2013 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel
The Ones Who Got Away: Celebrity Life Stories of Upward Social Mobility
verfasst von : Anita Biressi, Heather Nunn
Erschienen in: Class and Contemporary British Culture
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
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As in Chapter 4, this chapter addresses public narratives about choice, social advancement and individual achievement, but this time through a consideration of celebrity life stories rather than educational attainment. Here we explore life stories as a resource for understanding the politics of class and aspiration and its attachment to the language of ambition, merit, chance and opportunity, consumption and work. These are unpacked via celebrity autobiography in particular; focusing on the manufacture of celebrity life stories as paradigms of social mobility. We make this choice on the same basis that Karen Sternheimer (2011:12) chooses to examine celebrities in the context of the American Dream: because ‘they highlight contradictory notions about class, status, and upward mobility’ and can be mobilised and read as evidence that we have an open class system based on ‘one’s own talent, skill and specialness’.