Audiences for stardom and celebrity

In the 2003 co-edited collection Contemporary Hollywood Stardom (Austin and Barker 2003), Martin Barker observed how:

[T]he remarkable thing about our knowledge of cinema audiences, let alone our knowledge of audiences’ relations to stars, is its paucity […] whatever work has been done has appeared in the last ten years – and that is a smattering. (Barker 2003, p. 151)

Even if we expanded this to include the study of audiences for celebrity, the suggestion of a ‘smattering’ of work still remains largely apposite in the decade since this was written. Indeed, in Celebrity in 2001, Chris Rojek observed how previous structuralist and textualist approaches to celebrity had marginalised the ‘knowledge, desire and judgement’ of the audience (2001, p. 43), and he foregrounded how the social and cultural functions of celebrity ‘can only be concretely established through empirical investigation’ (2001, p. 92). That is not to suggest, as this introduction goes on to explore, that significant work does not exist (work which has had an important impact on the field), but only that such work has often tended to be sporadic or small scale. In turn, such texts (for example, Gamson 1994, Stacey 1994) have historically then been fetishised as examples of what all ‘audiences’ do with stars and celebrities, rather than revealing what those audiences did, in those particular research contexts.

The earliest empirical studies of audience relations with star/celebrity culture are often seen to be Richard Dyer’s (1986) chapter on Judy Garland and gay men (which used letters to explore how Garland functioned as a gay icon), Jackie Stacey’s (1994) Stargazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (which used letters and questionnaires to explore women’s relations with Hollywood stars in the 1940s/1950s) and Joshua Gamson’s (1994) audience chapters in Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (which used focus groups to explore how people responded to the epistemology of the celebrity system). Yet although these works marked the advent of such investigations in an academic context, they are predated by sociological studies – sometimes industry commissioned – of film audiences, which frequently incorporated questions concerning audiences’ relations to stars (see Mayer 1948, Tudor 1974).

It is not possible or necessary to give detailed attention to each and every piece of work subsequently published in star and celebrity studies, although we aim to sketch out broad themes here. For example, Stacey’s (1994) work marked the beginnings of a longer trend in examining how gender – or more specifically female gender – plays an important role in shaping audience engagement with stars/celebrities. In fact, successive work in this area includes a considerable proportion of the empirical work produced in star and celebrity studies, including Rachel Moseley’s (2002) generational study of female responses to Audrey Hepburn; Samantha Barbas’ (2001) historical exploration of fan materials emerging from Hollywood’s formative years; Joke Hermes’ (1999) investigation of readers’ perceptions of famous figures in women’s magazines; Rebecca Feasey’s (2008) focus group study on readers of heat magazine; and Linda Duits and Pauline van Romondt Vis’ (2009), Catharine Lumby’s (2007) and Kim Allen’s (2011) research into how girls ‘make sense’ of female celebrity culture. The latter in particular is significant for preceding the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project ‘The Role of Celebrity in Young People’s Classed and Gendered Aspirations’ (Allen et al. 2014), which explored how ‘accounts of aspiration within celebrity culture (e.g. stories of success, talent and self-realisation) shape young people’s imagined futures’ (although the emphasis was on youth here rather than girls per se).¹ Notably, in drawing upon individual and group interviews with 144 school children, this is the only large-scale empirical study to investigate audience relations with celebrity culture since the early period of scholarship. Although the emphasis on the female audience made sense in view of the extent to which women have historically been conceived as the primary audience for stars and celebrities, this has nevertheless left the male audience particularly unexplored, as work by Ian Huffer (2003, 2014) on male audiences for Sylvester Stallone suggests.

