Faculty of Arts
quotations used in lecture 12 – television celebrity and fandom
“I want to suggest that fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked over analytically. It is also always performative; by which I mean that it is an identity which is (dis-)claimed, and which performs cultural work. Claiming the status of a ‘fan’ may, in certain contexts, provide a cultural space for types of knowledge and attachment. In specific institutional contexts, such as academia, ‘fan’ status may be devalued and taken as a sign of ‘inappropriate’ learning and uncritical engagement with the media.”
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“Fandom is…a spectrum of practices engaged in to develop a sense of personal control or influence over the object of fandom.”
• Cheryl Harris, “A Sociology of Television Fandom” in Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity. Ed. Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander (New Jersey: Hampton Press, 1998), p. 42.
“Television is our most pervasive representation of a shared ‘cultural space.’ Television’s role, then, in circulating meanings with which we regularly engage in the course of everyday life, is a fairly important one.”
• Harris, “A Sociology of Television Fandom,” p. 43.
“Fan practices are simply intensified, more visible instances of everyone’s everyday struggle over cultural meanings and cultural space in a battleground of commodified culture that is managed and represented most prominently by television.”
• Harris, “A Sociology of Television Fandom,” p. 45.
"Celebrity is a world in which organizational and professional conflicts resolve in simulation, performance, mimicry, blurring; a world in which authenticity is deferred and superficial fragments circulate. Therein lie its dangers, but also its promise: to keep alive the conflict-ridden questions of power, role playing, equality, and authority, to dwell in a cultural conversation that is elsewhere distorted and given up, indeed to protect it through its superficiality and triviality."
• Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary
"Celebrity culture is now ubiquitous, and establishes the main scripts, presentational props, conversational codes and other source materials through which cultural relations are constructed."
• Chris Rojek, Celebrity (
"Everyone who made a career in public - and the number of public professions was speedily increasing - was being made to realize how both art and printing could make him [sic] more symbolic, more essential, and more powerful. Whatever holy aura had attached to the image, whatever link to eternity was asserted by the book, was becoming accessible to all who cared to make their claim…It was a new world of fame, in which visible or theatrical fame would become the standard."
• Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (Oxford UP, 1986; rev. ed. 2000), pp. 267-268
“Celebrities are cultural fabrications […] In fact, celebrities are carefully mediated through what might be termed chains of attraction. No celebrity now acquires public recognition without the assistance of cultural intermediaries who operate to stage-manage celebrity presence in the eyes of the public[…].Their task is to concoct the public presentation of celebrity personalities that will result in enduring appeal for the audience of fans.”
• Chris Rojek, Celebrity (
"The household names which populate our consciousness today are not those of heroes but rather those of celebrities. Although the two regularly get confused, they are vastly different. Heroes are people well known because they worked to change the world and they promoted ideals worthy of respect and emulation. Celebrities, however, are people known simply for their wellknownness! Celebrities are receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness."
• Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in
• Leo Lowenthal, "The Triumph of Mass Idols" (1944) Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1968), pp. 109-140.
• Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1998).
"Identification with celebrities facilitates the construction of a shared world which can be known and acted in rather than just the simple provision of images of passive consumerism...[T]he celebrities of the public stage provide a series of reference points through which a multitude of publics can reflexively identify themselves. It could be said that celebrities provide a voice through which they both address their constituencies and through which the constituencies can speak themselves."
• David Chaney. Fictions of Collective Life; Public Drama in Late Modern Culture (Routledge, 1993), p. 146
"Paradoxically, it was the very ordinariness of what the Big Brother cameras showed us that confirmed the wider authority of television to represent our reality: in so far as it was ordinary, this was the reality that would exist without the media being there."
• Nick Couldry, "Playing for Celebrity: Big Brother as Ritual Event" (pdf)
"To the extent that organized religion has declined in the West, celebrity culture has emerged as one of the replacement strategies that promote new orders of meaning and solidarity."
Chris Rojek, Celebrity, p. 99.
"Australians have many different ways of thinking and feeling, but nevertheless share a cyberspace within which cultural differences are not only negotiated and adjudicated, but creatively combined. The most visible signs of this process are celebrities."
• McKenzie Wark, Celebrities, Culture, and Cyberspace (London: Pluto, 1999), p. 33.
