“Is This All We Want from a Field Called Celebrity Studies?”: on the Enduring Legacy of Graeme Turner's Approach to Fame

Introduction

If celebrity studies has an academic ‘star’, Graeme Turner would likely be its key contender; he would probably have objected to me positioning him like that, but doing so offers an apt way to signal his enormous and what will certainly be enduring impact on this lively subfield of cultural studies. Indeed, I am not the first to have done so; my colleague Meaghan Morris in her Cultural Studies festschrift piece following Graeme’s‚ retirement also remarked that he is a ‘star’ in many fields, including celebrity studies, but she makes an argument about the distinction between ‘stars’ and ‘legends’: ‘Legends serve the people; they are loved and remembered for the lasting gifts their struggles bring to others…Graeme Turner is a legend in this sense’ (Morris, 2015: 504). While debate about such differences could itself take up an entire celebrity studies paper, suffice it to say, Graeme – as one of his Fame Game co-authors, P. David Marshall, would put it – is a ‘voice above others’ (1997: xi) in celebrity studies. We should continue to listen to this remarkable voice, through his considerable and groundbreaking scholarship in this area, and especially heed his sage advice about how our research in this area can be done better. Cultural studies’ ways of doing celebrity research are distinctive – largely because of Graeme's exceptionally astute, timely, nuanced, politically-engaged work in the area over decades. It is that immense contribution to which I hope to do justice here.

Though I had briefly corresponded with him via email, I first met Graeme Turner in person at a Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference at the University of Technology in Sydney in late 2005. I had recently completed my doctoral thesis on the ‘media event’ that came to envelop Helen Garner's The First Stone (1995). At the heart of that extended media furore was, of course, celebrity capital – who had it (and how did they secure it), what they did with it, and what it meant for public understandings of feminism (Taylor, 2008). Graeme's scholarship had significantly shaped my approach to renown, as well as to Australian media more broadly. We shared a disciplinary background in English and his work on literary celebrity, in particular, deeply informed my own. When I saw him during a coffee break between sessions, I admit that I was star-struck but nevertheless made the life-altering choice to approach him to tell him how important his work had been to me. To his credit, and in a deep, enduring generosity I would feel the benefit of until he sadly passed last year, Graeme was genuinely interested in my doctoral research and my hopes to transform it into a monograph (which I did, thanks to his advice on book proposals and feedback on chapter drafts). So began twenty years of intellectual exchange, dialogue, mentorship and friendship. Since his passing, there have been so many similar stories from those whom Graeme nurtured in this way.

As he did for so many others, from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and research areas, Graeme fostered and enabled my ongoing effort to develop a distinctly feminist form of celebrity studies. My scholarship, and the way I approach celebrity cultures, has remained – and will remain – deeply indebted to Graeme's pioneering work in this area as well as his many years of mentorship. As will become clear here, I write and think about celebrity (and indeed many cultural phenomena) in the ways that I do because of him. Over my formative years (2009–2013) as a University of Queensland Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, of which Graeme was the founding Director (1999–2012), and indeed beyond, we had many generative conversations about celebrity and how we might best come to terms with the political and cultural issues it provokes. We even a co-convened a CCCS symposium, ‘What's left to say about celebrity studies?’, to take stock of the field in 2011, and of course the conclusion was (and remains): an awful lot!

Given Graeme's unwavering commitment to cultural studies and its development, it is not at all surprising that he turned his attention to something like celebrity. His work on fame and stardom is entirely consistent with his career-long focus on marginalised and devalued forms of media and popular culture and practices, recuperating such forms and those who invest in them by attending to the role they play in how we think about ourselves and the worlds we inhabit (Turner, Marshall and Bonner, 2000; Turner, 1993a, 1996, 2004, 2010a, 2010b, 2014, 2016). In its modern form celebrity is, as he established, integral to the political economy of the media in ways that necessitate greater scholarly attention to its industrial dimensions. Celebrity, as Graeme and myriad critics who have built upon his work underscore, is also crucial to processes of world-making and, as such, its cultural and political significance cannot be overestimated. This need not imply a celebratory approach; indeed, as was his way, he consistently offered the kind of nuance that a complex cultural phenomenon such as celebrity necessitates. Over many years, Graeme did much to ensure we all realised what was at stake in these critical conversations over how celebrity was manufactured, sustained, contested and consumed – and he repeatedly urged us to reflect upon how we went about researching the industrial, cultural, social, and political aspects of renown, and whether there were better or more productive ways of doing so.

