Salvato focuses on controllability, especially control of the body, as indicative as professionalism. As an example, he looks at Britney Spears experiencing a "descent from professional to amateur" around 2007, and how in order to "control the amateur body" she is absent from the cover art, and her voice is drowned in electronics on her next album, and how this is ironically labeled a "brilliant" album by the mainstream media. In this context, he says, the term professional "signifies slick, glossy, untroubled, and untroubling" (76). Here he equates the mainstream use of "professional" to refer to a type of dispassionate, neutral behavior. Chris Crocker can never be seen as a sincere figure, part of the "manufacture of sincerity" because he is deemed an unstable body, whose excesses of crying, emotion, bodily movements, and other behaviors allow him to be marginalized as an amateur.
I found it interesting that in Salvato's view, the idea of professionalism is linked to a restoration of confidence in the American social order. The narrow view of professionalism disenfranchises voices that might go against the grain of the dominant social order. However, counter to this narrowness is the potential for democratization via the internet and technology, and the dichotomies of professionalism will inevitably be challenged. Why is it important that society's amateur/professional dichotomy, as interpreted by Salvato, is centered on the body and body control, and what/whose agenda is this dichotomy serving?
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