Fan studies, which has certainly intersected with star and celebrity studies on a number of levels, has also contributed insights into the relations between audiences and star/celebrity culture, particularly as clustered around specific music stars such as Elvis Presley (Hinerman 2002), Madonna (Schulze 1999) and Lady Gaga (Click et al. 2013, Bennett 2014). Such convergences between fan studies and celebrity studies became all the more prevalent after the Internet ‘mainstreamed’ fandom and made such responses more visible and accessible (for example, Pullen 2004, Franco 2006), with studies ranging across contemporaneous, historical and posthumous stardom/celebrity (Wang 2007, Garde-Hansen 2010, Courbet and Fourquet-Courbet 2014). At the same time, within celebrity studies in particular, there has arguably been a move away from seeing celebrities only or primarily in terms of ‘fandom’, with the field now recognising a much larger range of cultural, political and affective encounters with celebrity. Such an approach views the famous less as figures of identification and admiration, and pays more attention ‘to the ways they become constructed in language and discourse …’ (Stevenson 2005, p. 160) – a framework in which discourses of judgement have become crucial. Many of the studies cited above already play this out (Hermes 1999, Lumby 2007, Feasey 2008, Allen 2011), but further examples would be Sofia Johansson’s (2006) chapter on the extent to which the tabloid representation of celebrity is met with varying degrees of class ambivalence, derision and ‘hate’, as well as more recent studies of how audiences make moral evaluations of celebrity actions and scandals in ways which work through the boundaries of collective citizenship and social norms (Van Den Bulck and Claessens 2013a, 2013b, Eronen 2014). It may be that the impact of new technologies on audience engagements (discussed below) has rendered the diversity of responses more visible (after all, it would be problematic to assume that audiences of the classical Hollywood period merely expressed a unified adoration for stars). At the same time, such new technologies may have played a role in facilitating the expression of hostility toward the actions and privileges of those in the public eye.

Indeed, it would be difficult to write an overview of the place of ‘audiences’ within star and celebrity studies without paying attention to the burgeoning body of work on Twitter (Muntean and Peterson 2009, Marwick and boyd 2011, Alexander 2013, Thomas 2014), which has contributed to debates about the apparently changing relationships between ‘media, celebrity and audiences’ who no longer spend ‘most of their time doing the “looking” or listening’ (Stevenson 2005, p. 159) (a debate that also takes in reality TV and YouTube fame). What is emphasised in particular here is the shift from a ‘traditional understanding of “celebrity management” which is highly controlled and institutionalised, to one in which performers and personalities actively address and interact with fans’ (Marwick and boyd 2011, p. 140), even if they do so on unequal terms (2011, p. 155). What is most significant for our purposes here is that work on Twitter – perhaps even more so than online fan forums – may represent the beginning of a much greater blurring between textual, discursive and ‘audience’ analysis in so far as traces of audience reception become part of the conventional framework through which the circulation of celebrity is discussed. At the same time, a note of caution can be raised about methodological rigour and reflection here, in so far as, whether increasingly ‘ordinary’ or not, traces of audience engagement need to be situated within appropriate epistemological and methodological frameworks.

Graeme Turner observes how:

It is important to recognise that regarding the consumption of celebrity as explicable through one set of principles, as serving on set of politics, or as operating through one modality, is to misunderstand the cultural processes in play. (2004, p. 110)

The interventions we have outlined above traverse a range of diverse methods and forms of evidence, moving across historical letters to fan magazines, audience memories, individual interviews, focus groups, surveys, online forums and social media platforms. What is common to all of these materials, as we are conceptualising them here, is their bid to prioritise and make audible the real voices of audiences. In variously spotlighting the complex role that famous figures play in identity construction – the working through of moral values, the negotiation of aspiration and inequality, and the articulation of consumption practices – these works are also united in their aim to complicate the often simplistic and dismissive judgements that are made in popular discourse about audience relations and relationships with star/celebrity culture.

The purpose of this issue is to provide a dedicated space to showcase a range of current work in the field, even whilst we acknowledge that this is only a small insight into research presently being developed. Indeed, following the call for papers that launched this issue, we received 40 proposals, which we see as encouraging evidence of an empirical turn in the field. We hope that this issue plays a role in consolidating and stimulating what is a vibrant and crucial aspect of studying the culture of celebrity.

Notes

1. http://www.celebyouth.org/about/ [Accessed 2 October 2014].