Digital ventriloquism and celebrity access: Cameo and the emergence of paid puppeteering on digital platforms

Cameo is part of a growing set of new media platforms trending toward direct routes for monetizing fame. Cameo allows fans to book personalized shout-out videos and provides celebrities—celetoids and reality stars in particular—access to new modes of income, which became increasingly important amid the pandemic. This research explores how the direct monetization of the fan-celebrity relationship is re-shaping the power dynamic of these parasocial relationships. Using digital ventriloquism as an analytical lens to study reality stars (e.g. Real Housewives) on Cameo, this study introduces the concept of paid puppeteering on digital platforms, defined as a form of digital ventriloquism in which a celebrity’s public persona is manipulated and incentivized through financial means on a paid digital platform for the illusion of close parasocial connections with fans. Paid puppeteering reinforces celebrities as gig workers as Cameo mitigates fan access to celebrities—for a fee.

“It’s a mix of authenticity and complete fabrication” Emotional camping: The cross-platform labor of the Real Housewives

Despite popular interest in reality television, social media, and self-branding, much scholarship focuses on a single platform and places the burden of self-branding on the individual alone. Drawing on 6 years of research into the Real Housewives (RH) franchise and interviews with “Housewives,” I focus on the women’s performances of identity and self-branding across platforms. This article demonstrates that the women of RH become experts at working the system that exploits them via a form of labor I conceptualize as “emotional camping.” Successfully branded “Housewives” tend to be (1) dedicated to Bravo, (2) inclined to present as walking GIFs on Instagram, and (3) seemingly authentic. I argue this self-branding strategy affords these women a semblance of privacy in their highly public careers. These findings are a critique of and feminist mediation into the legitimate labor reality stars do for networks and themselves across platforms.

Postfeminism’s Impact on Gendered labour

Since the advent of postfeminist culture in the 1990s, women’s desire has often been described as wanting to return to a domestic, feminine lifestyle in which women are portrayed as “keen to re-embrace the title of housewife and re-experience the joys of a ‘new femininity’” (Genz and Brabon, 2009: 57). In movie and TV programs such as Footballer's Wives (2002-2006), The Real Housewives franchise, and Desperate Housewives (2004-2012), the rebranding of domestic labor as a place of enjoyment and liberty expressed through popular culture rejects feminist worries about tedious, repetitive, and exploitative housework.

“Not for Lazy Moms”: The Real Housewives of Potomac’s Monique Samuels and the Branding of Black Motherhood

This article explores how Monique Samuels’s role in The Real Housewives of Potomac (TRHOP) and in her Not For Lazy Moms (NFLM) branded spaces, works both for and against the new momism to make visible black women’s experiences navigating essentialism, choice, and the identity work of black motherhood. Samuels’s positionality as a black woman leveraging her essential oils storyline into building a brand for herself brings the franchise into new cultural terrain: “the new momism.” Douglas and Michaels (2004) describe the new momism as a celebration of motherhood that encourages agency and autonomy but ultimately centers on intense devotion to childrearing. Samuels’s TRHOP storylines and extratextual self-fashioning deploy the tenets of the new momism and disrupt its inherent white supremacy to authenticate her identity through essential oils as a wellness commodity and curate an affective space for black women with her NFLM lifestyle brand.