Minoritized Celebrities & Counter-Narratives: Media Storytelling and Audience Perceptions of Red Table Talk

This research utilized critical interpretive analysis of Facebook’s Red Table Talk web series and focus group interviews to explore how counter-narratives are produced on Red Table Talk and received by audience members. Social media provide opportunities for celebrities of minoritized backgrounds to enact public relations with counter-narrative discourse, subverting gatekeeping boundaries and offering alternatives to master narratives about their identities and experiences. The cultural significance of Red Table Talk as an intervention and interruption of the larger narratives and discourses about celebrities marginalized by their racial and ethnic identities is argued. Results suggest that the use of mediated counter-narratives humanized and empowered the minoritized celebrities to tell their own stories and resist master narratives.