What does it entail to be a micro-celebrity in a social media subculture?: Exploring how transgender vloggers negotiate personas on YouTube.

Description

YouTube is increasing becoming a platform for stardom, enabling ordinary people to rise to fame – and earn money. It is this shifting terrain of YouTube that this paper addresses by investigating how celebrity status works in a social media context – and in particular how it plays out in an identity based online subculture. Taking my point of departure in Theresa Senft’s concept of “micro-celebrity” (Senft 2008) and Alice E. Marwick’s use of the term (Marwick 2013), I will explore what being a micro-celebrity entails for transgender vloggers that address and engage with an audience of predominantly trans or trans-curious others. As I will argue the concept and characteristics of the micro-celebrity are useful as an overall description of the transgender vloggers but it needs to be developed further in order to catch the specific “affective labor” (Hardt 1999) that being a micro-celebrity within identity based social media subcultures entails.

Paper på IR15: Boundaries and Intersections (Association of Internet Researchers)

Period	20 Oct 2014 → 24 Oct 2014
Held at	Unknown external organisation