{"id":7341,"date":"2026-09-16T13:23:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T10:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/queercollective.cy\/?p=7341"},"modified":"2026-09-16T13:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T10:28:08","slug":"killthecelebrityinside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/queercollective.cy\/el\/killthecelebrityinside\/","title":{"rendered":"Kill the celebrity inside"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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We\u2019ve all been through the same experience one way or another. We see someone online, who leads a fabulous lifestyle, queer as it can be. Trendy techno-raver adjacent wardrobe, creative beautiful friends, clear skin and up-to-date morals with a seemingly never-ending stream of income that funds the constantly evolving and expansive queerness they embody. Lead to the best parties, by the best company, with the best bodies forming a heavily sexually nuanced circle where one may or may not indulge in, queerness becomes a step-by-step of content that resembles that of a never-ending after-party. Somewhere along this never-ending consumption of identity, you find yourself checking pages again and again, to see the lifestyle being constantly reproduced and re-instated by new people, that are similar yet somehow always \u201cniche\u201d, doing the same things ad infinitum. It\u2019s a whole new thing, yet somehow it\u2019s still the same. It\u2019s a completely different person, yet they all wear Namilia, Balenciaga or whatever the new uniform implies, while their Instagram profile is bombarded with a perfectly curated hue selection of Anafi, Paris and Puerto Vallarta. To adopt Max Weber\u2019s positions about Western capitalism in making sense of the new order of things, we first have to examine which circumstances allow the Western civilization (and Western civilization only) to treat its cultural phenomena as appearing to have a development that has universal significance and value. Simply, why is it that Western cultural movements, somehow feel global? Then, we need to understand that no other societal moment, nor historical age, has left the absolute dependence of virtually all political, technical and economic conditions of life, to the hands of just a small number of \u201cofficials\u201d as we have now, in the modern Occident\/West.<\/p>

For those of you who do not wish to read further, an insta-answer is that we are globally under Western supremacy. Western imperialism has created a globalized White colonial mid-set which we all have internalized and thus are actively promoting, passively a part of, or constantly trying to deconstruct. However, the view I\u2019m trying to shed some light to here is whether, this structural hierarchy has utilized subjectivity to promote an idealized Westernization by setting \u201cauthorities\u201d as the core of its methodology (yes, yes it has) or whether we\u2019ve all just been commodified (yes, yes we have). To link my take with Webber\u2019s positions: How have we as people, and particularly queers, taken on, unconsciously even, the mission of Western hierarchy on a communal level?<\/p>

A couple of years ago, the whole world was pulsating to Brat summer in the sour-apple hue plastered across all kinds of merch, media and moguls \u2013 to the extent of liberal presidential campaigns (EEEWWW, FREE PALESTINE FOREVER). As a metal-head first, an anti-assimilationist second and a queer third, my confusion spiked as the only BRAT I knew, was the female-fronted New Orleans extreme metal band (you\u2019re welcome). Upon a deeper look, I see a child of migrants fully enfleshing the globalized bimbofication, the neoliberal ideal of \u201cfreedom\u201d, the West demands of its worshippers. In this way, the neoliberal Western supremacy coming full circle by giving us a \u201cforeigner\u201d at the top of the ladder. Sure, partying is fun, wearing skimpy clothes made of polyester is cute and doing drugs is great if that\u2019s your thing, but why the need to reclaim words that have never had any part in the revolution?<\/p>

Yes, queerness is attached to camp and its re-instating logic of humor, irony and bad taste (as the Pope of Trash himself, John Waters, has so meticulously crafted for years). However, where does one draw the line between taste as \u201cpolitics\u201d and aesthetic reclamation as redundancy? Maybe the line should be drawn before tacky promotional tactics, somewhere before the creation of a false movement that leaves a taste in your mouth as an apple would, that\u2019s rotten from the inside and bought off of the TikTok shop.<\/p>

Yes, it is just fun and I probably just don\u2019t get it, but what is the appeal of being a brat \u2013 a badly behaved child? [I want to make a point here and defend the Brats of the BDSM\/fetish world. We support a healthy, consensual, kinky power-play. What we don\u2019t support is vapid celebrity culture marketing stupidity to a community that should be revolting.] Is the success of diversity, seeing artists of migrant descent fully replace their British counterparts in the symbolic hierarchy? Is the accumulation of wealth on the back of exploiting workers (see Amazon and Apple funded concerts\/branding\/advertising) in other parts of the world, parts where your ancestry comes from (speaking of the general non-Western world, I know she\u2019s half Gujarati Indian), really the behavior that a new-found queer celebrity is idolized for, while coloring the status-quo vomit green?<\/p>

