'Fowl' play: reverse place-branding of Toxteth, Liverpool through the celebrity discourse of Robbie Fowler.

Butler-Warke, Alice

Abstract

This paper interrogates the concept of place-branding and celebrity. It uses Liverpool Football Club striker Robbie Fowler and his roots in Toxteth as a way to contest the unidirectional relationship between celebrity and place. Where 'traditional' place-branding sees a celebrity's positive symbolic capital transferred to place, this paper shows how the direction of transfer may be reversed with the symbolic capital of a place flowing towards the celebrity. It takes the stigmatized area of Toxteth and shows what happens when the negative symbolic capital of place is entered into the discourse of celebrity. In the case of Fowler, this paper highlights how a territorially stigmatised Toxteth is used as both a symbolic millstone that drags him down and an illustration of his achievements 'against the odds'. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis and drawing on a Chomskyian framing of the political economy of the media, this paper suggests that the linking of Fowler and Toxteth is illustrative of a broader neoliberal ideology that sees symbolic violence as the means of ensuring a distinct social stratification.

Citation

BUTLER-WARKE, A. 2023. 'Fowl' play: reverse place-branding of Toxteth, Liverpool through the celebrity discourse of Robbie Fowler. Social and cultural geography [online], 24(9), pages 1538-1556. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2022.2073466

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 10, 2022
• Online Publication Date: May 10, 2022
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2023
• Deposit Date: May 2, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: May 2, 2022
• Journal: Social and cultural geography
• Print ISSN: 1464-9365
• Electronic ISSN: 1470-1197
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 24
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 1538-1556
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2022.2073466
• Keywords: Place making; Tourism; Branding; Notoriety; Footballers; United Kingdom
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1653050