ABSTRACT
Although the analysis of discourses which inform the presentation and representation of child stars in the preceding chapter is immensely useful in deconstructing the form and content of media texts on or about such individuals, a whole dimension of meaning is also omitted through this approach to understanding the data. From the very fi rst readings of newspaper and magazine articles about child stars it was apparent that there was something timeless and mythical about both the structure of the stories and the main characters within them. Whereas discourse analysis focuses on the specifi c activities of rationalisation, justifi cation, and categorisation evident in texts which are contingent upon the particular social context from which they emanate, it cannot account for the possibility of universal themes and ideologies which may tell us more about what it means to be human rather than what meanings have been assigned by humans in a specifi c society at a particular time. Therefore, the proceeding analysis examines the data from a broadly structuralist perspective in order to provide a fuller understanding of the complexities, tensions, and paradoxes surrounding the fi gure of the child star in our culture. In a sense, it is an attempt to explore beneath the surface appearances of how child stars are constructed in the media in order to contemplate the timeless universal structures which may underpin their continued presence in our cultural landscape. Even Foucault, whose general approach to social or cultural analysis emanates from his theory of discursive formations and is thus diametrically opposed to structuralism, accepts that it can be a useful tool in investigating certain aspects of culture. As he puts it:
I recognise the value of [structuralism’s] insights . . . when it is a question of analysing a language, mythologies, folk-tales, poems, dreams, works of literature, even fi lms perhaps, structural description reveals relations that could not otherwise be isolated . . . I now have no diffi culty in accepting that man’s language, his unconscious, and his imagination are governed by laws of structure.1