The funny thing is, that I actually did get hooked on a couple of songs from \u201cBrat\u201d when they were viral, as the melodies could not escape my brain as is the nature of pop music. I even watched \u201cThe Moment\u201d and surprisingly, it was a fairly well thought-out film that criticizes the trials and tribulations of celebrity. However, what I couldn\u2019t shake off was the evident machinery of re-branding one\u2019s self as an anti-brand while working and being sponsored by the biggest brands out there. Ultimately, creating a market strategy that calls out the system of celebrity you\u2019re part of, while you\u2019re actively benefiting from that said system. The attempt comes from branding yourself as an \u201calternative\u201d, \u201creactive\u201d, \u201cbadly behaved\u201d child that behaves badly only within the contours of their privilege\u2019s safety. \u201cSure, I will criticize brands but not too hard cause in the end, I do want their branded money\u201d. Money that has been accumulated by decimating populations for lithium, for profit, for labor, for genocidal expansion of their presidential campaigns. \u201cIt\u2019s just fun\u201d. Maybe then, that\u2019s exactly the appeal of being a brat; to embody a juvenile mental capacity of entitlement. A capacity of lack, and of communal ethos \u2013 one which could only excuse the empty understanding of future represented by a generic, rebranded, not-too-foreign quasi-heterosexual celebrity funded by the queers (lezbehonest, by queers in this case I mean the gays\u2122). We all want to be a brat. We all want to be cool, diluted and privileged. We all want to be Paris Hilton \u2013 famous for being famous and rich because of it.<\/p>

I recall John Waters in an interview stating that when he was younger, \u201cit was cool to hate rich people\u201d and how serious of a person you need to be, in order to enjoy a fucked up movie. Somehow, in the technofeudalist hellscape we\u2019re all part of, scrolling our time and rights away, we\u2019ve all sacrificed our constructed individuality in the shrine of \u201ccelebrity\u201d. We all want to be the \u201crich people\u201d. We all know that one \u201cqueer\u201d micro-celebrity whose Instagram we stumbled upon by accident, yet suddenly became part of its circuit, unwillingly in-taking information about their weekend plans, curated friend group of niche Berlin-adjacent, sexually liberated DJ artist friends with mullets, all obsessively rewiring their clout, to that of a team. A collective consciousness is born, of an inner-celebrity, an \u201calpha\u201d, a digital hierophant whose lifestyle is now the coveted mystery \u2013 knowing enough to envy, detached enough to not fully grasp yet somehow always advertised and publicized. Generally, celebrity culture grew as people became more interested in watching and showing themselves in public. Places played an important role in this change. In 1760s London, theaters, novels, and leisure activities made the city a new place to be seen and to create a public identity. In nineteenth-century Paris, department stores and shopping arcades turned fashion and consumption into a public spectacle by changing their storefronts to glass, visible from the outside in, letting people imagine new lifestyles even if they did not buy anything (Marshall xix). In the current day, with the wide distribution of digital media, information and reels, now the idea of \u201ccelebrity\u201d is closer than ever. So stuffed up in our own eco-chambers withdrawn from real community, even in the tightest and most well-intending queer circles, somehow at the epicenter of praise is THE individual. One representative of a scene, of a cultural moment, of a city, of an ideal. An individual which in most cases is a white-passing, Eurocentric-coded, aesthetically Westernized person whose globalized idea of self and personal freedom can feed THE \u201cuniversal\u201d experience (and by universal we mean Western and imperialist). An IKEA of a person who usually assimilates their own narrative into capitalist construction with the \u201canti\u201d narrative that queerness started from \u2013 the people.<\/p>