Graeme's writing on celebrity has been extensive, with impactful articles, chapters and monographs devoted to it published over many decades. In 2004, Graeme published Understanding Celebrity, with a revised version to follow in 2014. This field-defining book, however, was not his first engagement with celebrity culture and why it matters. One of his earlier articles focused on the celebrity of Australian author Peter Carey (1993b), in a way that was consistent with his work in National Fictions (1993a), and which underscored the centrality of authors’ promotional labour in their wider cultural and commercial success – something which of course has only intensified. In 1996, in the short book Literature, Journalism and Media, based on a series of lectures at James Cook University, Graeme further combined his early intellectual history in literary studies with the kind of incisive media and cultural criticism for which he became so well-known internationally, including through an engagement with authorial celebrity in the Australian context. With key fellow Australian cultural and celebrity studies scholars Frances Bonner and P. David Marshall, Fames Games (2000) was the first – and indeed to date only – critical analysis of the celebrity and promotional industries in Australia. In other books, such as Ordinary People and the Media (2010b) and Re-inventing the Media (2016), though not solely preoccupied with celebrity, he placed fame and processes of celebrification in the wider context of changing media terrains and technologies.

As I further elaborate below, Graeme consistently sought to intervene in, shift, and develop the field of celebrity studies in (at least) two key ways: through increased, deeper and more nuanced attention to key elements in its establishment and maintenance: industry (production) and audience (consumption), and through advocating greater methodological diversity in the field which he saw as having been marred by its over-reliance on textual analysis. For Graeme, celebrity studies as an intellectual and political project would be considerably strengthened if it sought to better understand both production and consumption and, concomitantly, expanded its methodological repertoires to meet such a challenge. Before dealing with this work in more depth, I consider why he sought to make such interventions into an oft-devalued field of scholarly inquiry.

Why should we care about celebrity?

As Meaghan Morris observed in the aforementioned piece, Graeme's research ‘has always been engaged with the question of “what should be?” in Australian cultural and media scholarship’ (2015: 510). Indeed, this is a core part of the kind of mentorship and research leadership that he so generously offered so many of us across his extensive career but which he also explicitly addressed in all his scholarship – including on celebrity: What kinds of work should we be doing and why does it matter? For those studying popular culture, the need to have a response to the latter in the face of scepticism about the value of critically interrogating cultural phenomena like celebrity can be especially pressing. Indeed, even now, and while many other forms of popular culture are widely accepted as viable objects of scholarly analysis, when I tell those from outside media and cultural studies that my disciplinary sub-field is celebrity studies there can be an implicit judgement about its value – or lack thereof – upon which Graeme himself had remarked: ‘One of the inevitable consequences of undertaking academic work on celebrity is being asked repeatedly – by journalists, by one's colleagues, sometimes even by taxi drivers – why you would do such a thing’ (2014: 144). While perhaps the taxi drivers may remain unconvinced, Graeme explicitly used the conclusion of Understanding Celebrity to reinforce why cultural studies should most certainly ‘take celebrity seriously’ (2014: 144) – suggesting there was, even in 2014, a reluctance to do so even from within an interdisciplinary discipline known for its engagement with historically denigrated cultural forms, identities, and practices. Long before others in cultural studies, Graeme was in no doubt of the value of sustained investigation into fame and its social, political, and industrial effects. While studies of celebrity, particularly from film theorists such as Richard Dyer (1979), have a longer history, it is the cultural studies approach to celebrity that Graeme especially pioneered, and which led him to offer an incisive metacommentary on the field in ‘Approaching Celebrity Studies’ (2010).

What's wrong with celebrity studies?

