Imagining Innocence reconceptualises the interface between childhood and celebrity studies by exploring how child stars embody layered cultural meanings of childhood across history and media.
Imagining Innocence reconceptualises the interface between childhood and celebrity studies by exploring how child stars embody layered cultural meanings of childhood across history and media. The book brings together research that explores child celebrities across the entertainment ecologies of film, television, sport, music, theatre, and streaming platforms.
It analyses iconic figures such as Julie Andrews, Patty Duke, Brooke Shields, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, alongside contemporary child celebrities on Disney+ and in participatory online cultures. Case studies also include trans child stars, the ‘Adam Goodes saga,’ which reveals how settler discourses of childhood are mobilised to contain Indigenous celebrity, and children of celebrities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book explores how child stars sit at the intersection of childhood and celebrity studies, reflecting and unsettling dominant Western, Eurocentric constructions of childhood while reframing questions of gender, sexuality, race, disability, and national identity.
By theorising child stardom as a “palimpsest,” the book highlights how cultural narratives of the child are repeatedly overwritten yet never erased. The volume will be essential for scholars and students of media, celebrity, and childhood studies, as well as for readers interested in how children and childhood shape, and are shaped by, celebrity cultures. This book was originally published as a special issue of Information, Communication & Society.
Introduction: The Child Celebrity as Palimpsest: Reconceptualising the
Interface between Childhood and Celebrity Studies
1. 'Prima Donna in
Pigtails': Reading the Child Stardom of Julie Andrews
2. Challenging Normalcy
through Stardom: Childhood Celebrity, Disability, and Patty Duke's Helen
Keller
3. 'A Woman's Face and a Child's Body': Brooke Shields and Child
Sexuality
4. 'Lying with You': The Filial Coupling of Serge and Charlotte
Gainsbourg
5. Heritage Child Stars on Disney+: The Liquidities of Child
Stardom in the SVOD Era
6. Teach Your Children Well: Adam Goodes, from Unruly
Child to Indigenous Statesman
7. Jazz Jennings and Evie Macdonald: Trans
Child Celebrities, Transnormativity, and Childhood 'Innocence'
8. Meet Our
Baby: Celebrities' Children and Childhood between Comfort, Refuge, and
Futurity
Djoymi Baker is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cinema Studies, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Jessica Balanzategui is Associate Professor in Media, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Diana Sandars is a lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