If one is to examine evolution as a discourse, belongingness theory reaches back to ancient times in which people wished to be in groups since this increased their chances of survival, reproduction and hunting large animals which over time and through evolution, has constituted within us an internal mechanism that craves social acceptance (Halpern 103). In practical terms, it\u2019s just exciting to be around other queer people or generally, people that have the same interests as you. However, has identity, with its contours now being objects and behavioral patterns dictated by marketing choices, been commodified to the point of a ready-to-purchase persona or is the product of \u201cideal subjectivity\u201d become so inaccessible, that not even the queers can afford to be queer anymore? Through \u201cfollowing\u201d, we now create smaller hierarchies which may not divulge into matter, capital or skill, but do so in aesthetics, lifestyles and appearances. It is very common in gay men\u2019s narratives, to associate with a certain \u201cdiva\u201d growing up, in the likes of Britney, Madonna, Gaga etc. I myself was obsessed with Shakira. Once I saw her, stepping out of the ocean, gyrating her hips in mud, surrounded by horses, I was so confused. Do I want to be with her or do I just want to be her? Evidently, at the tender age of 7, Shakira represented something which I was forbidden in adopting: femininity. In all cases of celebrity, representation is great as it provides a visual mapping for your neurological development as far as self-visualization goes. That is why we need people that look like us, in places we want to reach, in order to believe that we can indeed, reach those places. However in this vastly visual and reproduced world we live in, what are the boundaries between representation and authority? Is a reproduction of image, in its most specific and diluted iterations, the work of being, or is it simply another authoritarian emblem for us to worship, follow and simply, be policed under? Evidently, I am not implying that any of these celebrities\/people are actual policing authorities. No, I do not believe Charli XCX, Beyonc\u00e9 or Bad Bunny, are policing puppets of hyper-capitalism utilized by the status quo to calm down through representation the masses from organizing and revolting (okay, maybe I do a little bit). However, what they are is salespeople and what they are selling is a product \u2013 always. Isn\u2019t it funny how in Trump\u2019s regime, where Latinx people are being deported and incarcerated en masse, what is allowed and used as an emblem of \u201cneoliberal all-American-you-can-also-do-it success\u201d is a Latino man who is dating a Kardashian, designs for Zara yet the gays still swoon over. Celebrities might not police the optics of gayness, or the strength of populace, but their following, their cultural echo and their social clout, identifies those who \u201care\u201d, and those who \u201care not\u201d, those who are \u201cbrat\u201d and those who are not, those who are \u201ccurrent\u201d and those who are not, those who buy into the \u201cnow\u201d and those who are just \u201cover\u201d.<\/p>

In the theory of attention economy, a distinction is made on the modern-day economic Darwinism. In this new order, the digital entrepreneur has to learn to harness and selectively channel their own capacity of connecting life to the\/a constant \u201cnew\u201d in order to create surplus value. By constantly asking for \u201cnew\u201d attention to the \u201csame\u201d patterns, the power of grabbing attention recreates a continuity to the Darwinian dynamics of competition, while re-enforcing the constraints of natural scarcity that framed the survival of the fittest. In simple words, in a capitalist machinery that is designed with the ultimate goal being that of purchase, the never-ending pursuit of your attention is the ultimate commodity. The \u201ccelebrity\u201d does both at once \u2013 sells you an object as new, by making your attention scarce. \u201cHere is millions of information of a same but different thing, only for you to want to be like me, by buying a commodified version of me and thus, add within this information avalanche another copy of myself.\u201d On the one hand, by putting a stable face to a pattern, brand and expectation, we feel like we belong through recognition. On the other, glamorizing our own \u201cindividuality\u201d what is created is a false scarcity of specialness, uniqueness and intimate urgency. \u201cI might have released a green album 6 months ago, but this one is the same but different. It\u2019s the same songs but different, plus the album is a different kind of green so you definitely need this one too cause it\u2019s for sure not the same thing\u201d. By creating this \u201cattentional assemblages\u201d of media as Tiziana Terranova describes them, what is enabled is a measurement of intimacy, success and familiarity through likes, views, followers and shares (2). Ultimately, creating a new scale of marketization and financialization. Thus, by engaging within this circuit of passing impressions and attention triggers, what acts as a response of \u201cbelonging\u201d is usually just imitation or simply consumption. Ultimately showing that the attention economy is not only that of capitalist acquisitions but also of socialization of ideas, affects, percepts and thus an economy of social production and cooperation (Terranova 8). In short: give me your attention to sell to you something you already have, in order to look like all these people who look the same but they are special, so now you can also be special with this opportunity I am giving you, me, your close personal friend who you know so much about \u2013 I made an Instagram live to show you what\u2019s in my bag, so you know that you know me, right?.<\/p>

Digital\/Social Media, does not recognize culture, it commodifies it anew by reprogramming it with every post and every digital swipe. By seeking repetition and consistency, \u201cbranded\u201d subjectivity delivers a stability that we naturally seek as social beings, wishing to belong. The easier something can be labeled, hashtagged and replicated, the easier it can reach the impoverished attention neurology of the consumer. Ultimately, providing the falseness of uniqueness to your dopamine drained brain, with your already impoverished attention spam treating any \u201cnovelty\u201d and dopamine spike as an oasis within its general affective scarcity. In this way, marketing through cognitive exhaustion, the experience (and delusion) of individuality as \u201coneness\u201d. One same influencer, many faces. One same caf\u00e9, many cities. One same celebrity, many iterations. One same lifestyle, many people. One same rave, many cities.<\/p>

