Journal of Fandom Studies, The - Politics and Pleasures of Fandom as Celebrity Counterpublics, Sept 2020

While the rise of new media has led to a blurring of stars’ public personae and private, intimate lives, the musician, in particular, has long been expected to share their private, authentic self through their music. This is certainly the case with superstar Beyoncé, whose 2016 solo album Lemonade was widely received as a revealing portrait of her marriage to hip hop mogul Jay-Z. Yet Beyoncé has long been playing with the public–private divide as a key part of her star persona. Her decision to limit media interviews has allowed her to maintain unprecedented control of her star image; an image that is now corralled through the texts that she herself circulates via her music, videos and other media. One such notable, yet under-examined text is her 2013 autobiographical film Life Is But a Dream. Both the narrative and the production of the film serve to teach audiences how to read the rest of Beyoncé’s cultural work; as work that is fully controlled by her and intended for women. This pedagogical film disrupts common readings of her image and performances as being in the service of a male gaze, thus opening up new pleasures and potentials for female fans more broadly and Black female fans more specifically. Life Is But a Dream is thus a central, rather than a periphery text in Beyoncé’s star image, complementing and complicating the work she produces across other media formats.

The ideas of outspoken feminist celebrities are met with scepticism. This scepticism is rooted in the idea that, while celebrities have a platform for expression, they are not academics and their role in education should therefore be limited. This article explores the role of Jameela Jamil, a British, queer actor, and analyses her use of Instagram and Twitter as platforms for education and social change. I argue that she uses social media to teach and learn from her followers regarding body acceptance, racial and sexual inclusivity and queer representation. This work also explores the realities of clapbacks, cancel culture, mistake-making, shame culture and affective solidarity via her use of language, such as through the vulnerable phrase ‘I want to delete this tweet so much, but…’. In positioning Jamil as more than simply a celebrity feminist, and beyond what is considered a normative public intellectual, I assert that she embodies the role of a celebrity feminist educator. This role is unique as it creates space for Jamil’s online feminist activism, her accessible use of language and her desire to teach and learn from her followers to be made meaningful within the context of feminist education and celebrity studies.

Fanfiction has a long and varied history in the Star Wars franchise since it began in 1977 with the debut of the first film, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The decade of the 1970s created new possibilities for science fiction multiverses and metanarratives; science fiction became an adaptive film genre that could be reimagined with seemingly infinite narrational results. The myriad of genre films that were released in the mid-to-late 1970s revealed dynamic syntheses with horror (e.g. Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), franchises that previously had existed solely on television (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and musical theatre (The Rocky Horror Picture Show). Cinematic audiences became increasingly accustomed to science fiction tropes and themes in film; audience participation in the theatre (e.g. The Rocky Horror Picture Show) expanded to print zines (often with fanfiction) for multiple franchises as well as fan conventions. Fanfiction’s beginnings as an analogue culture dramatically changed with the advent of the internet and the evolution of fandoms as digital cultures. Web-based platforms such as FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own (AO3) host sundry fan communities’ creative outputs including podcasts, art and, most frequently, fanfiction stories. The release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015 immediately captured the fandom’s imagination; the animosity and tension between the new villain Kylo Ren (Ben Solo) and protagonist Rey of Jakku particularly fascinated the young adult fans who were lately converted to the Star Wars fandom due to this pairing (known as Reylo within the fandom and within cinematic circles). The newest generations of fans were acclimated to audience participation and paratextual interactions due to their positions as digital natives. The Reylo fan phenomenon particularly erupted into fanfictions as critical data artefacts, even predicting Reylo as a romantic pairing years before the second and third films in the franchise trilogy Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The Reylo pairing is just one example of how online Star Wars fanfiction communities expand audience participation to autonomous collective identity formation. This article examines feminist fanfictions in the Star Wars fandom as gendered critical data artefacts, as collaborative communities of practice, and as counterpublic discourses that apply feminist critiques to conventional gender roles within the most recent film trilogy and the fandom itself.

This article relies on survey data I collected from the Hiddleston fandom in June of 2018, to gauge their long-lasting impressions of the highly publicized three-month relationship between Tom Hiddleston and Taylor Swift in 2016. Their responses reflect three significant (and overlapping) anti-fan expressions: extreme dislike of Taylor Swift, frustration with the media coverage of the ‘Hiddleswift’ spectacle and acknowledgement that it was difficult to be a fan of Hiddleston during that time. By pairing with Swift, an act many survey respondents felt was played for publicity, and simultaneously distancing himself from social media, he became inaccessible to those who had been loyal to him early in his career. I interrogate Hiddleston’s own references to himself as an ‘authentic’ public figure and then conduct close readings of the only two extended profiles that have been published since his relationship with Swift ended in 2016: one in GQ (2017) and another from the New York Times (2019). Although it was neither publication’s intent, both pieces led to further media scrutiny and mockery, which only exasperated his fans further. Ultimately, I argue that Hiddleston’s name remains pejoratively linked to Swift’s, but not vice versa, thereby proving the negative impact this short-lived romance had upon his celebrity narrative and fandom.

The web 2.0 phenomenon and social media – without question – have reshaped our everyday experiences. These changes that they have generated affect how we consume, communicate and present ourselves, just to name a few aspects of life, and moreover, opened up new perspectives for sociology. Though many social practices persist in a somewhat altered form, brand new types of entities have emerged on different social media platforms: one of them is the video blogger. These actors have gained great visibility through so-called micro-celebrity practices and have become potential large-scale distributors of ideas, values and knowledge. Celebrities, in this case micro-celebrities (video bloggers), may disseminate such cognitive patterns through their constructed discourse which is objectified in the online space through a peculiar digital face (a social media profile) where fans can react, share and comment according to the affordances of the digital space. Most importantly, all of these interactions are accessible for scholars to examine the fan and celebrity practices of our era. This research attempts to reconstruct these discursive interactions on the Facebook pages of ten top Hungarian video bloggers. All findings are based on a large-scale data collection using the Netvizz application. As part of the interpretation of the results, a further consideration was that celebrity discourses may be a sort of disciplinary force in (post)modern society, which normalizes the individual to some extent by providing adequate schemas of attitude, mentality and ways of consumption.

Using Michael Warner’s (2002) conception of publics and counterpublics, we can see that historically much of fandom was situated in the position of counterpublic as fans not only were placed on the outskirts by others but also actively participated in acts that ran counter to the mainstream reading and consumption of media content. Current media fans of popular American franchises, however, are often courted by corporations and those with the power to influence the mainstream. There is an interest in the types of transformative practices in which fans engage. In actively seeking these audience members and their practices, corporations are forcing these groups into a more public position while helping to shift the types of activities that are considered part of fandom. Essentially, by bringing ‘desirable’ and ‘affirmational’ media fans into the mainstream, corporations are reorganizing them as publics in terms of their position within society, and this shift could contribute to a change in what it means to be a media fan.