them, as well as show their contentment towards positive actions taken by divas. This rule addresses the support provided to pop divas (strategy), based on famous life, on fans’ engagement and on communicative skills of digital influencers (concepts) who deconstruct divas’ famous image (object) in a surprised, appreciative, and sometimes uncomfortable manner (modalities). This rule is based on three functions that show the support received by divas from divergent materialities: the first function refers to deglamorization; the second one, to empathy; and the third one, to the contentment of fans.

Deglamorizing pop divas (F02) is the first function of this rule. It revolves around pop divas’ erroneous idea of perfect life, which influencers end up reconfiguring in ways that highlight their daily issues and showing that divas are just as human as we are. It comprises pop divas’ sense of humanization (referential) before the deglamorization (materiality) process carried out by influencers (subject) through their media knowledge (associated field). This deglamorization process can be seen through the following topics: the body pressure experienced by divas who feel the need to stay thin due to external demands (E05); news focusing on their bodies (E03) show the way divas’ bodies are treated, commented on and exposed by both the media and themselves; the prejudice directed at divas, which comprises a set of prejudiced attacks, such as chauvinist, lgbtphobic, and fatphobic comments (E06); offenses associated with divas’ relevance, which refers to their classification as irrelevant and futile individuals (E04); the real issues experienced by them, which concern their human condition to deal with issues, such as drug-addiction relapse, non-acceptance of their bodies and psychological disorders (E07); the support received from the media, which defends them and empathically report haters’ attacks towards them (E09); the exposure of topics about their sexuality, which evidence their sexual orientation and their relationship with these subjects (E10).

The second function of this formation lies on protecting pop divas (F03); it works as a safety network supported by both fans and influencers, who defend pop divas and express certain sensitization about the exposure of their personal problems, such as body pressures, boycotts, media invasions and attacks by haters. This function is featured by the empathy towards pop divas (materiality), when they face issues that evidence their humanization (referential), as well as by the support (referential) provided to them by three subjects. The first subject lies on influencers (subject) in the media context (associated field); the second one refers to fans (subject) in the fannish context (associated field), and the third one refers to other celebrities (subject) in the Showbiz (associated field). It can be seen in the news talking about prejudice suffered by divas, which ranges from racist attacks to gender prejudice (E06), divas’ activism arises in the midst of reports on suffering experienced by those who face certain issues (E08), of solidarity and support given to them when they face drug, sexism and racism issues or when they become targets of prejudice for being LGBTQIAPN+ (E06). These ordinary problems show the human nature of divas who go through personal problems, such as prejudice, mental health issues or drug use (E07), just like non-famous people do.

The third function of this discursive formation was called modeling of pop divas (F04), since it reveals the modeling power of fans who show approval and indicate that they are satisfied with divas’ actions, as well as who show dissatisfaction and demand changes in the attitudes of divas, who, in their turn, change their behavior after these demands. This function comprises the contentment (materiality) of fans (subject), who deal with issues referring to the support to (referential) and humanization of divas (referential), based on their fannish knowledge (associated field). It is composed of statements about pop divas’ sexual matters, which address the times when contents about their intimate and sexual lives were discussed in the media (E09), and it also comprises help to fans, which highlights divas’ efforts to positively help their consumers, their fans, whether by giving advice or through financial help (E11).

