This special issue of Celebrity Studies emerges out of the second biennial conference of the journal, held at Royal Holloway, University of London in June 2014. That conference was attended by nearly 200 scholars from every corner of the globe and we were extremely fortunate to have an amazing (and generous) line up of keynote speakers: our thanks to Richard Dyer, Diane Negra, Mandy Merck, Nick Couldry and our very own Sean Redmond along with all the delegates who made the conference such a success.
At the time of writing, we have just announced plans for the third conference, to be held at the University of Amsterdam in June 2016.Footnote1 These events not only allow us – as editors – to see the field in ‘embodied’ form (rather than the disembodied nature of the review process), but also demonstrate the growing vitality and maturity of the field. In 2014 we took the opportunity to test this with a themed call for papers on the question of ‘approaching celebrity’, asking scholars to consider the range of methodological tools that might constitute the field, better help interrogate the concept of celebrity and need greater attention in shaping the study of celebrity. This special issue represents the best of the many responses we received on that theme and, like celebrity studies itself, reveals a catholic approach to the question of method in the discipline. Thus, in the articles that follow the authors undertake analyses informed by everything from netnography to genre studies, from discourse analysis to social theory, and from social media metrics through to audience studies.
The selection chosen here represents the diversity of approaches in the field, highlights areas that have been overlooked, highlights new methodologies and calls for the use of more care in the deployment of specific methodologies to provide new insights and rigour to Celebrity Studies. Although the subject of research methods can often seem dry and dusty, the scholars collected here attack the subject with verve and innovation, asking key questions of the field that undoubtedly make it richer and stronger. Read on, write on and research on!
From the anonymous to the historical, the ‘temporarily meaningful’ and the remix of meanings
The special issue opens proactively with Mandy Merck’s keynote contribution, which is neither a study of celebrity nor a direct intervention on methodology. Instead, Merck’s entry highlights a key blind spot in the field of celebrity studies by approaching the topic from a genre-based analysis of the role of melodrama in celebrity narratives. As Merck sets out, while celebrity studies has done much to account for the pervasiveness of the focus of celebrity in narratives that range from newspaper journalism to Hollywood blockbusters and everything in between, little has been done to consider its (structural) opposite: anonymity. Although many scholars in celebrity studies acknowledge and study the way in which power and struggle take place in the ordinary, the mass and the everyday, these areas of investigation are always studied in relation to fame: for example, the audiences of celebrity, or the increasingly recurrent figure of the ‘ordinary celebrity’. But Merck suggests that if we are all celebrities now, a question the field has turned over many times, should we also be asking: ‘are we also all anonymous now’? In the context of a new ‘snoopers charter’ to be introduced in the UK and the reform of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States at the time of writing in mid-2014, it is worth noting that we once were.
In equally provocative fashion, David Marshall, Christopher Moore and Kim Barbour provide an account of how persona studies might intersect with celebrity studies. Focusing on the online presentation of self as a way of exploring celebrity and public persona, drawing on interpretative phenomenological analysis, social network analysis and prosopography to analyse the networked nature of the contemporary public persona. Persona studies, in some respects, offers and stands as a challenge to celebrity studies – taking a much wider approach to questions of performance and the self than celebrity studies does. Here, however, Marshall, Moore and Barbour offer thoughts on how the two disciplines might connect to offer some new directions. As they suggest, the methodologies worked through in this article ‘point to the array of techniques that individuals and institutions use to make and maintain their public profiles’, which celebrity studies might productively mine in understanding contemporary fame.
The next two articles both continue to investigate how online tools affect the presentation and re-presentation of self in a digital era. Bethany User examines how celebrities manage the performance of self through the convention of the Twitter interview: bypassing the professional journalist gate-keepers to present a version of the self that is perceived as being more authentic at the same time as the platform affords the celebrity greater control over their image management. Akane Kanai then offers an analysis of the way in which fans of Jennifer Lawrence remix her image through the use of memes to produce a highly active, and yet normative, version of femininity in a postfeminist culture. Bringing a discursive approach to the analysis, Kanai examines the affective labour of the young female bloggers as a form of identity work that reinscribes gendered power structures through audiences’ use of celebrity.
