Reading Response to "Understanding Celebrity Culture" by Su Holmes and Sean Redmond

The key points that I have found in the readings are:

“Adulation, identification and emulation are key motifs in the study of celebrity culture. The desire for fame, stardom, or celebrification stems from a need to be wanted in a society where being famous appears t offer enormous material, economic, social and pshysic rewards (gamson, 1994; rojek, 2001; turner, 2004).”

“Nick couldry (2000, 2003) argues that, in the modern world, being famous gives one access to a social space that sits at the centre of meaning generation and belonging.”

“According to Kobena mercer, ‘in political terms, identities are in crisis because traditional structures of membership and belonging inscribed in relations of class, party and nation-state have been called into question’ (1994: 4).”

“Fandom is often a creative enterprise, involving the production of artwork, fiction and dedicated websites.”

“The body of the star or celebrity is key to this search for the ‘truth’ about the star or celebrity.”

“The body of the star or celebrity either functions to reproduce dominant culture’s patriarchal, racial and heterosexual gaze, or it allows transgressive, oppositional and queer feelings and fantasies to emerge.”

“Braudy argues that we ‘live in a society bound together by the talk of fame’ (1986: 1).”

“Framing celebrity is a text which is capitalizing on the popular, as well as the academic, interest in contemporary celebrity.”

“Dyer famously argued for the analyses of stars in the realm of representation and ideology. Stars could b understood as ‘signs’- read as ‘texts’ and ‘images’ – and investigated using the tools of semiotics (barker, 2003: 6).”

“Couldry argues that the media constructs and maintains a symbolic hierarchy between media/ordinary worlds, in which the media is presented as the privileged “frame” through which we access the reality that matters to us as social beings’ (2004: 58).”

“The term celebrity has various uses in academia. It can function to indicate how the media contexts of fame are now less specific, with individual celebrities rarely restricted to a single media form (Bonner, 2005: 65).”