Had Roland Barthes written his legendary Mythologies at the start of the 21st century, Britney Spears would very likely have found her place among them. Instead, the star features in two books published a decade apart by the prestigious French publishing house P.O.L[1], as well as in a documentary available on arte.tv. Could the singer of “Toxic” be the new muse of the French intelligentsia?
The fact is that Britney is more than just an avatar of a pop culture where fame comes at a high price. Like the objects Barthes analysed, she has become a mythologised figure: the fallen star, the unfit mother, the crazy woman—images that present themselves as self-evident while concealing the constructs that produced them. Among the many pop stars of her generation, Britney Spears occupies a unique position: she takes the mechanisms of exposure, objectification, and control that structure contemporary celebrity culture to an extreme, to the point where the metaphor of a ‘captured’ body has become a literal reality in her case. Hypersexualised from the very start of her career that began in childhood, later stripped of legal autonomy over her own body, and ultimately the unlikely catalyst of a collective movement—hers is a trajectory with no real parallel among her peers.
This is probably why all three of the works examined here chose her as their subject. Three cultural artefacts, three regimes of the gaze. A decisive shift has taken place between Jean Rolin’s Le Ravissement de Britney Spears (The Ravishing of Britney Spears, 2011) on the one hand, and Louise Chennevière’s Pour Britney (For Britney, 2024) and Jeanne Burel’s documentary Britney sans filtre (Britney Unfiltered, 2025) on the other. The #MeToo and the #FreeBritney movements have made it possible to critically re-examine the ordeals that have punctuated the star’s career. The fate of the teenager whose posters adorned countless bedrooms in the 2000s now moves those who were once indifferent to her songs and performances, as meticulously choreographed as they were suggestive. Her misfortunes are understood in the light of patriarchal violence and the brutality of the society of the spectacle. Yet these three works go further: each, in its own way, takes the figure of Britney Spears to expose and unsettle the gaze that created her.
The Capturing Gaze: Devouring Britney
In Le Ravissement de Britney Spears, Jean Rolin imagines an ironic narrative device that immediately calls into question the notion of gaze. The novel takes the form of a first-person account in which a secret agent recounts one of his latest missions. Sent to Los Angeles, his job is to prevent the possible kidnapping of Britney Spears by an Islamist group. Yet this mission, tellingly named “April Fool,” proves absurd from the outset. Assigned to observe the star’s habits, the agent, lacking a driving licence, is forced to rely on public transport or on the paparazzi to navigate a car-centric city. As a result, he invariably arrives too late to catch even a glimpse of his target during her rare outings. He never encounters Spears directly, only through media images and second-hand reports. His perspective is therefore entirely mediated, shaped by the screens of the E! channel and the tracking devices of the paparazzi, who dream of catching the star off guard—ideally at a moment of complete breakdown. All ways of seeing Spears, whether those of the narrator or the paparazzi, serve as mechanisms of capture and are inextricably linked with the constant objectification of the female body. In the narrator’s eyes, Spears is reduced to a “rather conventional yet effective character of a lustful yet puritanical little girl,”[2] whose contradictions encapsulate male fantasies. Predictably, the agent ends up sleeping with a prostitute who is the singer’s doppelgänger, “a pseudo-Britney, far prettier than the original” (p. 182). The star’s body is thus multiplied, interchangeable, and consumable.
In Le Ravissement de Britney Spears, Spears stands as a hyperbole of a world that is both hollow and detached from reality. The deployment of helicopters to cover a court appearance, the mobilisation of vast resources to capture insignificant scenes (such as Britney eating frozen yoghurt or Lindsay Lohan drinking a milkshake): reality fades into the background behind its own spectacle. Rolin’s criticism is less directed at the violence of this predation than at a world that pays so much attention to figures who embody nothing other than their own celebrity. He is not interested in Britney Spears as a person; she remains a projection surface, never a subject.
“To anyone who might doubt the plausibility of the threats of kidnapping or assassination hanging over the singer, I would object that it is hardly more absurd—and rather easier—to target Britney Spears than the World Trade Center towers, and that the symbolic value of the former, in the eyes of the American public, is scarcely less than that of the latter” (p. 43),
The narrator’s remark is as lucid as it is chilling. In equating Spears with the Twin Towers as objects of symbolic value, Rolin captures something real about the logic of American celebrity culture. Both are sites onto which collective fantasies and anxieties are projected. Yet the very coldness of the comparison is revealing: by treating Britney as a symbol among symbols, Rolin perpetuates the very logic he describes, reducing her once again to an abstraction, a cultural object whose humanity remains entirely out of frame.
