Melissa A. Click

Making Monsters: Lady Gaga, Fan Identification, and Social Media

Like her chart-breaking musical success, Lady Gagas relationship with fans, built by her messages of self-acceptance and by her intense engagement with fans through social media, is unprecedented. Through one-on-one interviews with an international sample of 45 self-described Little Monsters, we explored this unusual fan-celebrity relationship and found that Lady Gagas re-articulation of the negative connotations of “monster” enabled fans to use her as a mirror to reflect upon and embrace their differences from mainstream culture. We argue that social media amplify fan identification and raise questions about the changing nature of fan-celebrity relationships in a digital environment.

Saving Food: Food Preservation as Alternative Food Activism

The renewed interest in sustainable agriculture suggests we are in the midst of a food revolution. However, food movements’ focus on individual, instead of collective, action has opened food activism to critiques that it is too focused on consumer politics and lacks the force necessary to make substantive changes in the global food system (e.g., Delind, 2006; Hassanein, 2003). Our examination of the practices of and motivations for food preservation, using survey and interview data, reveals that food preservation presents an opportunity to move alternative food practices away from an individualistic, consumer-oriented politics to a politics based upon relationships to self, others, and the earth, enabling activists to connect more deeply to the goals of food movements. Unlike the dominant discourses of food movements, which encourage an individualistic, consumer-oriented politics, food preservation emphasizes connection and relationships and thus has the potential to subvert the capitalistic logic of the global agro-food industry.

Reflections on a Century of Living: Gendered Differences in Mainstream Popular Songs

The study of popular music developed in part to correct the elitist dismissal of the popular and to validate popular music as a legitimate object of inquiry. Despite this, there is little popular music research that focuses on the most mainstream popular music. In this study we call for a return to the examination of the most mainstream popular songs and music videos through a preliminary investigation of two concurrent hits from the Adult Contemporary (AC) format: Martina McBrides “This Ones for the Girls” and Five for Fightings “100 Years.” Although both similarly focus on images and issues of life for American women and men during a century of living, they present dramatically different images of womens and mens lives in the lyrics and videos. Through examination of these songs and their accompanying videos, we call attention to the neglect of the most mainstream popular music and reiterate the importance of examining important aspects of U.S. culture, in this case gender, through its most mainstream, and seemingly mundane texts.

“Let’s Hug It Out, Bitch” HBO’s Entourage, Masculinity in Crisis, and the Value of Audience Studies

Media scholars have begun to examine how masculinities function in the media through exploration of a variety of texts and personas; however, most have sought to do so by using textual analysis. We argue that this emphasis on textual analysis has overshadowed scholarship on media audiences, limiting opportunities to understand how audiences’ gender identities are affected by mediated masculinities. Through interviews with viewers of HBO’s Entourage, we examine how viewers apply their attitudes and beliefs about masculinity to Entourage’s characters and use Entourage’s portrayal of masculinities to think through their own gender identities. We found that participants were drawn to a fantasy version of a powerful, dominant masculinity and felt less favorably about characters who exhibited forms of masculinity that incorporated attitudes and behaviors deemed feminine. Our findings suggest that scholarship on the crisis in masculinity, and theorization of hegemonic masculinity generally, would be strengthened with critical qualitative audience studies.

The twilight of youth: Understanding feminism and romance in Twilight Moms’ connection to the young-adult vampire series.

In this paper, we report the results of an online survey of self-identified “Twilight Moms,” adult women who have at least 1 child and identify as fans of Twilight, the popular young-adult vampire series. In particular, we examined transportation into the Twilight narrative and parasocial interaction with Twilight characters, and their correlations with gender beliefs, feminist identity, and relational satisfaction. Results revealed that Twilight Moms who held traditional beliefs about women and who identified as nonfeminist were more able to experience transportation into the books, and dissatisfaction with their current romantic partners predicted parasocial interaction with Twilight characters. We interpret these findings in light of fan studies research as well as media entertainment theory and research.

Twi-dudes and Twi-guys: How Twilight’s Male Fans Interpret and Engage with a Feminized Text

The Twilight franchise, based upon the popular Young Adult vampire romantic series, is, unquestionably, female-driven. However, the series’ romantic themes and enthusiastic female fans, as well as the public disdain they have received, have overshadowed the male fans of the series. To explore male fans’ interest in Twilight, how they reconciled their masculine identities with their attraction to a feminine text, and what they learned from Twilight’s romantic messages, we discuss our findings from surveys and group interviews with male Twilight fans. Both the lack of scholarly literature on male audiences of romantic media and the experiences of male Twilight fans reveal that we know little about the roles romantic media play in boys’ and men’s lives. We argue that studying male audiences of romantic media is a useful approach to begin to build an understanding of the roles feminine media forms play in boys’ and men’s gendered identities.

‘You’re born to be brave’: Lady Gaga’s use of social media to inspire fans’ political awareness

Through interviews with 45 self-described Little Monsters, we explore fan identification with Lady Gaga’s interest in and messages about politics and philanthropy, Gaga’s influence on fans’ attitudes toward activism, and the role activism plays in the Little Monster community. Our findings suggest both that fans can be deeply impacted by celebrities’ political values and actions, particularly when expressed through social media, and that the online, networked fan communities that develop around celebrities are socially supportive and politically engaged. We assert that fans’ identification with celebrities’ political values and actions, and the engagement of networked fan communities, demonstrate that the enforced distinctions between ‘audiences’ and ‘publics’ are outdated.