The child celebrity as palimpsest: reconceptualising the interface between childhood and celebrity studies

Abstract

This Special Issue seeks to contribute to the developing field of child celebrity studies by offering new ways of thinking about the interface between social constructs of childhood and celebrity culture. The Issue elucidates how child celebrities have been, and continue to be, crucial to the complex conceptual apparatus that constitutes ‘the child’. We begin this Special Issue with an invitation to reconsider how childhood studies can productively be brought into dialogue with celebrity studies in ways that illuminate how child celebrities and stars operate as palimpsests upon which traces of former child stars are marked. Following Hugh Cunningham’s caution that, ‘we need to distinguish between children as human beings and childhood as a shifting set of ideas’ (2005, p. 1), we identify child stars as a particularly fraught locus for these shifting concepts because they are regulated by a system of perpetual replacement. In this process of succession, new child performers – and the ideas about childhood they embody – are mapped over former child stars as they fade into obscurity or transform into adult stars. Childhood is not a universal phenomenon but a social construction that varies greatly across cultures and eras, demarcated by the arrival of adulthood in different and often inconsistent ways (McCue 2018). The development of ‘childhood’ in the West from the 19th century onwards is beset with ‘far too many contradictions’ (Bruhm 2006, p. 98) to reconcile, and, as this Issue highlights, child stars and celebrities embody, narrativize and navigate these contradictions as they are laid over one another. Indeed, the child star is one of the most significant and high-profile means by which the concept of the child is culturally imagined and worked through. Chris Rojek (2001, p. 17) identifies the role of lineage in the construction of celebrity using the children of royal families as an example of ascribed celebrity. We argue that in the commodified constructions of child celebrity and the child star, the concept of lineage exceeds bloodlines via the perpetual replacement of the child star system, and is instead constituted by a layering of personal and cultural histories and generational and national discourses. This form of child celebrity lineage provides a framework through which to understand how the palimpestic operations of child stardom illuminate the deep but fluid ideological structures of ‘the child’ as a cultural concept.