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Instagram Live has become a useful tool for maintaining celebrity and continuing to generate engagement, one that many celebrities turned to during COVID-19 shut-downs. Among them, Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe, the women’s sports power-couple, used Instagram Live to create a weekly talk-show that would eventually be titled  A Touch More . The Instagram Live platform provided the unpredictability of liveness and enabled Bird and Rapinoe to perform intimacy and authenticity as part of their celebrity persona maintenance during a time of increased precarity for their sports and thus their main avenue for fame. This article analyzes how Instagram Live – in relation to Instagram and Instagram Stories – operates as a locus of celebrity performance of authenticity and intimacy with  A Touch More  as the case study. Further, by exploring the construction of Bird and Rapinoe’s individual and coupled celebrity personas as fundamentally connected to the gendered precarity of their sports, I argue that even with their superstar status, Bird and Rapinoe’s cultivated intimacy in  A Touch More  was, in essence, a market necessity.

A Touch More with Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird: authenticity, intimacy and women’s sports celebrity on Instagram live