All of the essays in this issue illustrate a strikingly underemphasized aspect of celebrity, both in the present and in the past: its association with sexuality and the projection of a feminized self. My claims about celebrity's gender arise from much more than the fact that all the authors here are writing about female celebrities or those who aspired to join their ranks.1 Over its more than two-hundred-year history in Western societies, celebrity has been consistently paired with stereotypically feminine characteristics, behaviors, and areas of expertise. A particular species of more fleeting fame that emerged in Europe and Britain with the beginnings of democratization in the eighteenth century, celebrity initially referred to a phenomenon concerned more with the now and the new. To be celebrated was to curry the talk of present-day crowds rather than the posthumous representations of historians. “Born at the moment private life became a tradable,...

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