ABSTRACT
Celebrity and politics are siamese twins, for the simple reason that both politics and celebrity are about visibility, recognition, and esteem: where popular politics and any approximation of democracy is, there shall celebrity be. For female politicians, celebrity politics constitutes a threat to their political effectiveness, because the linkage of personal and public lives characteristic of celebrity ‘presents a complex and unfavourable arena to women because of its inbuilt and extreme polarization of femininity and politics’. Populist political styles rely on a claim to ‘ordinariness’, often expressed through coarse manners performed as authenticity. For the German/Italian political theorist Robert Michels, it was clear that celebrity of all sorts was relatively easy to convert into political leadership, in socialist and social-democratic politics at any rate. The involvement of various types of non-political celebrities in arenas of diplomatic and philanthropic intervention such as environmentalism and humanitarianism, inter-governmental dialogue, as well as the ordinary work of the United Nations, has become increasingly ubiquitous.