If one is to expand such optics into the realm of self, is it too \u201cradical\u201d to claim the yearning of celebrity as a desire to police? Aiming to police how one is to experience novelty and how one performs queerness? Does it change with every season? Does it change with every album? Does it change with each complete Instagram reinvention in which the past is somehow erased, only for the new era to begin (see Beyonce wiping out her digital footprint only to rebrand herself again as black, queer, ballroom, cowboy etc. \u2013 shout-out to Diamanda Galas calling Cowboy Carter \u201cbingo music for clowns\u201d)? How is queerness defined, if the queer par excellence lives in Neuk\u00f6lln, in Paris, in London, in New York and Barcelona yet never really \u201chere\u201d? In colonial theory, the metropolis is often distilled in the colonized subject\u2019s imagination as the ultimate center of culture, knowledge, and progress. It becomes an aspirational destination, where the colonized subject may travel to acquire new cultural knowledge and return to the homeland with a transformed perspective, creating a newly informed local quasi-culture that is now, relatively globalized. Alternatively, the metropolis is aspired to become a new home, offering a different sense of identity and belonging as opposed to the suffocating local one (as if the wealth and freedom of imperialism did not come from abusing the resources and minds of the colony). Thus, the idea of the metropolis plays a significant role in shaping the colonized subject\u2019s cultural identity, aspirations and thus, actions for a future (Loomba 7). If the queerness we now live through is elemental, through a visually resuscitated ballroom culture, a hyper-capitalized drag competition and a hyperventilating \u201cunderground\u201d, who denotes who IS queer and who represents THE queer? Can a person, do the same work as the metropolis does within colonialism? If one is to view queerness as an identity and positionality that implies understanding the political substantiality that is inherent within one\u2019s own sexual and gender performances, then the last thing we need, is an authority to dictate, police and mandate these performances by selling them back to us. Maybe we should decolonize the way we view people as representatives of ourselves. Maybe the answer we should give is not to give in but to decline.<\/p>

No, I do not like apple green nor do I want to be a child again.<\/p>

No, I do not want to move to an ex(?)-Nazi country whose cultural behemoths, choose which cause can be supported, and which phrase can be made illegal and \u201ctoo radical\u201d.<\/p>

No, I do not want to wear sexy polyester club-wear made by children in Cambodia.<\/p>

No, I do not wish to subjugate myself to yet another hierarchy of a \u201cqueer\u201d man choosing who belongs in the state-funded archive, and who can be erased for being too femme, too loud or too militant.<\/p>

And no, I most certainly do not want to be represented by a straight girl of migrant descent that performs the exact colonial expansive logic as her British white counterparts.<\/p>

If we do not kill the celebrity inside, we are always doomed to repeat the hierarchy of worship that is hidden behind girl-boss feminisms, Tel Aviv pride parades, and Apple funded artists that sell us \u201crevolution\u201d and \u201cdifference\u201d within a capitalist eco-chamber. An echo-chamber that chooses who is queer and who is simply, out of fashion, out of style and simply just too late to the party.<\/p>

———————————————————
Edelman, Lee. \u201cUnstating Desire.\u201d GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 2, no. 4, 1994, pp. 343\u201349.
Foucault, Michel. \u201cPanopticism.\u201d Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995, pp. 195\u2013228.
Halpern, Jake. Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America\u2019s Favorite Addiction. Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
Loomba, Ania. Colonialism\/Postcolonialism. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2005.
Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. 2nd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
M\u00fcller, Sabrina, Aline Knapp, Katharina Merian, and Patrick Todjeras. \u201cQueer Theology on Social Media: A Reflection on Queer Pastoral Influencers on Instagram.\u201d International Journal of Practical Theology, vol. 29, no. 2, 2025, pp. 231\u201345. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1515\/ijpt-2024-0041.
Terranova, Tiziana. \u201cAttention, Economy and the Brain.\u201d Culture Machine, vol. 13, 2012, pp. 1\u201319.
Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons, Scribner, 1930.<\/p>

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We\u2019ve all been through the same experience one way or another. We see someone online, who leads a fabulous lifestyle, queer as it can be. Trendy techno-raver adjacent wardrobe, creative beautiful friends, clear skin and up-to-date morals with a seemingly never-ending stream of income that funds the constantly evolving and expansive queerness they embody. Lead […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-club"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t