Imagining Innocence reconceptualises the interface between childhood and celebrity studies by exploring how child stars embody layered cultural meanings of childhood across history and media. The book brings together research that explores child celebrities across the entertainment ecologies of film, television, sport, music, theatre, and streaming platforms.
It analyses iconic figures such as Julie Andrews, Patty Duke, Brooke Shields, and Charlotte Gainsbourg, alongside contemporary child celebrities on Disney+ and in participatory online cultures. Case studies also include trans child stars, the ‘Adam Goodes saga,’ which reveals how settler discourses of childhood are mobilised to contain Indigenous celebrity, and children of celebrities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The book explores how child stars sit at the intersection of childhood and celebrity studies, reflecting and unsettling dominant Western, Eurocentric constructions of childhood while reframing questions of gender, sexuality, race, disability, and national identity.
By theorising child stardom as a “palimpsest,” the book highlights how cultural narratives of the child are repeatedly overwritten yet never erased. The volume will be essential for scholars and students of media, celebrity, and childhood studies, as well as for readers interested in how children and childhood shape, and are shaped by, celebrity cultures. This book was originally published as a special issue of Information, Communication & Society.