ABSTRACT

Centeno, D. DG. (2012). Celebrification Mythologies: Class and Gender Reading of Celebrity Endorsers in Political Campaign Advertisements. Unpublished Masteral Thesis, University of the Philippines, College of Mass Communication.

Celebrification as a process and phenomenon is generally observed as a recent trend in the daily media and social observations. It attests that the discourse on celebrities is evident and influential in the everyday communication in the media and among audiences in the contemporary Filipino culture. This study is pursued to investigate a perspective that helps understand the phenomenon of celebrification coming from the audience’s viewpoint. Anchored on the theoretical framework involving the philosophies of Barthes in myth-making, Bourdieu in social distinctions, and Horton and Wohl’s parasocial interaction, the study investigates queries on class and gender readings of images of prominent celebrity endorsers in the context of political campaign advertisements and other media interactions. This study explores on the role of parasocial interaction as a media construct in the differences of celebrity image formations among class and gender audience groups. It is an audience-centered reading of four select celebrities who endorsed political election candidates in the May 2010 national elections. They are Sharon Cuneta, Kris Aquino, Sarah Geronimo, and Manny Pacquiao. Readings come from the employees of the University of the Philippines Diliman in two methods: a survey and focus group interviews. A survey composed of the developed media-personae psychometric Parasocial Interaction Scale (PSIS) and voting behavior items was administered with 296 randomly-selected UP Diliman employees. As a complement to the quantitative method, a series of focus group interviews were conducted with six class and gender groups from the same pool of survey respondents. Data analyses generally used measures of central tendency (i.e., mean) and variance (i.e, T-test and Analysis of Variance) were employed to examine the quantitative units of analysis. Meanwhile, thematic interpretations were utilized to construct mythological configurations through the myth-emergent personified descriptors of celebrities from the readers during the interviews. Findings show that class and gender groups vary their reading on certain celebrities. The quantitative findings from the PSI survey tell that the degree of parasocial interaction distinctively vary from different audiences. Demographic characteristics of the audiences such as gender, income, age, occupation, and educational attainment play a descriptive function in their reception and parasocial interaction with the four celebrities. Also, the four celebrities under study elicit images that are similar across class and gender in certain aspects. But generally, readings were distinct for each celebrity giving prominence to the overall character they portray in political endorsement and other media contexts. Parasocial Interaction is strong in its influence on the formation of images and the way class and gender readers form their impressions and actions towards the political messages of these celebrities.