As one of its most senior figures, in the inaugural issue of the field's peer-reviewed journal, Celebrity Studies, Graeme took the opportunity of its launch, and the ostensible institutionalisation it signalled, to reflect upon the state of this interdisciplinary subfield. He sought to offer, as he put it, ‘a frank examination of what celebrity studies is doing now’ (2010a: 13). In his characteristically candid style, Graeme did not hold back. Lamenting that he did ‘not see a great deal of depth or variety in academic writing and research on celebrity’ (2010b: 13), with the focus being predominantly on analyses of their media representation, Graeme urged those working in this increasingly popular field to be mindful of how we were approaching the study of celebrity – and, most importantly, what we hoped would be achieved through the analytical and methodological modes we were privileging. He urged those who were intellectually engaging with celebrity to make clear why and how it matters, especially given – as noted – that scholars working on celebrity remain vulnerable to the (often) gendered denigration of popular culture more widely that he so vigorously critiqued in his own early cultural studies work on popular fiction, film, and television.

In that insightful piece, Graeme also pressed us to reflect upon the methods being used to do this work, in particular underscoring the limitations of the field's preference for – or rather over reliance on – textual analysis. This critique of the preponderance of close readings of celebrity representations is one he had made much earlier, too. Analyses of a ‘specific celebrity as a text’, as he remarked in the original Preface of Understanding Celebrity, regretfully ‘remains the dominant paradigm within cultural and media studies approaches to understanding celebrity’ (2004, n.p.), something which constitutes a significant ‘weakness in the field’ (2010a: 14). Coming himself originally from the field of literary studies, Graeme did not dismiss outright the necessity for ongoing work into the close analysis of celebrity signs, however. He was generous enough to recognise that this was an important approach, despite its limitations: ‘while textual analysis certainly remains a valid methodology, in my view we have long passed the point where it can be seen as constituting an entirely sufficient basis upon which to mount a broad programme of cultural studies research’ (2010a: 15). That is, while it may be important work, it is not the only work those interested in a cultural studies approach to celebrity should be doing. As Graeme puts it, and as I have appropriated for my title, we need to ask ‘if this is all we want from a field called celebrity studies? For my part, I think we need to do more to actively foster other approaches to studying celebrity’ (2010a: 13, my emphasis). As I will show, Graeme himself did much to cultivate these ‘other approaches’ – including in my work. He then suggests that the coming pages would represent somewhat of a corrective, turning his always incisive critical gaze instead ‘to the industry that produces these celebrity texts and to the processes that structure their consumption’. The structural aspects of celebrity, he argues, have been ‘sidelined’ by this myopic preference for textual analysis (2010a: 15).

Celebrity, as he notes, has been taken up as an object of analysis by various disciplines – from psychology to business studies: ‘there has been a bandwagon effect as the celebrity of celebrity studies has grown’ (2010a: 12). For Graeme, however, a cultural studies approach to the scholarly consideration of celebrity at least should have some specific features. Firstly, it ‘needs to be understood and studied as an industry’ (2010a: 14). This can, however, be a difficult task given ‘the celebrity industries actively mask their activities’ (2014: 44), something that makes the kind of industry analysis Graeme performs, and advocates for in future work, even more crucial if challenging. Fame Games, based on a large-scale industry study, sought to offer such ‘unmasking’ in a comprehensive analysis of the often invisible/invisibilised work of those tasked with manufacturing and sustaining their client's public visibility or extending their celebrity capital (Driessens, 2013) in Australia in the late 1990s. In his 2010 state-of-the-field piece he returned to the trope of unmasking, reiterating that ‘we need to find ways of removing the mask in order to directly investigate how that influence is managed and operated’ (2010a: 16), implying that there had been little in the way of celebrity studies that replicated the kind of work he, Bonner and Marshall had undertaken into the Australian promotional and publicity industries.

