Celebrity Audiences eds. by Su Holmes, Sarah Ralph, and Martin Barker (review)

Not all celebrity activity takes place in front of the flash of cameras. This fact is difficult to imagine because the staged character of celebrity life is so prevalent, from the high glamour of magazine shoots and red-carpet walks to the public-relations machine that mingles feel-good activism with stopping for a bite to eat after workout. Spectacle seems, practically speaking, to be the necessary condition of celebrity. To put it another way, "the spectacle of celebrity" emphasizes just how much contemporary culture treats the phenomenon in almost solely visual terms. But the phrase could also be taken as an invitation to examine the belief (if not the fact) that someone is doing the looking.

What, then, about those who do the looking, those whose looking fuels the celebrity engine? This emphasis on audience—and the way an audience's gaze turns readily into a metaphor for other behaviors, as well as other forms of engagement—drives Celebrity Audiences, a collection of essays edited by Su Holmes, Sarah Ralph, and Martin Barker. As the three note in their introduction to the volume, this focus marks a significant shift in the field of celebrity studies, which since Richard Dyer's Stars (1979) has largely made the person of the celebrity a text imbued with meaning. Representation and ideology produce the celebrity, so Dyer's argument went, through the circulation of image, wrapped up in a discourse of individualism that made the celebrity singular. Almost forty years later, Celebrity Audiences argues that proof of this singularity lies just as much with the motivations that draw audiences to celebrities as it does with the image such audiences encounter and make their own. Furthermore, for the essays in Celebrity Audiences, what audiences do in relation to the celebrities they choose constitutes a material fact of the phenomenon.

The sheer range of what audiences do is impressive. None of the individual celebrities the essays consider are surprising choices, drawn as they are from music, sports, television, and film, but the assortment of responses are. That is the point, I think. Celebrity Audiences covers familiar ground (for instance, when it touches on expressions of fandom, whether in tweets and other social media platforms or in questionnaires and in-person interviews), but the essays are frequently attentive to less-admiring judgments, not to mention outright criticism. That distinctiveness of response, which makes its way into the thinking of a number of the essays, suggests that even self-declared fans, motivated by identification and aspiration, are just as likely to hold celebrities accountable for their actions. Thus, Ana Jorge's "Christiano Ronaldo Is Cheap Chic" reveals how that Portuguese soccer star's arrogance prompts admiration and critique from young Portuguese boys, who take nationalist pride in his global stature while asserting that he should wield that stature more for the good of his native country. Or, as Tom Phillips' "Wrestling with Grief" reveals in a more complicated situation, fans who had found professional wrestler Chris Benoit a happy exception to the sport's spectacular personae also found themselves unmoored by the events of his murder-suicide. Online commentary enabled many in the wrestling community to come to grips with the Benoit tragedy, and if some online posters already knew one another before the death of Benoit and his family, others came to know one another well through that conversation. That an investment in celebrity can be detached from identification, and in so doing can ground other kinds of relations, is no small point.

If audiences are not always fannish, then they do more with celebrities than relate to—or identify with—them. This premise yields an approach to subjectivity that emphasizes the relations that take place as audiences commune with one another, directly or indirectly, through celebrity figures. Andreas Widholm and Karin Becker's essay on the public screenings of royal weddings in England and Sweden observes that audience response, coupled with the infrastructure of the...