ABSTRACT
As we saw in the last chapter, celebrities’ feelings are a popular topic on the red carpet.1 Interviewers unabashedly ask stars to “reveal” their emotions, via indirect and direct questions (such as “How are you doing?” and “Are you excited to be here tonight?”). Celebrities tend to respond to the interviewers’ coaching by labeling their feelings in a context-sensitive manner. We argued that this sort of emotional claimsmaking is not dissimilar to that which occurs in everyday life. Americans routinely create instances of emotions by asserting that they or their companions are happy, proud, envious, jealous, “pissed off,” and so on. Each label gives meaning to indeterminate situations and tends to serve certain goals in social interaction, such as avoiding conflict, eliciting respect, or creating humor. Thus, the apparently “private” experience of emotion can be analyzed as a social project: the interactive application of cultural categories.
