Honors Theses and Capstones

Date of Award

Spring 2025

Project Type

Senior Honors Thesis

College or School

COLA

Department

Communication

Program or Major

Communication

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

First Advisor

Nora Draper

Abstract

Britney Spears is an American pop star who rose to fame in the late 1990s at the age of 17 with her music, performances, and fashion. Spears was a prominent figure in celebrity gossip magazines, a genre which grew to prominence alongside and, in many ways, because of Spears. The distinct aesthetic and style of celebrity gossip magazines involved stories, blurbs, and images which wielded praise and shame—directly and indirectly—as tools to enforce norms and expectations for both female celebrities and female readers. Through a critical discourse analysis of 378 People and Us articles throughout the first ten years of Spears’s career, this study sought to understand how the framing and shaming of Spears by the magazines evolved over time in conjunction with her gender, race, class, and Southernhood. The analysis found that the magazines initially heralded Spears as an Americana princess, an emblem of the American Dream and New Southern Belle. Spears was praised throughout the first three years of the coverage for performing white southern womanhood the ‘correct’ or ‘right’ way; she was a “good,” beautiful girl who had promised to remain abstinent until marriage, was dating her childhood love, and was absolutely beautiful. As Spears later failed to meet such impossible, strict expectations and began to perform white southern womanhood the ‘wrong’ way by, for example, having sex before marriage and gaining weight, the shaming of Spears began. Overall, this study found that (1) the different types of shaming which were implemented by the magazines in the coverage of Spears, including sexual or slut shaming, body shaming, maternal shaming, and mental illness shaming, were all inextricably linked, both to one another but also to Spears’s race, gender, class, and origin, and (2) the magazines’ (dis)approval of Spears’s behavior set norms for female readers through the idolization and later alienation of Spears.

Download

Share

COinS