Similarly drawing on a discursive approach, but turning away from the contemporary digital moment to unearth the archive, the final two essays in this special edition put the spotlight on British television history. Andrew Tolson offers a meticulous analysis of the discourses in circulation around early television fame in the UK through close examination of the TV Times listing magazine (1955–1964). He argues that the terms ‘celebrity’, ‘personality’ and ‘star’ all developed increasingly specific meanings in the discourse so that the term ‘celebrity’ could be understood as defining an emerging popular culture and the relationship between media performers and outsiders/ordinary people. In a call echoed across many of the essays that follow, Tolson points to the importance – and possibility – of detailed empirical methods which shed new light on the celebrity archive.
The final essay in the main section of the journal both continues this focus on the empirical and returns us to Marshall et al.’s concern with the public presentation of self, but this time through the historical archive of television. John Ellis examines Deal or no Deal and the public performance of the ordinary self as an example of a programme and celebrity that was ‘temporarily meaningful’. In focusing on such examples, Ellis is able to demonstrate how paying attention to what Driessens refers to below as the epistemological conditions of celebrity enables an account of celebrity that reveals the historical assumptions which underpin the activation of the term ‘celebrity’. Thus, as Ellis concludes, ‘temporary meaningful’ celebrities might take on a ‘renewed salience when reconsidered against wider historical trends and within the rich array of (everyday) cultural references in which they originally acted’.
Epistemological, empirical and social
This issue of Celebrity Studies Forum is also devoted to method and approaches to celebrity. In it, Olivier Driessens picks up on the challenge set out by Ellis to locate the contextual factors in play in any analysis of celebrity. Indeed, Driessens questions the very way in which we deploy the term celebrity to label those we might study, encouraging scholars to reflect more carefully on how they are defining the phenomenon under investigation. Driessens’ emphasis on the epistemological is immediately met by Heather Mendick, Kim Allen and Laura Harvey’s empirical work on the everyday audiences of celebrity. Challenging the dominance of textual analysis, the authors call for a turn to the audience that will trouble ‘easy answers about what celebrity is and does’. Drawing on a large-scale study of young consumers of celebrity, Mendick, Allen and Harvey acknowledge the difficulty in empirical audience studies while also demonstrating the import and effectiveness of such work in understanding not only celebrity, but its place in social systems.
Ashley Logan’s articulation of how netnography might be usefully deployed to better understand contemporary celebrity follows on from this piece, placing an empirical analysis of the audience in the increasingly online spaces in which they are found. In her participant observation of a community formed around Kate Middleton, Logan demonstrates how the audience’s status (or aspirations towards) ‘micro-celebrity’ can create further barriers to empirical research that netnography might help overcome.
These empirical pieces are followed by Koen Panis’ intervention on the debate about celebrities’ socio-political involvement. Panis’ piece calls for a broadening of approach to understanding celebrities’ socio-political engagement beyond the increasingly well-trodden ground of development aid. Similarly to Driessens, he calls for greater clarity in how aspects of celebrity are defined and named, arguing that much scholarship on celebrities’ socio-political involvement misses a range of connections to be made between disciplines because of the diversity of terminology in play.
If the special issue opened with one keynote, it is appropriate to close with another. Nick Couldry generously offers his thoughts for others to build on regarding the way in which celebrity studies might make use of social theory, setting out some initial ways in which scholars might seek to deploy Bourdieu’s account of social fields in order to better understand today’s mediated society. Couldry’s concluding remarks about the interface between celebrity studies and social theory might be deployed more widely here: the field, and its interaction with a range of other methodological approaches, has a lively future ahead of it.
Finally, at least for the short term, I’m sad to say that I’ll be taking a hiatus from that future as I stand down from my role as Forum Editor. Having founded the section and journal with Su and Sean, it’s been a privilege to work with them and to watch the journal and field grow – particularly into one that is characterised by the generosity of ideas and debates exchanged between scholars. It is time now for the Forum to have a new lease of life under the excellent Hannah Hamad. My thanks to Su and Sean, to all the contributors who have made the section come to life over the past six years and, of course, to all the reviewers who have ensured short and timely pieces retain rigour and quality. May the good ship celebrity continue to sail on!
James Bennett
Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
Email: [email protected]