Celebrity. Andrea McDonnell
and highly vulnerable to its seductions. For example, when the silent movie star and matinee idol Rudolph Valentino died in 1926 at the age of thirty-one, and his hundreds of thousands of mostly female fans went into a highly emotional state of mass mourning, the phenomenon simply corroborated the notion of fandom as “excessive” and “bordering on deranged behavior.”46 In this view, fans were inept, socially isolated individuals (and typically women), and fandom served as psychological compensation for “the absence of ‘authentic’ relationships in their lives.”47 Yet while fandom could make up for low self-esteem, lack of friendships or community, and a dull, boring life, it was also seen as “a risky, even dangerous, compensatory mechanism.”48
In time, scholars began to raise, in earnest, critical questions about the nature of fandom and the desires and motivations of audience members. A notable shift occurred in the 1980s in media studies, when various scholars, while not denying the power of the mass media or celebrity culture, began to take issue with the image of media audiences as passive dupes, accepting whatever was presented to them. Stuart Hall, one of the field’s most eminent media studies scholars, and director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom, proposed a model for how audience members might make meaning from the media they consume. His famous and highly influential “encoding-decoding” schema argued that some people do, indeed, take the dominant or preferred meaning of a media text at pretty much face value. Others, however—people who think all the news is biased, or hate television on basic principle—typically engage in “oppositional” readings of media texts, rejecting their premises, values, and storylines. Most people, however, engage in “negotiated” readings; they bring to bear their own knowledge and experiences when watching television or a film or reading a magazine, and accept some elements of the text while questioning or rejecting others.49
Other scholars began both testing and extending Hall’s work, and this applied to conceptions of fandom as well. In his book Claims to Fame, Josh Gamson interviewed fans themselves, as well as analyzing the celebrity production system, and developed a detailed typology of fan types. He laid out the three broad interpretive strategies that celebrity watching audiences use, depending on how aware they are of the production process, how much they believe in the veracity of the celebrity text, and how much they engage with celebrity culture. On one end of the spectrum are “Traditionals” who see fame as a recognition of internal gifts, believe most of what they read and hear, and have minimal knowledge of the actual apparatus of celebrity production; this is the stereotypical, gullible fan. “Second-order traditionals,” in the middle of the spectrum, appreciate a more complex narrative about the star in which publicity mechanisms play a role in producing his or her fame, but this knowledge does not undermine the fan’s esteem. This kind of fan is not ignorant of the publicity system but takes it into account.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is what Gamson labeled “postmodernist/antibelievers,” the total skeptics. They are interested in the techniques of artifice in and of themselves; they know about celebrity manufacture and seek out its evidence and its details, rejecting the story of the naturally rising celebrity as naïve and false. Their belief in celebrity gossip (and in the legitimacy or authenticity of celebrities) is minimal, and their awareness of and cynicism about the production process is high. This is a form of engaged disbelief, and the revelations of the celebrity-production techniques feeds rather than undermines their interest. For example, when Jake Gyllenhaal began dating the pop star Taylor Swift and then quickly broke up with her, a skeptic might wonder whether he and his publicists were trying to keep him in the headlines to help promote his latest film Southpaw.
This shift in thinking about the way audiences actively use media provided for additionally nuanced understandings of fandom. Rather than think of fans as passive consumers whose lack of taste drives their choices, John Fiske argues that fandom is denigrated precisely because it is typically linked with the consumption and enjoyment of “cultural forms that the dominant value system denigrates.”50 If fandom had become, as Fiske noted, “a common feature of popular culture in industrialized societies,”51 then we should rethink its functions and, yes, its pleasures. While knowledge and consumption of official or what used to be called “high” culture (opera, fine wine, art) enhances our cultural capital, knowledge about celebrity culture has come to do that too. Fiske noted how fandom can fill a cultural lack by providing a community, and one based on having a specialized knowledge of and relationship to the star that enhances social prestige and self-esteem.
Fandom serves as a tie to others with the same passions, tastes, and affinities, and Fiske especially wanted to emphasize how fans work to produce meanings about celebrities through different modes of “productivity,” and thus elaborate on and produce our own extended meanings from the offerings of the culture industries. “Semiotic” productivity involves the ways in which fans use the stars they admire as resources to construct their own identities, often more empowered, often in opposition to prevailing expectations about appropriate behaviors. One example was when many Madonna fans in the 1980s drew from her defiance of norms around female sexuality to embrace their own desires for sexual agency as girls and women.
“Enunciative” productivity is one we all know: it is shared commentary, sometimes praiseworthy, sometimes condemnatory, between us and others, about a celebrity (or a performance he or she is in) that relates them and their behaviors to our everyday lives. Indeed, as Fiske notes, “much of the pleasure of fandom lies in the fan talk that it produces.”52 At the height of MTV’s Jersey Shore phenomenon, for example, people loved watching the show together and (typically) expressing shock or outrage over the latest excesses of the show’s stars. Viewers of The Bachelor (and The Bachelorette) often text or tweet with others while the show is on to comment, often derisively, about the comments and behaviors of those on the screen. Such enunciative productivity affirms a group’s core values, what it admires and disdains, and what values binds it together. “Textual productivity” is when fans create and circulate texts based on celebrities, TV shows, and movies, typically online, and often extend or utterly alter the characters and meanings of the original production to suit their own needs and desires. All of these forms of productivity rest, in part, on the notion that “stars are constructed by their fans and owe their stardom entirely to them” and serve central functions in constructing individual and group identities.53 Fiske’s work helps to outline how active fandoms, expressed both individually and in concert with other fans, allow audiences to benefit emotionally and socially while enhancing our cultural capital within the fan community.54 In a large-scale society, the enunciative productivity that Fiske outlines is made possible thanks to our collective access to a common cohort of actors whom we know and about whom we can engage in sociable conversation. Studies show that gossip, despite its trivial reputation and negative connotations, actually serves important social functions, such as encouraging bonding and camaraderie among friends and family members. It can also allow us to release stress, share ideas, and strengthen friendships.55
Indeed, scholars like Joke Hermes have noted how celebrity culture—and especially gossip about celebrities—serves as a kind of social glue within large-scale societies. In her study of gossip magazine readers, Hermes identified a series of pleasures associated with celebrity gossip, from the vicarious enjoyment of a world of wealth and glamour to the feeling that celebrities are a part of our own inner circles, a kind of extended family.56
Gossip has been typically associated with women, taken to refer to malicious talk about people not present and to reinforce a form of informal control over others. But the explosion in celebrity gossip has shown that it can also be highly pleasurable, and hardly only a female practice or domain. Nor is such gossip always mean-spirited; it can be admiring and friendly. Gossip about celebrities—their achievements, their marriages and divorces, their cheating scandals, their trips to rehab—draws people together to evaluate behaviors and to construe standards of shared morality, about what is and is not acceptable behavior. It serves to create in-groups and out-groups. So it helps establish solidarity, a sense of community, including a moral community that identifies and locates what we feel to be ethical, behavioral certainties. Unlike discussing politics or current affairs, for example, which can be contentious, or involve grasping esoteric policy problems, celebrity gossip allows us to make judgments without having to think too hard. Thus it provides a form of confident self-expression about famous, rich, and often powerful