Zendaya

 Introduction and background reading 

Read this Vox article on what makes Zendaya a great celebrity. Answer the following questions:

1) What was the 2015 Oscar controversy involving Zendaya? 

But she didn’t become really famous — mainstream famous, you’re-allowed-to-get-away-with-only-using-one-name-because-you’re-just-that-famous famous — until the 2015 Oscars.

That was when Zendaya, age 19, happened to appear on the red carpet in a white silk gown, with her hair in dreadlocks — and on E’s Fashion Police, Giuliana Rancic commented, “That hair is swallowing her. I feel like she smells like patchouli oil.” An offscreen (and never-identified) voice added, “Or weed.”

2) How did Zendaya control the narrative of that controversy?

Outrage followed thick and fast, with commenters across the internet decrying the Fashion Police segment as racist. And in the ensuing controversy, Zendaya could easily have let those commenters position her as the passive victim of Rancic’s ignorance. Instead, she rapidly took control of the narrative herself.

“There is already harsh criticism of African American hair in society without the help of ignorant people who choose to judge others based on the curl of their hair,” she wrote in an Instagram post the next day. “My wearing my hair in locs on an Oscar red carpet was to showcase them in a positive light, to remind people of color that our hair is good enough. To me locs are a symbol of beauty and strength, almost like a lion’s mane.”

3) What examples are provided of Zendaya using her celebrity to raise issues of race and social justice?

Since that episode, Zendaya has consistently continued to use her celebrity to talk thoughtfully about race and social justice. “I am inspired right now by people who use their platforms,” she told Glamour in 2017. “If people know your name, they should know it for a reason.”

• She often talks about how she feels she has a responsibility to help represent the black community onscreen. So when Disney offered Zendaya the starring role in a new show when she was 16 (K.C. Undercover), she says, she insisted that her character have a black family. “I was like, ‘If I’m going to do this, this is how it has to be.’ There needs to be a black family on the Disney Channel,” she said in the Glamour interview. “A lot of people who aren’t people of color can’t quite understand what it’s like to grow up and not see yourself in mainstream media.”

• She talks about her struggles to finagle her way into the audition room for parts that default to white actresses. “I always tell my theatrical manager, ‘Anytime it says they’re looking for white girls, send me out. Let me get in the room. Maybe they’ll change their minds,’” she told Marie Claire in 2018

• And she talks about the ways in which her light skin (Zendaya is biracial) makes her a more palatable option for casting directors than her darker-skinned peers. “I am Hollywood’s, I guess you could say, acceptable version of a black girl, and that needs to change,” she said at BeautyCon in 2018. “We’re vastly too beautiful and too interesting for me to be the only representation of that.”

4) Zendaya insisted on a black family in Disney’s KC Undercover show. How can we link this to the ideas of Paul Gilroy? 

5) Who is Zendaya’s stylist and how did Zendaya use fashion and appearance to develop her celebrity persona? 

She’s been dressed by stylist Law Roach since she was 14 years old — including on that fateful Oscars night — and his playful, performative aesthetic and commitment to storytelling is definitely at work in Zendaya’s outfits. (When Roach wants her to wear a particularly challenging look, Zendaya told Vogue in 2017, he tells her, “It’ll be a mo-ment.”)

But not just anyone can pull off the looks that Roach is putting together. It takes someone like Zendaya, who understands the way that clothing creates image and finds the attitude necessary to make them work. “You’ve got to be a strong girl to do that on the red carpet,” Roach told the Guardian in 2018, referring to the time he dressed Zendaya as Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie for the Grammys. “You have to have conviction to say, ‘I like this, and I think I look cool, and fuck you to everybody who doesn’t.’”

“Nobody wanted to dress her when she wasn’t known,” Roach explained to the Guardian last year. So he came up with a simple workaround: He started putting Zendaya in outfits that had already been worn by people more famous than she was (Beyoncé, Kylie Jenner). That move made her into a “Who Wore It Better” fixture — and that, in turn, made Zendaya a known quantity in celebrity and fashion columns. She picked up name recognition. And after a while, she could wear any kind of clothes she wanted to, in the same way that, after a while, she could go to the Oscars as a presenter instead of the guest of a guest.

