“Capitalist Pig: Consumption and the Tragedy of Anna Nicole Smith”
Megan Shea, NYU
A 1994 cover of New York Magazine features Anna Nicole Smith with the title “White Trash Nation” slapped across her. The photo depicts the fully-clothed Smith with legs wide open and replaces her privates with a delectable bag of Cheez Doodles. Smith’s hand reaches into the bag’s opening while her mouth is ostensibly filled with…well, with doodle. Smith’s rise to fame from a “white trash” background made her an undesirable “pig” under capitalism; her sexuality, spending habits, and public obsession with foods yielded a consumptive behavior that defied the royal standards associated with the blond archetype. Perhaps for this reason the media portrayed her as engorged; her feedings became the focal point for news outlets and her reality TV. show. Media coverage shows her eating a life-size cake of herself, a myriad of junk food, pizza (as part of an eating contest with her lawyer), and her favorite—pickles. To comprehend Smith’s relationship to consumption, I look to feminist scholarship on body image and Gayle Rubin’s account of regulation of women through trafficking. In the final chapter of my book, I argue that her lucrative self-exploitation yielded her as an accidental figure of feminist resistance. While most theorists see Smith as the epitome of a conforming celebrity culture, I view her as an anti-capitalist figure who cannot easily be marked. My excerpt will recap Smith’s relationship with food onscreen and off to gauge the relationship between food and capitalism in the mediatized performance of the female body.
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