Rebellious Bodies: Stardom, Citizenship, and the New Body Politics by Russell Meeuf (review)

In the acknowledgments section that precedes the introduction to Russell Meeuf ’s new monograph Rebellious Bodies: Stardom, Citizenship, and the New Body Politics, the author points to foundational scholarship by three highly eminent figures in the field—Richard Dyer, Yvonne Tasker, and Chris Holmlund—each of whom, in turn, blazed a trail for newer and emergent scholars of succeeding generations, like Meeuf, to follow and likewise make their own contributions to the body of work on this topic.¹ This is a corpus that takes up the task, in Meeuf ’s words, of “exploring the relationship between stardom, bodies and cultural politics” as it manifests across the spectrum of Hollywood’s entertainment media.² In particular, Meeuf highlights the emphasis that each places on the primacy of the star body to this thematic intersection in their differently titled entries in the cluster of publications that he correspondingly refers to as “the bodies books,” comprising Dyer’s Heavenly Bodies, Tasker’s Spectacular Bodies, and Holmlund’s Impossible Bodies, respectively.³ He thus offers up Rebellious Bodies as the newest addition to this cluster. This is not done with hubris but rather in deference. All the same, the comparison is apt, and Meeuf ’s work stands up well alongside that of his forebears. Meeuf has produced intellectually, conceptually, and methodologically cognate scholarship while making a new, worthy, and significant intervention that interrogates the cultural stakes of contemporary Hollywood stardom and celebrity in terms of what he calls “the new body politics.”⁴

Rebellious Bodies thus combines a star and celebrity studies approach, employing textual analysis, critical discourse analysis, and ideological criticism to explore and interrogate the intersectional cultural identity and body politics of twenty-first-century Hollywood entertainment media. So in these ways and others it sits well alongside the likes of Linda Mizejewski’s Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics. It also offers a more scholarly take on similar subject matter to Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman—a publication that is itself, like Meeuf ’s, self-professedly indebted to important work undertaken in the 1990s by Kathleen Rowe Karlyn’s theorizing of nonnormative femininities under the banner of female unruliness.⁵

Meeuf lays out the crux of his argument early in the introduction, to the effect that “stars with non-normative bodies create powerful challenges to the cultural centrality of white, able-bodied, heteronormative masculinity.”⁶ Identifying a postmillennial turn in Hollywood entertainment media’s cultures of stardom and celebrity toward bodies that “challenge Hollywood beauty standards and cultural body norms in one way or another,” Meeuf points to contemporary icons and flash-point figures like Lena Dunham (Girls, HBO, 2017), Rebel Wilson (Pitch Perfect, Jason Moore, 2012), Amy Schumer (Inside Amy Schumer, Comedy Central, 2013–; Trainwreck, Judd Apatow, 2015), Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project, Fox, 2012–2015, Hulu, 2015–), and Viola Davis (How to Get Away with Murder, ABC, 2014–), among others, as symptomatic of what he presents as the latter-day pushback against Hollywood’s overwhelming historical preference for elevating the careers of performers whose bodies conform to “social norms of beauty and health” and to what he describes as the “fetish” for star bodies that are thin, white or ambiguously ethnic, and normatively abled.⁷

In the chapters that ensue, Meeuf scrutinizes six stars in turn, each of whom has been selected according to the rationale and on the ostensible grounds that “they represent the most popular examples of celebrities who reflect the most pressing issues regarding bodies and inclusion” and “all demonstrate the intersectional nature of managing identity and inequality.”⁸ Hence, chapter 1 explores intersections of class, gender, and fatness in relation to contradictions inherent to the stardom of Melissa McCarthy, who, Meeuf demonstrates, differently signifies corporeal and performative unruliness, excess, and nonnormativity on the one hand (e.g., in the tentpole chick flick Bridesmaids [Paul Feig...