6) How has Zendaya influenced the representation of characters she has played? 

With her new power as producer, Zendaya got the show retitled from Super Awesome Katy to K.C. Undercover. She demanded that her character, K.C., be brainy rather than artsy (“There are other things that a girl can be” besides the Disney-standard singer or dancer, Zendaya explained to Vogue in 2017), and that she have martial arts training. She thought that when K.C. was at school, she should be a socially awkward teenager.

When the show premiered in 2015, reviews lauded specifically the elements that Zendaya had requested be added in. “Those who do watch will find a lot to admire in K.C., who’s both book- and street-smart, a critical thinker, and always graceful under pressure,” said the children’s media guide Common Sense Media.

7) How did LL Cool J describe Zendaya? 

LL Cool J told Vogue about Zendaya following a triumphant guest-starring spot on Lip Sync Battle in 2017, “She’s cool. You can manufacture fame. You can manufacture publicity. You can manufacture songs. You can’t manufacture cool.”

8) Do you agree with his assessment? Is Zendaya authentically cool or just another manufactured celebrity? 

I agree with the statement quite heavily. Zendaya just has this kind of personality not common in most celebrities. She isn't trying to force a cool agenda nor is she trying to force a strictly business tailored one, she's found a clear balance and rolled with it

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Social media analysis

1) Visit Zendaya's Twitter feed. Analyse her use of tweets - are they promoting her film/TV work, linked to fashion or sponsorship work or more socially or politically oriented? 

Her work isn't really at the forefront of her twitter account. In fact, it seem that her twitter account is more of a s**tposting account more than a formal one. She just kind of choses what to tweet about regarding her day.

2) Look at Zendaya's Instagram account. She has said this is the one account that is always 100% created by her - can you find any evidence of that in the way posts or images are constructed? 

Not really, all her post still seem to be very work influenced. This is in contrast to her twitter which seems to have way more informal content littered around it.

3) Watch Zendaya's 73 questions Vogue interview. How is this constructed to create a particular representation of Zendaya? 

4) Research Zendaya across any other social media accounts - e.g. Facebook. Do you notice any differences in how she represents herself on different platforms? Comment on text, images or tone/content.  

To me, I don't really notice a massive difference regarding the way she represents herself in other platforms. They seem to all follow the same format, or at least the same vibe or feeling. It's always a 50/50 on her posts - either it's formal, or it's not.

Representations

Go to our Media Magazine archive and read the article on Zendaya, social media, feminism and celebrity (MM81 - page 12). Answer the following questions:

1) What the concerns around social media discussed at the start of the article?

It’s not a new criticism of social media that it wreaks havoc on our brains. 

However, nowadays people seem to be taking these criticisms more seriously and concerns that social media can negatively affect one’s mental health and cause anxiety are more widespread and being taken more seriously. Younger and more impressionable users can’t help but compare themselves to one another whether consciously or unconsciously. Using platforms such as Instagram sometimes means that people equate their sense of self- worth with arbitrary values such as the number of likes or comments a post receives. This, combined with the added pressure of teen life, when young adults are working out their identity and ways to express that identity, is a recipe for a mental health crisis.

2) What example is provided of Zendaya’s authenticity – or possible lack of authenticity? 

A video was posted to her YouTube channel titled ‘Watch Me React To My First YouTube Vids’ in which she and a friend watched back the YouTube videos she first posted onto her channel as a child star. She derides the videos and comments on how fake they were, claiming that when she was younger she felt like she had to create or perform a persona that matched Rocky – her character in the Disney show, Shake It Up. She remarks that at the time she thought ‘the kids are gonna love it, it will be cool’ which perfectly encapsulates the idea of marketing oneself online and the pressure on young people to perform a certain way to get likes.