5. Reflecting about Results

Digital influencers (Rodner et al., 2022; Colucci & Pedroni, 2021) establish their online fame (Silva & Campos, 2019; Abidin, 2018) and create their contents based on the appropriation of media objects (Gray, 2010), such as pop divas. Divas are immersed in a promotion process based on the outspread of texts about their professional and personal lives; these texts often point to a deglamorization aura (Skalin, 2020), since divas are placed in a certain position (McCabe et al., 2020; Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018), wherein society judges their behavior, which must be perfect (Zanette & Scaraboto, 2019; Rocha, 2018; Franssen, 2020). Thus, divas’ image undergoes stereotyping (Knudsen, 2019; Dann, 2018; Ferguson et al., 2020) as this judgment is made based on beauty and bodily perfection standards established as truths in society (Brace-Govan & Ferguson, 2019; Foster & Pettinicchio, 2021). However, this process emphasizes the material impossibility of their bodies, which are incapable of reaching this place of perfection as physical, topic, material bodies. Thus, we understand that this place of perfection can only be reached through the utopianism of their bodies (Foucault, 2013). Based on the way the first discursive formation is presented, it is possible perceiving the important role played by digital influencers (Rodner et al., 2022; Tennent & Jackson, 2017) as builders of divas’ image (Turner, 2006) who are empowered by virtual markets (Fearfull & Brownlie, 2019). Thus, divas’ deglamorized image, due to their “negative” deeds (Skalin, 2020), represents their request to occupy a humanized body. This body is susceptible to errors, it is imperfect, and it is far from meeting the social standards established for it (McCabe et al., 2020; Dann, 2018).

The second discursive formation also highlights the potential of consumer relations mediated by digital technologies and by the advancement of web 2.0 (Jorge, 2020), which enables the activity of consumers (Jenkins, 2015), who start to co-produce (Lowgren & Reimer, 2013; Cova & Cova, 2012) divas’ image by validating and supporting the ones who recreate their images based on the narrative about the humanization of their bodies (Franssen, 2020). Thus, divas get support when they show their human features through a deglamorized body that corresponds to a topic materiality that, in its turn, distances itself from the utopian perfection standards (Foucault, 2013) required from it (Ferguson et al., 2020; Brace-Govan & Ferguson, 2019).

Both discursive formations show what Dann (2018) has evidenced, which is the recreation of a female body image that distances itself from stereotypes applied to it. This factor is evident in the first discursive formation as creative process of divas’ image, whereas in the second formation, it is established through the support and validation provided by consumers, influencers and other celebrities who see this distance from divas’ body perfection stereotypes as something positive.

The female body exists in a context that stereotypes it (Knudsen, 2019; Dann, 2018) and encourages the pursuit of a body standard that is beautiful, strong, and young (McCabe et al., 2020; Rocha & Frid, 2018). This aspect corroborates the pursuit of the body utopianism evidenced by Foucault (2013), who emphasized that the utopian body is beautiful and perfect, although not material; it is a body we occupy in our imagination or Psyké.

When the utopianism (Foucault, 2013) associated with body perfection standards (McCabe et al., 2020; Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018) is perceived by several women, it faces their opposition and resistance to meet them and to “rewrite” their bodies (Toffoletti & Thorpe, 2018; Dann, 2018; Joy &Venkatesh, 1994).

Female bodies have always been built based on implications of regulatory, ecoomic, and social interests (Knudsen, 2019; Zanette & Scaraboto, 2019; Rocha, 2018). Moreover, they had their naturalness brought under control and oftentimes made invisible (Brace-Govan & Ferguson, 2019). It happens because female bodies must hide their reproductive features, such as menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause to be seen as professionally valid (Morgan, 2006). In other words, features that naturally classify them as women must be erased, because they weaken and disfavor them as professionals.

Butler (2018) evoked Foucault to emphasize that the body is used as a blank page where cultural values are inscribed on. In order for it to happen, the body must be destroyed, i.e., its value must be set by the environment it is inserted in. The aforementioned author has suggested that bodies are the product of politically constructed forces, as well as evidenced that corporeal categories are disrupted by gender acts that result in a meaning that goes against the binary social structure. According to her, sexual bodies are politically modeled, as their borders and surface are culturally written based on strategic interests focused on setting their definitions and limitations through sexual markers that dictate how each body type should be inserted in the social structure.

The sexual categorization differentiating sex from gender is a body generalization mechanism that defines bodies solely based on their sexual meaning. Thus, the body is a passive being that receives, and is formed by, meanings external to it (Butler, 2018). The aforementioned author has also emphasized that discourses establish the limits of bodies, which are often used to establish and naturalize social taboos, as well as proper shapes and behaviors. She has also suggested that a possible post-structuralist appropriation would lie on understanding that bodies are limited by hegemonic social concepts. Thus, bodies are destroyed and rebuilt as their story changes. This story refers to the meaning creation process that requires body subjection for the speaking subject to be promoted.

