Mark Duffett, University of Chester, UK
. Volume 9, Issue 2 November 2012 Boosting Elvis: A content analysis of editorial stories from one fan club magazine Mark Duffett, University of Chester, UK Abstract There is a tendency in fan studies research to ignore the offline and contingent activities and concerns of organized fan cultures. After introducing the community of English-speaking Elvis Presley fan clubs, this article presents findings from a study of 240 editorial stories from one fan club magazine written over the course of a decade. Results show that under the banner of supporting the memory of their hero, fans participate in a diverse and vibrant living culture and they pursue a wide variety of activities. In order to understand their practice of ‘boosting’ (Barbas 2008), the empirical results are framed with a discussion of Durkheim’s (1912) theory of religion. I argue that keeping Elvis’s memory alive, for fans, means actively maintaining the magnitude of the fan base. Keywords: Elvis Presley, fandom, living culture, boosterism, Durkheim, religion. Introduction For over twenty years, fan studies have been a way to explore audience participation with a media text… The evolution of fan studies, however, has reached a critical moment: traditional studies of media fandom in the digital age seem inadequately equipped to describe and analyse what I call the ‘philosophy of playfulness’ we can observe in fans’ use of today’s digital technology. (Booth 2010, 1-2) What are the specific, historical concerns of fan communities? In the 1990s, various ethnographers explored such questions.1 Since then, with few exceptions, book-length accounts of offline fan communities have been much less prominent.
[Show full text]