The Subversive Recontextualization of Celebrity Images

The following essays explore the ways that the discursive construction of celebrities manipulates cultural ideals and analyze how those celebrities’ cultural meanings can be purposefully manipulated by putting the celebrity in a new context, a process termed “recontextualization.” I define this term fully in each essay, but briefly, recontextualization subverts the celebrity’s original meaning and challenges the cultural ideals associated with that meaning. In the first essay, “Contesting Hegemonic Ideology,” I analyze how the recontextualization of Shirley Temple’s celebrity image from a 1930s advertisement to Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye challenges and deconstructs the hegemonic ideologies that Temple’s celebrity embodies. Then, in my second essay, “Shia LaBeouf by Shia LaBeouf,” I analyze Shia LaBeouf’s self-authorship through recontextualization that challenges his own representation of hegemonic masculinity, focusing on the recontextualization from Michael Bay’s movie Transformers: Dark of the Moon to Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö, and LukeTurner’s performance art piece, #AllMyMovies.