Storying the Self in the Migrant Fandom of David Bowie
Associate Professor Sean Redmond, Deakin University
The role of auto-ethnography in music fandom has a very limited and rather side-lined history. While it is certainly true that fan voices have been used to explore how their music idols have been identified with, and why they matter at the level of identity and belonging (Lowe, 2003, Groene and Hettinger, 2015), this work often imposes a meta-frame on the empirical method, substituting fan voices for a top-down analysis and interpretation.
The approach that I will take in this talk is to draw both upon auto-ethnography and to allow our fellow fans to 'story' their own responses as an attempt to get beneath the modes of feeling that music fandom ignites -- situated as it will be within the narratives that people assemble as they talk these stories. This approach draws upon Ruth Finnegan's sociological method (1997), and the affective turn within star and celebrity studies (see Redmond, 2014) in which writing oneself into identification and desire is centred and encouraged rather than marginalised and dismissed.
The figure to story will be David Bowie, as part of a larger project I am undertaking (with Toija Cinque, Deakin University) on this mercurial, seminal figure of pop and rock. Examining the way fans 'story' their appreciation of David Bowie, the research is undertaking fieldwork in five key sites/cities, each of which Bowie is closely connect to.
For this talk I will focus upon the way that 'migrants' in Melbourne use David Bowie to story, make sense of, their arrival in Australia, often as first generation migrants coming to terms with their 'difference'. As the research has found, Bowie's alternative and outsider status resonates keenly with people who find themselves 'strangers' in a new land. Lyrically, musically and in terms of star representation, Bowie becomes the figure through which migrants navigate themselves through new cultural and social environments. Here I also find that migrant identity readily intersects with sexuality, gender, class and age concerns.
References
Finnegan, Ruth (1997). 'Storying the Self: Personal Narratives and Identity', in Hugh Mackay (ed) Consumption and Everyday Life, London: Sage, 65-112.
Groene, Samantha L., and Vanessa E. Hettinger (2015). 'Are You “Fan” Enough? The Role of Identity in Media Fandoms', Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Apr 20, 2015, No Pagination Specified, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000080
Lowe, Melanie (2003), 'Colliding Feminisms: Britney Spears, 'Tweens', and the Politics of Reception', Popular Music and Society, 26, 123-40.
Redmond, Sean (2014) Celebrity and the Media, London: Palgrave.
Sean Redmond is Associate Professor in Screen and Design, and Deputy Director: Deakin Motion Lab Centre for Creative Research, at Deakin University. He has research interests in the arts-science nexus, film and television aesthetics, film and television science fiction, film authorship, film sound, stardom and celebrity, and film phenomenology. He has published nine books including The Cinema of Takeshi Kitano: Flowering Blood (Columbia, 2013), Celebrity and the Media (Palgrave, 2014), Endangering Science Fiction Film (AFI Film Reader Series, 2015) and with Su Holmes he edits the journal Celebrity Studies, shortlisted for the nest new academic journal in 2011. Sean convenes the inter-disciplinary and cross-institutional Eye Tracking the Moving Image Research group and recently guest edited a special edition of Refractory on the arts-science nexus in relation to eye tracking and the screen. His monograph, Liquid Space: Digital Age Science fiction Film will be out in 2016 (I.B. Taurus)
Associate Professor Catherine Fowler
Emancipating Spectatorship: a history of singular, subjective, introspective and idiosyncratic engagements with cinema
For film studies one of the key interventions that the development from theories of spectatorship to audience studies brought about was to complicate understandings of what viewers do with texts by theorising how they make meaning, gain pleasure, engage, perform, critique and resist (see Ang 1985; Barker & Brooks 1998; Brooker 2002; Fiske 1989 and Jenkins 1992 respectively). The triumph of this work was that it made the activities of viewing media visible and hence available for study. However, at the same time a dichotomy was created between spectators and audiences, the cinematic subject and actual film viewers such that, as Judith Mayne puts it: “Spectatorship became … something a film or a filmmaker did, not something [the spectator] brought to a film”(1993: 4).
In this talk I aim to emancipate spectatorship from the shackles imposed upon it through the dichotomy that has separated work on spectatorship from work on audiences. I will do so by piecing together a history of singular, subjective, introspective and idiosyncratic engagements with cinema. Such engagements are made visible if we borrow some of the vocabulary and methods of fan and reception studies and apply them to existing artistic and critical practices. Hence we might associate a kind of fannish enthusiasm and obsession with the object (Brooker and Jermyn, 2002) with artist Joseph Cornell's singular 'fanvid' Rose Hobart (US, 1936). We could imagine Maya Deren's 1940s subjective psychodramas as gestures of textual poaching (Jenkins, 1992) or 'ripping' (Fiske, 1989) of Hollywood's woman's film. Similarly, I'll argue that the introspective accounts of film viewing by philosopher Stanley Cavell and idiosyncratic remembrances of film fragments by artist/critic Victor Burgin, both channel remembrance, thereby connecting with and adding to work on the relationship between memory and history, public discourses and private narratives (Stacey, 1994).
Film theory had little time for the overly subjective engagements of Cornell, Deren, Cavell and Burgin above. By changing the questions we ask of such work, the perspectives we bring to it and the critical background against which it figures, I hope to add new dimensions to understandings of spectatorship, audiences, viewing and doing that complicate assumptions about the relationships between reception, identity and technology.
References
Ang, I (1985), Watching Dallas: soap opera and the melodramatic imagination, Routledge, New York.
Barker, M & Brooks, K (1998), Knowing audiences: Judge Dredd, its friends, fans, and foes, University of Luton Press, Luton, UK.
Brooker, W (2002), Using the force: creativity, community and Star Wars fans, Continuum, New York.
Brooker, W and Jermyn, D (2002) The Audience Studies Reader, Routledge, London.
Fiske, J (1989), Understanding Popular Culture, Routledge, London.
Jenkins, H (1992), Textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture, Routledge, New York.
Mayne, J (1993), Cinema and Spectatorship, Routledge, London.
Stacey, J (1994) Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship, Routledge, London.
Catherine Fowler is Associate Professor in Film and Head of the Department of Media Film and Communication. She has research interests in the film/art axis of influence, European cinema and avant garde, experimental and feminist moving image practices. See www.otago.ac.nz/mfco/staff/otago052275.html.