Online talk via Teams, 16 November Tuesday, 17:00-18:00 (link)
As part of the Centre's research seminar series, Sabrina Moro's paper will examine the imbrications of sexual violence and celebrity culture in contemporary US media. Even before #MeToo, the public fascination with everyman perpetrators of violent sex crimes has been instrumental in shaping cultural understandings of sexual violence. A critical analysis of the media framing of sex offenders who have become famous because of the crime they committed reveals how the celebritisation of sexual violence can be lucrative.
Because of its focus on sex-based offences and its trademark ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ episodes, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (NBC 1999-) provides an entry point to analyse the celebrification of perpetrators. This paper draws on SVU’s dramatization of the cases against Earl Bradley and Larry Nassar It first explores how celebrified pedophiles are constructed as monstruous abnormalities to maintain the mutual exclusivity of heterosexuality and violence. Even as there are many similarities between the Bradley case and the Nassar case – abuse of medical authority, serial assault of minors – their cultural resonance is not equivalent. The second part of this paper attends to this discrepancy. It shows that the media coverage of Nassar’s trial captures social anxieties related to gender, sexuality, race, and class, as well as the changing nature of fame.
Sabrina Moro recently submitted her PhD in Journalism and Media Studies at Nottingham Trent University and is currently a lecturer in French and Media at Nottingham Trent University. Her research interests include contemporary celebrity cultures, mediations of sexual violence, and feminist theory. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies and Journal of Fandom Studies. Her chapter on Maria Schneider’s sexual assault testimony will be published next Spring in Screening #MeToo: Rape Culture in Hollywood (SUNY Press).
Trigger warning: the paper deals with sexual assault of minors, but no details or depictions are included in the presentation.
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