Related to this industry focus is Graeme's emphasis on celebrity as a doing rather a being, and something that at its heart is about selling the celebrity as a commodity (Turner et al., 2000; Turner 2004/2014): ‘If celebrity is a commodity’, he says, ‘I want to know more about the industries which produce that commodity’ (2010a: 16). Celebrity is not something one has but something that is always only contingent and reliant upon a vast range of cultural intermediaries, such as managers, agents and publishers, and of course the celebrity themselves (2014: 46) – not to mention audiences, the other core area Graeme implored us to examine. This focus on industry also represents a key way of moving beyond, or a vital way of ameliorating, the limits of textual analysis: ‘When we conceptualise celebrity as something to be professionally managed, as well as discursively deconstructed, we think about it differently’ (2014: 156). In an interview with James Hay for Communication and Cultural/Critical Studies in 2013, Graeme elaborated on his consistent preoccupation with media industries, asserting that it has been one of the elements that characterised his cultural studies approach to film in particular:

I taught film for quite a long time, but always through a cultural studies lens. One of the things that did seem to me to be missing from a lot of the work in film at that time—not completely, but I think it was marginalized—was industry analysis. That's the kind of thing that I’ve always felt drawn to and have always tried to represent in the work that I’ve done. The little book that I wrote on celebrity, for instance, is divided into production and consumption for exactly the same reasons (2013: 149, my emphasis).

Though the boundaries between production and consumption are more porous than when the above interview took place, it remains the case that further studies of those professionally involved in cultivating and maintaining celebrity could help illuminate what remain opaque processes. This kind of industry analysis is especially important as, rather than simply being relegated to tabloids or magazines that trade on coverage of famous figures, ‘celebrity has become a central structural component of the contemporary political economy of the media; take away celebrity and the industries which feed it, and some of the basic support systems for contemporary commercial media production go with them’ (2014: 145). The type of comprehensive analysis Graeme and his co-authors offered nearly three decades ago is perhaps difficult in the context of limited research funding (Bonner, 2015: 534) but celebrity studies needs to better understand changes in the promotional and publicity industries, as well as in media industries more broadly – in Australia and elsewhere. My own ongoing ARC Linkage project (LP220200396) with Margaret Henderson, the Australian Society of Authors, the Australian Publishers Association and BookPeople (formerly the Australian Booksellers Association) takes up these questions, engaging with the Australian publishing industry, agents and publicists (alongside authors and readers); it offers a much smaller scale intervention but it seeks to ascertain the degree to which these various actors engage in promotional labour and whether/how this work, because of digital media and downsizing in publishing houses, has been displaced onto authors themselves. Our interviews with authors are finding that this ‘visibility labour’, as Crystal Abidin (2016) puts it, is very much now being performed by women authors who experience harassment, misogyny and trolling in ways that need to be mitigated – including by those in industry who expect them to do this kind of promotional labour (i.e., publishers).

While the celebrity's ability to actively intervene to shape/control their public persona via various social media platforms has in some respects been overblown, it is certainly the case that digital media – whether through assistants and managers who do this work or the celebrity themselves – has transformed persona-building (Marshall et al., 2019). But thinking about this as work – and often as a form of unpaid gendered labour as we are finding in the digital media work that publishers increasingly expect of women authors – can help assuage these limitations. Therefore, in addition to the audiences who do things with and through celebrity, I would add that the kind of empirical research Graeme was steering us toward can – and should, where practicable – also involve the celebrity themselves. In this vein, scholars are increasingly engaging with the idea of celebrity-as-lived, interviewing celebrities themselves to reflect upon their experiences of negotiating public visibility (Driessens, 2015; Ferris, 2015; McIntyre, 2021; O’Meara, in press; Towers, in press).

How does celebrity intervene in the social?

Rather than conceptualising celebrity as ‘field of representation to which we might respond as if to a body of texts’, Graeme draws upon Jack Bratich's work to compellingly argue that ‘celebrity is a mode of intervention into the social which must be understood in terms that acknowledge the nature of its participation in the production of everyday life’ (2014: 146). Such work is especially important, given that, as Graeme remarked in Reinventing the Media, itself featuring a three-chapter section on celebrity which he saw integral to this ‘reinvention’:

At this point we don’t know just how, or indeed if, celebrity culture might be imbricated into those processes of everyday life that are not directly concerned with consuming or producing or participating in the media – in a sense, the crucial test for the extent of celebrity's cultural influence. (2016: 110–11, original emphasis)

Following Graeme's sage recommendations, the heterogenous uses of celebrity by audiences, then, is an area in which we can and should continue to expand. Building upon this, it seems to me that one way we could further these debates is through more sustained critical dialogue between fan studies and celebrity studies – the lack of which has always somewhat surprised me. While of course not all consumers of celebrity are fans (or even anti-fans), there is much more than could be done in terms of audiences through greater acknowledgement of the synergies between these fields without reducing it to fandom. Indeed, Graeme encourages us to look beyond fan investments to think further about how celebrity ‘participates in the field of expectations that many, particularly the young, have of everyday life’ (2010a: 14).

