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22 Untidy Fan Response to the Soiling of Martha Stewart’s Spotless Image Melissa A. Click In 2002, I set out to study Martha Stewart fans in hopes of understanding Stewart’s popularity in the United States at a time when women seemed to have more choices outside the home than ever before. My public calls for focus group participants drew fans I could not easily recognize as such. For me, this raised the question, What is a fan? The insider trading scandal Martha Stewart was involved in during the time period in which I conducted my interviews, October 2002 to October 2005, added a layer of complexity to my study of Stewart’s fans. The scandal drew immense media attention that impacted both her celebrity and her media texts, many of which were amended to extract her presence or canceled outright. Interestingly, the interviews I conducted with audience members of Martha Stewart Living revealed that fans were drawn to at least two distinct aspects of this text: Martha Stewart the celebrity, and the ideas created by Martha Stewart. As I argue below, an important component of the criticism of Stewart, and the positions her fans took as a result of this criticism , is the tension between femininity and feminism in U. S. culture; Stewart’s text and persona raise questions about what an American woman can or should be. Thus, the ways in which Stewart’s audiences respond to her and her media texts reveal the ways in which Stewart’s blending of traditional and contemporary ways of being a woman provoked both praise and condemnation. There is much to be learned from studying fans who do not fit traditional descriptions. Indeed, in doing so we move closer to creating a fuller 301 picture of the ways audiences respond to media texts. In this essay, I explore the ways in which my experiences with Martha Stewart Living audiences raise a number of fruitful questions for further explanation about our understanding of fan behavior, the ways in which fan positions might change over time, especially in response to changes in their favored text, and how fan readings of texts reflect and impact social values. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia By the time I began my focus group research in 2002, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia was a $295-million-a-year business (Carr 2003: C5). As the highly visible focal point of her media texts, known to fans simply as “Martha,” Stewart built a wildly successful business based on her own good taste. Fans could consume Stewart’s advice for living through a number of formats, all of which carried nearly identical messages: books, magazines , television, radio, newspaper, and the Internet.1 Stewart’s lifestyle advice drew a huge audience; when my project began, Martha Stewart had sold more than 10 million copies of her more than thirty-four books, and the combined readership of Stewart’s magazines was 10 million readers (Tyrnauer 2001: 398). Stewart’s daily television programs drew 1.67 million viewers (Fine & Friedman 2003: 1). Her Kmart line included five thousand products and earned $1.6 million in sales in 2001 (Tyrnauer 2001: 398). In 2002, Martha Stewart was without question a savvy businesswoman who had successfully constructed a public personality as a trusted advisor who strove for perfection and promoted impeccable taste. As a result of Stewart’s visibility as an expert in matters of high taste, a perfectionist in the home, and a successful businesswoman, her image was repeatedly critiqued in U. S. popular culture. Underneath many of these critiques lay the ways in which Martha Stewart’s subject matter in her media texts (images of domestic perfection), when combined with her public persona (a divorcee with seemingly strained personal relationships ), confused gender norms. Furthermore, Stewart’s media texts, in many ways, catered to women who work in their homes, yet Stewart, as one of the most powerful businesswomen in the United States, had very little time to lead the domestic life she detailed. Popular critiques of Stewart hinted at or aimed to demonstrate that her public persona was only a façade—and behind that façade was an entirely different person. However, in early 2002, none of the reports about Stewart’s alleged 302 f a n s a n d a n t i - f a n s : f r o m l o v e t o h at e [18.217.208.72] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 02...

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