ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the embodiment node on the circuit of celebrity affect. The position taken here is that celebrity and fan encounters are always of the senses born and that living the body is the vessel through which powerful feelings emerge. One can see how celebrity bodies work to transmit dominant cultural values about race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, age and social class. The celebrity body can materialise as an intense sensory stereotype, where they are positioned to emit difference through the very pores of their corporeality. A whole set of power-saturated, binary oppositions are constructed around the differences between white and black celebrity bodies: differences that continue, to varying degrees, in contemporary 'racialized regimes of representation'. Generally, the connotations of the white celebrity body are positive, while those of the black celebrity body are negative. We live in the age of a confessional culture and celebrity is one of the key conduits for its transmission and revelatory sense-making.
