ABSTRACT
This essay examines the particular set of images that coalesce around the white male body in the Jazz Age by reading a variety of celebrities across multiple media, such as Bernarr MacFadden, Rudolph Valentino and Lon Chaney. While each figure's celebrity takes shape in relation to their individual field and background, what connects them is a particular focus on the male body as part of their celebrity. These men constructed idealized images of themselves, and these constructions provided particular configurations of the male body as a panacea for postwar disillusion. Strongly encouraged to identify with these stars, white men could potentially find ease from corporeal tensions through a temporary psychological alliance with the celebrity image. In other words, celebrity culture produces a form of imaginary fraternalism for white males, assuaging their anxieties through willing subjection to the celebrity's fictional self-image. This
mechanism both mourned and resurrected male bodies across a wide variety of cultural arenas such as film, advertising, and physical culture. Examining such celebratory presentations in the context of Jazz Age male bodily discourses reveals the power of celebrity culture to perform a particularized form of white masculinity, elucidating the spectacular bodily and psychic practices by which these men managed their corporeal fears and frailties.
