class and feminine excess: the strange case of Anna Nicole Smith
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abstract Cultural concerns about race, class and beauty often intersect with mass-mediated depictions of the female body. Drawing on Foucault’s theories about disciplining the public body, this article examines the changing public perception of Anna Nicole Smith from an ideal beauty to a white trash stereotype. This analysis argues that Smith’s very public weight gains, her outrageous behaviour and her legal battle for her late husband’s fortune is presented in the media as an example of inappropriate conduct for a white beauty ideal and thus is repositioned as white trash culture. Central to this repositioning is the constant tabloid depiction of Smith as an ‘out of control’ grotesque. This article argues that contrary to the optimistic understanding of female grotesques as effective agents of cultural criticism and social change, Smith represents the female grotesque as an agent of cultural control that instructs middleclass women on how to avoid committing classed, racial and gendered transgressions. The article concludes that the case of Anna Nicole Smith functions as a cautionary tale that reinforces cultural standards of normalization.
keywords Anna Nicole Smith; female grotesque; class and gender; white trash; beauty; body and cultural capital
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feminist review 81 2005 c 2005 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/05 $30 www.feminist-review.com (74–94)
introduction Throughout the 1990s, Anna Nicole Smith occupied an especially beguiling position as a second tier celebrity in popular culture. Her outlandish and excessive public life is, in some senses, a particularly American form of celebrity in that she embodies some of the most embarrassing stereotypes of the dumb Southern belle, the white trash gold-digger and the contemporary US fascination with even the lowliest forms of fame. To the rest of the world Anna Nicole Smith may be just a passing confirmation of the ubiquitous nature of American culture (if they are familiar with her at all), but in the USA she is a guilty pleasure, a tabloid spectacle that makes the rules and boundaries of culturally acceptability clear. The former stripper and fried-chicken waitress from Southern Texas first achieved public notoriety as Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1993 and through her subsequent modelling work on the extremely high-profile Guess Jeans advertising campaign. In the years that followed, Smith remained a popular subject of media scrutiny and ridicule as her supermodel status spiraled downward into embarrassingly bad film roles, dramatic weight gains and a bizarre marriage to an elderly oil tycoon more than 60 years her senior. But nothing seems to have caught the public’s attention more than Smith’s recent legal battles over the estimated 450 million dollar estate of her now late husband, J. Howard Marshall II. The likelihood that Smith’s inheritance, after only 14 months of marriage, will make her one of the wealthiest women in the USA seems to offend and bewilder many. After all, here is the woman chosen as the cover model in 1994 for New York magazine’s fea
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