If fandom had become, as Fiske noted, “a common feature of popular culture in industrialized societies,”51 then we should rethink its functions and, yes, its pleasures. While knowledge and consumption of official or what used to be called “high” culture (opera, fine wine, art) enhances our cultural capital, knowledge about celebrity culture has come to do that too. Fiske noted how fandom can fill a cultural lack by providing a community, and one based on having a specialized knowledge of and relationship to the star that enhances social prestige and self-esteem.
Fandom serves as a tie to others with the same passions, tastes, and affinities, and Fiske especially wanted to emphasize how fans work to produce meanings about celebrities through different modes of “productivity,” and thus elaborate on and produce our own extended meanings from the offerings of the culture industries. “Semiotic” productivity involves the ways in which fans use the stars they admire as resources to construct their own identities, often more empowered, often in opposition to prevailing expectations about appropriate behaviors. One example was when many Madonna fans in the 1980s drew from her defiance of norms around female sexuality to embrace their own desires for sexual agency as girls and women.
“Enunciative” productivity is one we all know: it is shared commentary, sometimes praiseworthy, sometimes condemnatory, between us and others, about a celebrity (or a performance he or she is in) that relates them and their behaviors to our everyday lives. Indeed, as Fiske notes, “much of the pleasure of fandom lies in the fan talk that it produces.”52 At the height of MTV’s Jersey Shore phenomenon, for example, people loved watching the show together and (typically) expressing shock or outrage over the latest excesses of the show’s stars. Viewers of The Bachelor (and The Bachelorette) often text or tweet with others while the show is on to comment, often derisively, about the comments and behaviors of those on the screen. Such enunciative productivity affirms a group’s core values, what it admires and disdains, and what values binds it together. “Textual productivity” is when fans create and circulate texts based on celebrities, TV shows, and movies, typically online, and often extend or utterly alter the characters and meanings of the original production to suit their own needs and desires. All of these forms of productivity rest, in part, on the notion that “stars are constructed by their fans and owe their stardom entirely to them” and serve central functions in constructing individual and group identities.53 Fiske’s work helps to outline how active fandoms, expressed both individually and in concert with other fans, allow audiences to benefit emotionally and socially while enhancing our cultural capital within the fan community.54 In a large-scale society, the enunciative productivity that Fiske outlines is made possible thanks to our collective access to a common cohort of actors whom we know and about whom we can engage in sociable conversation. Studies show that gossip, despite its trivial reputation and negative connotations, actually serves important social functions, such as encouraging bonding and camaraderie among friends and family members. It can also allow us to release stress, share ideas, and strengthen friendships.55
Indeed, scholars like Joke Hermes have noted how celebrity culture—and especially gossip about celebrities—serves as a kind of social glue within large-scale societies. In her study of gossip magazine readers, Hermes identified a series of pleasures associated with celebrity gossip, from the vicarious enjoyment of a world of wealth and glamour to the feeling that celebrities are a part of our own inner circles, a kind of extended family.56
Gossip has been typically associated with women, taken to refer to malicious talk about people not present and to reinforce a form of informal control over others. But the explosion in celebrity gossip has shown that it can also be highly pleasurable, and hardly only a female practice or domain. Nor is such gossip always mean-spirited; it can be admiring and friendly. Gossip about celebrities—their achievements, their marriages and divorces, their cheating scandals, their trips to rehab—draws people together to evaluate behaviors and to construe standards of shared morality, about what is and is not acceptable behavior. It serves to create in-groups and out-groups. So it helps establish solidarity, a sense of community, including a moral community that identifies and locates what we feel to be ethical, behavioral certainties. Unlike discussing politics or current affairs, for example, which can be contentious, or involve grasping esoteric policy problems, celebrity gossip allows us to make judgments without having to think too hard. Thus it provides a form of confident self-expression about famous, rich, and often powerful others. It is, for the most part, safe and easy commentary and can protect us from more serious engagement with each other.57
Hermes identified a series of other pleasures we get from celebrity gossip. It can enlarge the reader’s private world, where we can enjoy a vicarious world of glamour and can feel involved with celebrities who are richer and more famous than we are; they are brought into our circle of family and friends. Through what she calls the “extended family repertoire,” which relies on a highly personal mode of address to the reader, we can develop a strong emotional connection to the stars. We can gain what can seem like “secret” knowledge about them and their lives that may “confer an imaginary sense of power over the rich and powerful,” but also over others because you’re in the know and they are not.58
Some of these are emotional pleasures, but Hermes notes there are cognitive ones as well. When we read about a rumor or speculation about a celebrity, especially because we know some of this gossip is false or exaggerated, we engage in puzzle solving, trying to ascertain what we think is true and what isn’t. There is a pleasure here, the fun of speculation in trying to “ferret out” the truth, because most of us have our doubts about the truthfulness of gossip magazines. Today, we can often fact check stories, compare sources, and even troll celebs’ social media accounts to learn the “truth.” We are ever more aware of the ways that celebrities “fake it”—from Photoshop to plastic surgery to strategically placed paparazzi and leaked tidbits. Such reading may involve the intellectual activity of hypothesizing about relationships, where we rely on our intuition and previous experiences with similar stories.59
Another pleasure of course is schadenfreude, relishing the misfortunes of others. With celebrities, we often love judging them, denouncing them, and ridiculing them as much as we love admiring them.60 And when they fail or are exposed as phony or superficial, it can be consoling to those of us who never made it into the spotlight.61 Kathie Lee Gifford, as the cohost of the highly popular Live with Regis & Kathie Lee in the 1990s, constantly bragged about her fantastic marriage and that her husband, Frank, was a “human love machine.” Then in 1997, Frank was caught having extramarital trysts with a female flight attendant at New York’s Regency Hotel. To those irritated by Kathie Lee’s superior, smug, self-satisfied presentation of her allegedly perfect marriage, there was great satisfaction here in her humiliation. More recently, in 2013, when nineteen-year-old Justin Bieber was arrested for speeding through a Miami neighborhood, driving under the influence, and resisting arrest, and later egging his neighbor’s home, those who envied his massive success at the young age of fifteen took great delight in this tarnishing of his image. A massive—and to some deeply satisfying—fall from power was the disgrace of Harvey Weinstein, who not only had reportedly harassed and assaulted women for years, but had verbally and publically humiliated men as well.
But are we all, then, just nasty people? Why do we find glee in this kind of schadenfreude? The pleasure we find in celebrities’ pain is actually quite rational. First, when stars fail, their failure reinforces our own, perhaps preexisting, sense that the standards of beauty, wealth, and success that the celebrity industries embody are unrealistic, even for those who appear to have “made it.” Second, when we judge celebrities and find fault in their actions, we have the opportunity to affirm our own moral codes, or punish deviance, thus creating and reinforcing boundaries around our own moral frameworks.62
While we may criticize stars in ways that bolster normative values (e.g., oh, she got too heavy, he is a cheating dog), we may also actively disagree with those moral codes, standards of conduct, and rigid demands of physical perfection. Indeed, much of the pleasure of celebrity gossip may actually lie in subverting these codes. When we tell a friend how Bono spent nearly two grand to have his favorite hat flown to him or how P. Diddy bought his son a $340,000