In light of the foregoing, we emphasize that bodies tend to place themselves in the modulation inscribed on them and that, consequently, they connive with the set of discursive standards and expectations accounting for defining social rules (Knudsen, 2019). Accordingly, Beauvoir (2014) advocates that the female body should not be a means of coercion, control, or submission; on the contrary, it should be a place of feminine expressiveness and freedom.

6. FINAL REMARKS

Based on the current findings, it is possible saying that digital influencers paratextualize the deglamorization of pop divas by stating their humanization. In other words, this deglamorization process is based on the presentation of divas’ humanized image, which evidences aspects of their lives that bring them closer to ordinary people, a life that goes beyond their diva and celebrity status, and that shows them as people. Thus, this process refers to matter associated with divas’ bodies that would initially correspond to perfect and stereotyped bodies that, due to the deglamorization process, start to be presented as common, topic and real bodies. Influencers’ discourse evidences divas’ deglamorization in two different fronts represented in the herein addressed discursive formations.

“A star is born” formation is the first front to reveal this deglamorization process. According to it, digital influencers become divas’ image meaning builders, who depict them in a much more humanized way as their secrets are revealed, as well as their issues and their way to solve them. This formation works as the act of exposing the “hidden” side of divas’ lives, which is explored in the media and, oftentimes, is even reinforced by divas themselves.

On the other hand, the second front reveals the empathic and sensitized discourse of influencers, fans, and other celebrities towards the construction of this new media image assumed by divas, who now present themselves, and are presented, as “ordinary” people who live, on a daily basis, with issues that distance them from their glamour status, such as non-acceptance of their bodies, drug use and leaked nudes, among others.

Thus, it was possible seeing that the pressure on divas’ body image and behavior is part of the discursive materialization that corroborates the hegemonic interests of society and imposes the standard that defines the useful, beautiful, and feminine body worthy of a Diva. However, according to the current findings, this whole-body regulation and limitation is not accepted by divas, who act in a way that goes against what is required from them. This factor is clearly seen when divas refrain from using editing software to improve their photos and decide to show their body shape and “imperfections” or when they expose their femininity in a way that goes against the standardization of female bodies and behaviors in society, for example.

The current study contributes to a line of investigation that indicates the rise of studies about digital influencers, who show their remarkable social influence skills that end up making them famous (Tanwar et al., 2022; Wandoko & Panggati, 2022; Gomes et al., 2022; Javed et al., 2021; Karhawi, 2021; Nascimento et al., 2020; Silva et al., 2020). Thus, it contributes to the expansion of the CCT field (Arnould & Thompson, 2007), more specifically, to the research agenda focused on spreading market ideologies through the massive mediation of contents, based on the active use of media (Gaião et al., 2012). The current case investigated the use of digital media, with emphasis on how influencers spread ideologies and positions by appropriating the news about pop divas to create their paratexts and, thus, to play their consumption mediation role.

As research limitation, we were able to identify blogs whose news production was in compliance with the research scope, but they did not keep old news available or did not provide a tool to search for news based on the divas’ names.

With respect to research developments, studies focused on investigating the paratextualization of entertainment industry objects produced by the industry itself, or by its consumers, should be conducted to provide an alternative bias to the one approached in the current study, namely: media production. In addition, it is possible carrying out studies with different objects of this industry other than pop divas, such as other celebrity types like sportsmen, or other text types, such as movies and books, which are also susceptible to paratextualization. Studies about digital influence also open a wide range of possibilities, such as studies focused on investigating the consumption of niche influencers, such as fashion or games. Moving on to the feminist theory, it would be interesting carrying out studies about feminist digital influencers, as well as about black or LGBTQIAPN+ divas.

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• FINANCIAL SUPPORT

  The authors thank the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) for supporting the research that resulted in this article.

Edited by

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Talles Vianna Brugni https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9025-9440

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Emerson Mainardes https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2525-275X

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  01 July 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  26 May 2022
• Reviewed
  31 Aug 2022
• Accepted
  24 Sept 2022
• Published
  26 Apr 2023