Pippa Middletons backside the Marxist interpretation

The scholarly community, a portion of it anyway, is diving ever-deeper in the analysis of the rear end of the sister of the wife of the man whose father’s mother sits on the throne of the United Kingdom.

The interest has spread westward, to the Republic of Ireland. Ireland has no monarch, and thus does not have a monarch’s child’s child’s spouse’s sibling’s butt of its own to analyse.

Gavin Wilkinson, who recently obtained a graduate degree from University College Dublin, wrote a treatise called Fetishising Pippa Middleton: Celebrity Posteriors, Whiteness and Class Aspirationalism. He has long stood at the forefront of Irish scholarship in celebrity studies. His 2007 undergraduate dissertation at Dublin Business School, Celebrity Worship: Its Relationship to Religiosity and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, ranks as one of the few achievements of its kind ever produced in the country’s top educational institutions.

Wilkinson’s argument, like its subject matter, is complex yet subtle: “I seek to investigate [the common] characterisation of Middleton’s backside by utilising Freudian and Marxist interpretations of fetishism that concern gender and class respectively, exposing how Middleton’s celebrity capital trades upon an economy of fetishised identity constructs, underscored by the property of division, which differentiate her from her contemporaries through her English whiteness. I analyse the materialisation of Middleton’s derrière in a broader British context, giving particular attention to how it operates as a sign of class aspirationalism and social mobility.”

Wilkinson’s piece on Middleton’s posterior appears in Celebrity Studies, an academic journal that launched in 2009, while the world was reeling from the previous year’s financial meltdown. Celebrity Studies managed to survive and to achieve eminence – one could easily argue preeminence – in its field.

In 2011, the journal published a study that, until now, dominated intellectual discussion of the meaning of Pippa Middleton’s butt. That paper, called And Bringing up the Rear: Pippa Middleton, Her Derrière and Celebrity”, written by Janet McCabe, a Birkbeck, University of London scholar, is the stool upon which Gavin Wilkinson rests his reasoning. This paper was significant enough to warrant three pages, as discussed in this column previously, while James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of DNA’s structure only got a page.

McCabe’s old Pippa paper is the standout among the more than three pages of references that protrude at the end of Wilkinson’s new Pippa paper.

Wilkinson compares and contrasts two great ways of looking at the fetishisation of Middleton’s rump. (By “great” here I mean: inspired by the thoughts of famous great intellectual celebrities.) A Freudian view, Wilkinson says, “relies on multiple perceptions concerning the synchronicity of both presence and absence, which are experienced at once through the mechanism of disavowal”.

But a Marxian take, Wilkinson explains, “substitutes social relations for value relations resulting in alienation between people”. Marx’s take on the Pippa’s butt hoo-ha is especially super, Wilkinson notes, because “the fact that this social estrangement is concurrently discernible and indiscernible mirrors Freud’s mechanism of disavowal”.

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