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Like Zizi said, my interests include pop culture, new media, and marginalization. A recent news that overlaps with some of these topics is the new administration's effort to accelerate the process of getting abolitionist and activist Harriet Tubman‘s portrait on the $20 USD bill.
Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman escaped to Philadelphia and began rescuing and freeing many other slaves in her lifetime, ultimately serving in the Union Army and advocating for the women's suffrage. https://hypebeast.com/2021/1/president-biden-treasury-harriet-tubman-twenty-dollar-american-bill-announcement
What can we make of this effort to put her portrait on the $20 bill? Thinking as a communication and cultural studies scholar, what are the implications of finally having a Black woman, who was also a former slave and an activist, on literal dollar bills?
As explained in "Celebrity: A History of Fame" by scholars Susan Douglas and Andrea McDonnell, "Until the Renaissance period and the emergence of early capitalism in the 1500s, fame had been restricted primarily to royal and religious leaders...
...But with the growth in trade and the rise of a moneyed merchant class, portrait painting emerged as a more portable, more accessible means of recording and displaying one’s individual likeness and his or her success."
Douglas and McDonnell elaborated, "coins [...] were one of the earliest mass-produced technologies for circulating fame, and set the precedent for presidents and kings to have their faces on coins and later on bills."
Portraits were deemed status symbols then, affirming the portrayed person's power and historical significance. As money became a wildly circulated artifact among even laypeople, fame was also distributed with every coin and bill that traversed from one wallet to another.
So while we all have a chance to be "famous" and present ourselves as important through new media and a host of other structures, money as the functioning unit under capitalism remains just as pertinent to symbolize power and establish representation and significance.