Interestingly enough, this seemingly authentic Zendaya video from 2017, where she criticises

her previous inauthenticity, might not have been as genuine as it seems. seems. If we read the video description it is quite clear from the way it is written in the third person, that Zendaya did not upload this video herself.

3) What is the one social media app that Zendaya manages entirely herself?

Instagram.

4) What are the issues highlighted by Billie Eilish regarding self-representation and feminism? 

Eilish is highlighting the lack of nuance in understanding self-representation and feminism which accompanies the mainstream online. These are over-simplified ideas and restrict one from accurately and earnestly portraying oneself online and contribute to the mental health epidemic caused partly by social media platforms. As Eilish expresses in her song ‘Not My Responsibility’, the way people respond to her chosen forms of self- representation is not on her. Eilish is reminding herself and her audience that the opinions of other people, specifically the tabloids, critics and trolls online, are not in her control.

• "Every girl wants to feel desirable...But then there’s a whole world of men who argue that women say, ‘Oh, I don’t want men to sexualise me’ but then wear shirts that show their boobs and sing songs about having sex.’ I’m like, do you not get the idea that we want to wear what we feel good in but we don’t want you to jump in? It’s very dumb."

• "If I wear more, if I wear less, who decides what that makes me?/ Is my value based only on your perception?/ Or is your opinion of me not my responsibility?"

5) How authentic do YOU feel Zendaya’s media representation is? Is it the real Zendaya or a media construction designed to look authentic? 

Since the whole social media video incident in 2017, I feel that Zendaya has taken the appropriate steps to help better validate her authenticity. It's gotten too well, in my opinion, that her personality during interviews and her online presence has bled together into this type of formal/informal way of living.

A/A* extension work

Read this academic history of celebrity culture and social contexts. How much can we find that is relevant to the kind of celebrity persona Zendaya has created? 

Precisely because celebrity was still a novel experience in the nineteenth century, the writers who were its first beneficiaries (or perhaps, its first victims) explicitly wrestled with these anxieties. Spurgin notes that by the time he wrote Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens had “begun to suspect that celebrity will rob him of his dignity,” which is why his books often included characters who exemplified what Spurgin terms “the humiliations of fandom and celebrity.” What Dickens hoped for, instead, was lasting fame based on actual accomplishment. (#AchievementUnlocked, we might fairly say now.)

The severing of notoriety from accomplishment is what made this kind of fame suspicious in the eyes of other nineteenth century artists, too. “Once one becomes a celebrity, from whatever field, then one’s membership in that field is less relevant than one’s status as celebrity,” Nicholas Dames writes in “Brushes with Fame: Thackeray and the Work of Celebrity.” Dames argues that the emergent “dynamics of celebrity” form a central preoccupation of Thackeray’s work, “whereby the celebrity is at once exalted and punctured, and whereby the machinery of publicity that creates celebrities is at once targeted as an ill and exploited as a tool.” Dividing the universe of notables into “good” and “bad” celebrities thus gave both the public and elites of the nineteenth century a way to quarantine their anxieties about celebrity itself. Today, a similar dynamic is at work in the way we perceive newly minted online celebrities and influencers.

Joshua Gamson differentiates between using the internet as “a launching pad for performers who manage to build an audience online that they then use to break into the off-line entertainment world” and internet-specific forms of celebrity like “the anti-celebrity, a collective in-joke, in which the most unlikely candidate becomes the most celebrated,” or “the self-made, do-it-yourself celebrity, who has pursued fame outside, despite and sometimes in opposition to the established celebrity system.” And Elaine Reprogle speculates that criticism of cancer bloggers stems from squeamishness about how much non-famous people should share online, and wonders whether “the expectations for maintaining ‘privacy’ [are] actually stricter for people who are not famous.”

How does the construction of Zendaya's online presence reflect the social and cultural changes of the last 10 years?

To me, Zendaya's online presence reminds me of the "anti-celebrity" character, as through her chill/no stress attitude, she ends up being as Joshua Gamson says "the most celebrated, the self-made, do-it-yourself celebrity, who has pursued fame outside, despite and sometimes in opposition to the established celebrity system.”