For a decade, Ms. Clarkson has been belting power-pop hits like “I Do Not Hook Up” and “Since U Been Gone,” and dismissing withering criticism of her weight. As a result, her fans have built a distinctive relationship with her: less that of conventional adulation than of identification and admiration.
“You get a sense that she’s one of us,” Ms. Travali said.
That connection has been reinforced by “Stronger,” released last week, which the singer describes as her own journey of empowerment, addressed directly to fans. On one song, “You Can’t Win,” Ms. Clarkson, 29, sings, “If you’re thin/Poor little walking disease/If you’re not/They’re all screaming obese/If you’re straight/Why aren’t you married yet?/If you’re gay/Why aren’t you waving a flag?”
The bond was apparent Thursday, at a Manhattan taping of “VH1 Unplugged: Kelly Clarkson,” which has its premiere Nov. 18. Ms. Clarkson’s appeal reached across generations of women.
Linda Scott, 52, who traveled with her husband from Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, said that her daughter, 24, was also a passionate fan. Celebrating joint birthdays at the taping were Jolie Rosen, 14, and her mother, Cynthia Kroning (who gave her age as “old enough to be her mother”) of Norwood, N.J.
“Kelly’s not afraid to discuss anything,” said Mrs. Kroning, a fan by dint of driving teenage girls around with the car radio blasting. Referring to a cut on “Stronger,” she added, “ ‘What Doesn’t Kill You (Stronger),’ should be an anthem.”
At the taping, Ms. Clarkson’s genial unflappability came across from the get-go. Finishing a bluesy cover of Carrie Underwood’s “I Know You Won’t,” she glanced down at her red body-hugging sheath dress. She laughed and tugged at the top.
“Oh, my God!” Had she been spilling out of her dress the whole time? she asked.
That poise has gotten her through years of sometimes-harsh jabs. On the video for her first single, “Mr. Know It All,” Ms. Clarkson looks skeptically at a wall papered with news clippings that have sniped at her weight, challenged her sexuality and ridiculed her rebellion against music-label executives. Then she tears an opening through her paper wall of shame and jauntily steps into a sun-soaked landscape.
At the taping, she stepped into a powerful “Mr. Know It All,” mother-and-daughter fans bobbing and lip-syncing. Afterward, Ms. Clarkson shook her head, abashed.
“I flubbed the lyrics, damn it,” she said. “And I knew it when I was doing it, too. So why didn’t I just stop? It’s just like my relationships!”
The makeup people dabbed at her face. As they turned away, Ms. Clarkson wiped her lips, mouthing to the audience, “Too much!”
In an interview, Courtney E. Martin, author of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters,” said, “There’s so much talk about Taylor Swift being the girl next door” — the role played by the singer in her video for “You Belong With Me” — “but she’s tall and blond, the girl that the girl next door wants to be. But with Kelly, you sense that she really is the girl next door. She acknowledges more complexity than most stars talk about.
“For any woman to not only own her body size at an average woman’s weight is amazing, let alone to own weight gain without shaming and stigmatizing it publicly. It’s a difficult line to walk because Kelly’s private. She doesn’t want to be known as the fat activist pop star. That’s not her mantle.”
While waiting for another stage setup, Ms. Clarkson shimmied in her red dress. “Spanx!” she shouted merrily, pulling back the celebrity Wizard of Oz curtain. “For all you ladies out there, let me tell you: it sucks it right in. You feel like a packed sausage. I feel like I have two pairs on.”
No question that the girl next door has great pipes, but for all Ms. Clarkson’s approachable charm, she wears steely armor. To promote her music, Ms. Clarkson will chatter amiably to any microphone (though she declined several interview requests for this article), but she keeps her private life private.
She lives off the paparazzi grid, both in Nashville and on a ranch in Texas, where her animal-rescue shelter includes 10 horses; innumerable dogs, cats, donkeys and goats, and a llama. She has said she has 12 tattoos (including one behind each ear), owns nine guns (and sleeps with a Colt .45), and will drink Chivas and sing karaoke to Guns N’ Roses songs.
“Female pop stars like Beyoncé, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez all come out of the relationship factory,” dating other celebrities, said Ann Powers, a critic for NPR Music. “But Kelly has stood outside of that. She is not trying to sell herself on the red carpet.”
Her public persona, Ms. Powers added, “has always been the sadder but wiser girl, which has to do with her voice: a dusky alto that veers toward R&B but has a rock edge. That has allowed her to develop a persona of defiance, independence, of seasoned experience. And her actual biography mirrors that.”
Ms. Clarkson has spoken of having grown a thick skin by age 6, when her parents divorced. Her early years in Burleson, Tex., were hardscrabble. She couldn’t wait to see small-town Texas in her rearview mirror. After graduating from high school in 2000, she worked a string of jobs to afford to get to Los Angeles, to distribute copies of her demo tape.
But after more dead-end jobs in Los Angeles and occasional work as a television extra, Ms. Clarkson saw her gambit go up in flames, literally, when her apartment caught fire. She lived in her car and, in 2002, slinked home to Texas. And that’s where she heard about auditions in Dallas for a new music contestant television show, “American Idol.”
Since becoming the show’s first winner, Ms. Clarkson has sold more than 20 million copies of her four studio albums and has won two Grammys. As she hits her promotional whirlwind for “Stronger,” it’s clear that Ms. Clarkson has learned to respond deftly to interviewers’ under-the-microscope questions.
Last month in Australia, talk show hosts eyed her, repeatedly asking whether she had lost weight.
She smiled and immediately replied to one, “No, I have not! Nothing! Everywhere I go, people say that, but nope!”
She refers airily to her small breasts, “I’m sporting a flat now, same as since seventh grade.” Conversely, she told a Canadian interviewer that, unlike singers who can dance, like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Beyoncé, “I keep my pants on because let’s face it: we would scare people,” describing her posterior as “big” and “giant.” She burst out laughing. “That would be a big moon!”
Ms. Powers, the NPR Music critic, said, “Here is someone who was manufactured by the music industry, by ‘American Idol,’ and it’s ironic that she has emerged as one of our most authentic artists.”
Ms. Clarkson is always asked whether she has a boyfriend, with some interviewers directly inquiring if she is a lesbian. Inevitably, she guffaws. “I have a big gay following,” she told an Australian interviewer recently. “If I were gay, I’d probably have more luck.” Women, she added, are far less intimidated by her than men.
Donnette Noel, an adviser to the Dressing Room Project, a girls’ body-image campaign, has been following Ms. Clarkson since her “American Idol” debut. “She was this down-home girl, so sweet and down to earth,” Ms. Noel, 24, said. “You’d expect her to change. But she hasn’t. Her weight fluctuates, and she’s O.K. with that. She became a role model without even trying.”