The Critical Gaze: A Self-Examination
In her documentary Britney Unfiltered,[3] Jeanne Burel eschews irony to directly critique the gaze that has captured Britney Spears. Divided into five short episodes, the film alternates between archive footage and interviews with fans and researchers. It exposes the media violence the star has endured by subjecting it to critical scrutiny. The interview clips following the release of the star’s second album stand out for their misplaced brutality. The most intrusive questions, such as “Are you single?”, “Are you a virgin?”, “Have you had a boob job?”, are asked in a light-hearted tone and accompanied by a smile from the men asking them. The editing shifts the way these fragments are received by isolating them and commenting on them: what might have passed for media impertinence and tacit complicity with the audience appears, in hindsight, to be systemic violence.
The documentary also highlights the legal extension of this capturing and objectifying gaze. In 2008, Spears was placed under a conservatorship, which transferred her finances, decisions and even her body[4] under her father’s authority. This translated the capturing gaze she was subjected to into a very concrete legal form, galvanising a community of fans who mobilised to launch the #FreeBritney movement.
Spears herself reclaimed a form of narrative authority by publishing her memoir, The Woman in Me (2023), her own account of events that had long been narrated, interpreted, and consumed by others. In a similar move, the film revisits the images that turned ‘Britney’ into a mythology, turning the gaze back onto itself and reconfiguring familiar archive footage as objects of analysis and scrutiny. Britney Unfiltered thus questions the responsibility of media consumption. It does not merely indict the media industry; it also implicates its audience and raises an uncomfortable question: what does it mean to have watched, clicked, and laughed? Rather than presenting the archive footage in its spectacular immediacy, it re-contextualises it to reveal not only a series of excesses, but also a regime of visibility structured around the consumption of the female body and the (wo)manhunt.
This re-contextualisation reaches its climax in the scene where the star shaves her head. On 16 February 2007, the voice-over reminds us that “Britney Spears left the realm of ordinary stars and entered the realm of legend.” Images of the ‘event,’ sold at exorbitant prices and broadcast worldwide, saturated the media landscape. According to Rolin, this moment “has the distinction of having attained, via the internet, what comes closest, in human terms, to eternity” (p. 55): further proof of society’s vacuity, which endlessly replays the downfall of a celebrity thrown to the mercy of the public. Much like the items analysed by Roland Barthes, the scene functions as a saturated sign: its immediate interpretation, that of a spectacular downfall, masks the conditions of its production. The purpose of the documentary is precisely to challenge this apparent obviousness. Far from being a meltdown, the head-shaving appears as the culmination of a media witch hunt and, more broadly, of an extremely brutal collective gaze.
The Inhabited Gaze: Beyond the Myth
In Pour Britney, Louise Chennevière goes a step further: it is no longer simply a matter of exposing or denouncing the gaze that captures, but of tracing its effects from within. Without denying the sense of crisis inherent in the head-shaving episode, the writer seeks to interpret it not merely as a collapse, but as a gesture. Shaving her head is Britney’s massive middle finger to all those who scrutinise her:
“To have one’s skull laid bare, […] was to be excluded from the order of desire. […] That night, knowing she was being watched by everyone everywhere, she excluded herself with her own hands, and everyone then said she was mad, for must one not be mad to no longer wish to be desired by that naked gaze, to no longer wish to be immediately sexually available, to no longer wish to serve any purpose?”[5]
The ‘breakdown’ becomes a point of resistance. Rather than substituting a heroic reading for a pathologising one, Chennevière brings the shaving scene to the fore as a crisis point of the gaze: a moment in which the violence of the mechanisms that produce the image, and the possibility—however fragile—of thwarting its codes, are revealed.
This shift is part of a broader project. The title’s dedication (pour meaning both ‘to’ and ‘for’) functions simultaneously as an ethical gesture and a strategy of decentring. Rather than reconstructing a biographical truth or advancing a critical claim, the aim is to replace the logic of exposure with that of relationship. Chennevière intertwines her own experiences with those of Spears and Nelly Arcan, a Quebec writer who was constantly reminded of her past as a sex worker by the media and the public, and who ultimately took her own life, “because she could no longer bear having been made a woman” (p. 22). In doing so, Chennevière sketches out a shared, embodied field of experience, structured by the same forms of symbolic violence and the pressure to conform to gendered expectations. This community is realised both formally and thematically, as the text weaves together the narrator’s voice, Arcan’s prose, and Spears’s songs. Although she did not write them, they speak to her experience with uncanny precision.
