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“The Closest Thing to Perfect”: Celebrity and the Body Politics of Jamie Lee Curtis Christina Burr F or the September 2002 issue of More, a women’s lifestyle magazine targeting women over the age of forty, film actress Jamie Lee Curtis posed in a sports bra and tight spandex briefs without the aid of lights, makeup, or retouching.1 The photograph reveals wrinkles on her face, plump thighs, big breasts, and a bulging tummy. With this image of the “unglamorous,”“ordinary ,” and “real,” Jamie Lee was intending to expose the illusion of the celebrity body. The photograph was taken at the insistence of the actress as part of a concerted effort to reinvent her celebrity status around what she claimed was a newly found self-esteem. Some in Hollywood viewed her action as a career risk, since film stars, particularly women, are not supposed to get old or fat. On the following page of the feature, a photograph of the glamorous Jamie Lee appeared. This image required three hours of primping and prepping , thousands of dollars of designer clothing and jewellery, and the work of a cast of thirteen: the magazine’s creative director, a photographer and three assistants, two fashion stylists and an assistant, a hairdresser, a makeup artist, a manicurist, and a prop stylist and an assistant. The appearance of the article in More coincided with the publication of Curtis’s children’s book on selfesteem .2 Curtis has since spoken out about the dangers of Botox and other cosmetic procedures. Yet throughout her career, Curtis’s star image has been constructed in various ways around her body.In Trading Places (1983),Perfect (1985), and A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Curtis’s star persona is defined by her lean, toned, sexy body. In True Lies (1994), she performs a striptease for her husband, portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. More recently, in the 215 Popular Representations of the Body in Sickness and Health 216 body-switch film Freaky Friday (2003), Curtis played a frantic “supermom” who takes the identity of her teenage daughter. In this chapter, I argue that Jamie Lee Curtis’s star image has been fashioned out of cultural ideals about the feminine body through the use of her films and an array of textual sources including movie reviews, television interviews, and women’s magazine articles. Paradoxically, the media have made use of her star image both to reinforce popular cultural ideals of the young, thin, sexy female body and to expose the illusion of the celebrity body, thus revealing to women the lie behind the ideal of female bodily perfection in Hollywood. This chapter on Curtis’s star image has been influenced by scholarship in film studies and cultural studies, and by feminist writings on women’s bodies, particularly on the impact of the media on women’s bodies and body image. Ironically, as the chapter will demonstrate, the body politics surrounding Jamie Lee Curtis have been contradictory and ambivalent. Some feminists and journalists have applauded her outspokenness on issues surrounding the star body, suggesting that showing an imperfect body or face is an act of courage in the youth-obsessed movie industry, while others have cautioned that Curtis is only helping to perpetuate the values the gesture appears to challenge. Women’s bodies have always been,and continue to be,of central importance to feminist scholarship and politics. Since the 1970s, control over women’s bodies and body image by the media and the fashion and beauty industries has been a persistent theme in feminist scholarship.Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi stated the case, most famously perhaps, in the early 1990s in their respective bestsellers. They argue that the “beauty myth” was the most damaging aspect of a violent backlash against feminism and a political weapon aimed at women’s oppression. Faludi and Wolf indicate further that women’s magazines are integral to the cultural construction of the beauty myth because they perpetuate the notion that every woman can achieve the ideal feminine body (youthful and toned) through the proper regimes of dress, diet and exercise, skin care, and cosmetic surgery.3 This has translated into the belief that by changing their bodies, women can transcend problematic social locations, thus making their lives better. In the mass media, idealized images of thin, white, youthful women are produced in what Sandra Bartky describes as the“fashion-beauty complex,”largely controlled and constructed by white men.4 The celebrity body, as feminist writers inform us, has made some...

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