White trash celebrity in the age of eugenics: desecrating Clara Bow

This essay examines the desecration of Clara Bow whose celebrity as a movie star and cultural icon exploded across media in the 1920s and early 1930s. Her symbolic and commodity value was synonymous with the erotic provocations of the stereotyped flapper, but her celebrity transgressed Hollywood’s conventional discursive inscription of female stardom as a glamorous attainment of upward mobility, instead infecting it with themes convergent with eugenics discourse. As a consequence, Bow’s desecration was related not just to the eruption of sex scandals, but also to a persistent emphasis on her tainted class identity as ‘white trash’. In this respect, the desecration of Clara Bow anticipated elements of twenty-first-century celebrity formation, including the moral judgements and class shaming directed at ‘chav’ female celebrities associated with British reality television.