Celebrity

By the time Caitlyn Jenner’s reality program, I Am Cait, premiered in the summer of 2015 featuring the athlete-cum-reality show star, she had already helped to instigate a national conversation about transgender lives. The celebrity phenomenon surrounding Jenner, which arguably mainstreamed the issue of transgender rights in ways that had not been done before, testifies to the cataclysmic reach of the celebrity platform, the increasingly convergent nature of media celebrity, and the imperative to grapple with how a proliferation of “no-holds-barred” access to stars has transformed the notion of twenty-first-century celebrity from earlier models.