Diana and Beyond

Analyzes the global circulation of white femininity through Princess Diana and other celebrity figuresThe death of Princess Diana unleashed an international outpouring of grief, love, and press attention virtually unprecedented in history. Yet the exhaustive effort to link an upper-class white British woman with ""the people"" raises questions. What narrative of white femininity transformed Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular? What ideologies did the narrative tap into to transform her into an idealized woman of the millennium? Why would a similar idealization not have appeared around a non-white, non-Western, or immigrant woman? Raka Shome investigates the factors that led to this defining cultural/political moment and unravels just what the Diana phenomenon represented for comprehending the relation between white femininity and the nation in postcolonial Britain and its connection to other white female celebrity figures in the millennium. Digging into the media and cultural artifacts that circulated in the wake of Diana's death, Shome investigates a range of salient theoretical issues surrounding motherhood and the production of national masculinities, global humanitarianism, transnational masculinities, the intersection of fashion and white femininity, and spiritual and national modernity. Her analysis explores how images of white femininity in popular culture intersect with issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and transnationality in the performance of Anglo national modernities. Moving from ideas on the positioning of privileged white women in global neoliberalism to the emergence of new formulations of white femininity in the millennium, Diana and Beyond fearlessly explains the late princess's never-ending renaissance and ongoing cultural relevance.""Brings together one of the most talked about images in recent history, Princess Diana, with one of the least talked about, whiteness. It is a brilliant move, to see, scrutinize and show the elusive, and to many people invisible, structures of white femininity in one of its most visible and vivid manifestations. Combining a painstaking analysis of Diana's immediate historical and cultural context with a wide sense of her connection to other prominent images of white femininity, the book lucidly opens up the gender and ethnic specificities of particular, but also broad and familiar, instances of motherhood, fashion, nation, masculinity, and spirituality. This is a major contribution to cultural history and celebrity studies as well as the fields of gender and whiteness, beautifully written, always enthralling.""--Richard Dyer, author of White: Essays on Race and Culture and Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society