The morbid internalisation of the capturing gaze takes root in childhood. The text first celebrates the joy of being a little girl, because “it means being able to become Britney Spears […], it’s singing and dancing, it’s being in your body, without fear or distance, feeling very much alive, it’s keeping a great distance from fear” (p. 36). However, this immediate bodily experience is gradually reshaped by the social gaze, and what was once a spontaneous relationship with the body becomes a constrained space of signs and interpretations. An acute awareness of being seen—and therefore judged—sets in:
“Perhaps that is what it means to no longer be a little girl: knowing that there will always be someone watching you, […] spying on you, keeping an eye on you and desiring you, whether you want it or not” (p. 39).
The most ordinary gestures become overdetermined signs that are constantly interpreted according to the logic of sexualisation and normalisation:
“It’s not just old perverts, no, that would be too easy; it’s because the old pervert is not a specific individual, but a way of seeing that is everywhere” (p. 66).
It is this regime of the gaze that needs to be destabilised:
“I, for one, would like people to stop saying that images are harmless, that they do nothing, and that they exist far away from us in their own realm, while in fact they penetrate and infect our bodies and souls” (p. 108).
Writing plays a full part in this. Through its jarring rhythm, syntactic breaks, and repetitions, the text rejects the narrative continuity and smoothing typical of media and biographical accounts. The unusual use of punctuation, particularly the misplaced or excessive use of commas, produces a discontinuous prose that makes the effort of speaking palpable. It is as if each sentence has to begin again in order to avoid being absorbed into stabilised forms of discourse or into silence.
Pour Britney can thus be read as an attempt to exit the mythological realm. Rather than creating a new image of Britney or inverting existing ones, Chennevière situates her within a lived, collective experience. In doing so, she paradoxically restores a form of universality to Britney’s story. Stripped of her myth, the star becomes a particularly clear example of a condition experienced by many: the pressure to conform to codes of seduction, being accused of madness when those codes are rejected, and the gradual loss of a self that was never truly one’s own.
Britney’s revenge
This, then, would be Britney’s ‘revenge.’ Long held captive, both literally and figuratively, by systems that stripped her of control over her own life, she has become the site upon which a critique of those very systems is articulated. Britney Spears is neither a triumphant icon nor a mere victim. The myth has not disappeared, but it has been fractured from within, making room for a subject—ambiguous, unstable, and irreducible. The Instagram videos the star keeps posting say as much, showing her spinning around (sometimes holding knives), again and again. Her polished early-career image is consigned to the past, yet her emancipation does not appear as a liberation. Among other things, Britney Spears has become a literary character—one through which our own ways of seeing are exposed.
Romance literature scholar Aurore Peyroles works at the ZfL on her project “In Court: Trials in Contemporary Literature.”
[1] Founded in 1983 by Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, P.O.L occupies a unique position within the French literary landscape. Renowned for its high standards and openness to contemporary writing, the publishing house pays particular attention to experimental literary creation.
[2] Jean Rolin: Le Ravissement de Britney Spears, Paris: P.O.L, 2011, p. 52. The title is an allusion to Marguerite Duras’s novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), in which the word ravissement carries a double meaning: both rapture and abduction. All quotations are referenced directly in the text and have been translated from French by me.
[3] Britney sans filtre, a documentary by Jeanne Burel, 2025 (available on arte.tv until 17 November 2026).
[4] During a court hearing in Los Angeles in June 2021, Britney Spears alleged that she had been coerced into keeping an intrauterine device (IUD) for several years against her will as part of the conservatorship imposed by her father. This testimony played a pivotal role in the campaign to end the singer’s conservatorship.
[5] Louise Chennevière: Pour Britney, Paris: P.O.L, 2024, p. 112. As with Rolin, all quotations are referenced directly in the text and have been translated from French by me.
VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Aurore Peyroles: The Reversal of the Gaze, or Britney Spears’s Revenge, in: ZfL Blog, 26.5.2026, [https://www.zflprojekte.de/zfl-blog/2026/05/26/aurore-peyroles-the-reversal-of-the-gaze-or-britney-spearss-revenge].
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13151/zfl-blog/20260526-01
