STAR STUDIES, PERFORMANCE STUDIES

Richard Dyer, whose work helped launch star studies as a legitimate subfield in cinema studies, observes: ‘From the perspective of ideology, analyses of stars, as images existing in films and other media texts, stress their structured polysemy, that is, the finite multiplicity of meanings and affects they embody and the attempt so to structure them that some meanings and affects are foregrounded and others are masked or displaced’ (1979: 3). By combining semiotics and sociology, Dyer's approach ‘analyzes the star image as an intertextual construct produced across a range of media and cultural practices … [and] study of stars becomes an issue in the social production and circulation of meaning, linking industry and text, films and society’ (Gledhill 1991: xiv).

Dyer's approach has directed attention away from issues of truth and authenticity surrounding star images and refocused on ideological functions of star texts in cultural, historical and geopolitical contexts. Since the early 1990s, stardom as an ‘industry of desire’ (Gledhill 1991) in Hollywood and Europe has been examined by a growing number of scholars. A veritable bloom of scholarship in the new century demonstrates that this growing field has benefited from its foundational socio-semiotic approach and has investigated other aspects of stardom and star texts hitherto neglected, especially those outside or on the margins of Western cinemas.

This chapter explores a productive connection between star studies and performance studies, two interdisciplinary areas that have developed quickly since the 1990s. As suggested earlier (Farquhar and Zhang 2010: 6), in the perspective of performance studies, Dyer's ‘structured polysemy’ of star texts may be reconceptualised as an assemblage of polysemy not so much structured as conjunctural, for the simple reason that star performance, like performance in general, ‘isn't “in” anything, but “between”’ (Schechner 2002: 24), that is, between various acts of embodiment rather than one singular act. In this sense, performance studies’ emphasis on actions, interactions and relationships dovetails with star studies’ focus on contextuality and intertextuality, but the former's conjunctural vision focuses less on an apparently stable structure of embodied meaning than on glaring cracks and fissures opened up by repeated performances.