Graeme's assertion that we need to learn more ‘about the social and cultural functions celebrities might fulfil for their audiences’ (2016: 109), and his call for expanded methodologies through which to do so, including those that place an emphasis on audiences and consumers of celebrity through ‘more empirical modes of enquiry’ (2010a: 19; see also Holmes and Redmond, 2013), is one that many working in this field have clearly heeded – especially in terms of gender, sexuality, class, and race. Scholars have since undertaken important empirical work with audiences to ascertain precisely how celebrities are shaping personal and professional ambitions and aspirations – including those around fame itself, something enabled by forms like reality tv and social media, as Graeme emphasised. For example, in Celebrity, Aspiration and Contemporary Youth: Education and Inequality in an Era of Austerity, Heather Mendick et al. engaged directly with young British audiences to demonstrate how celebrities ‘regulate young people's aspirations by opening up and closing down certain ways of thinking, being and acting within austere meritocracy’ (2018: 10). In this respect, their work – like Graeme's – sought to challenge narratives about celebrity's triviality and instead to ‘take celebrity seriously as a social and cultural practice through which we work out and express our ideas about ourselves and others’ (10; see also Mendick et al., 2015). Similarly, and indicative of the resonance of Graeme's positioning of celebrity as a ‘cultural formation which has a social function’ (2014: 10), other researchers have used interviews to better come to terms with what audiences do with celebrity. This includes research into how famous figures shape young women's understandings and engagements with feminism in New Zealand (Jackson, 2021); how LGBTQ audiences responded to celebrity marriage equality activism in Australia (Watson, 2021); the role that celebrities play in young women's perceptions of leadership (Paule and Yelin, 2024); and how celebrities inform the moral judgements audiences make (Click and Tukachinsky Forster, 2025).

While, as such studies underscore, it is common to suggest that celebrities help influence identity formation and wider understandings of political issues and social movements, ‘there is no agreement on exactly how that occurs, or to what effect’ (Turner, 2016: 110) – something which remains the case even in the present. Given the ubiquity of celebrity, and the many more pathways to celebrification, the urgency that Graeme identified around such questions has only intensified as digital platforms such as TikTok and the ‘influencers’ it enables have increased in reach and resonance. In addition, the increased (and indeed largely now expected) direct intervention of celebrities into the political field, particularly via social media, is something we are only beginning to come to terms with (Van Bulck, 2018; Majic, 2023). Moving forward, more research with audiences in the way Graeme encouraged could provide invaluable insights into the affective, cultural and ideological work celebrities do in the world, and how audiences actively engage with them, as well as elucidating who gets to speak and (most importantly) be heard on pressing social and political issues and with what ramifications.

None of this needs to lead to a celebratory approach; working on celebrity requires a particular kind of nuance, which Graeme always offered in his own scholarship. As he remarked with Bonner and Marshall, ‘As has happened elsewhere in cultural studies where arguments for a progressive strain within popular culture run up against the need to criticise specific and more regressive aspects of that culture, this project has to insist on the specificity of particular instances as well as on the necessity of critique’ (2000: 178). In Understanding Celebrity, he evocatively characterised this need to resist reductive accounts of celebrity while also acknowledging its limitations as a careful ‘balancing act’. In regard to the need to navigate a path between condemnation and celebration, I am reminded of feminist theorist Jennifer Wicke's comments about the sphere of celebrity in relation to feminism: ‘good things happen in the celebrity zone and bad things happen in that zone’ (1994: 758). And the way in which we get to those different ends of the spectrum, and everything that happens in between, is through the kind of audience work Graeme exhorts us to do. If a celebrity has certain effects, and indeed affects, in the world then we cannot just read these off celebrity signs (Turner, 2010a, 2016).

Although textual analysis of specific celebrities remains a favoured approach for some, there is now – as Graeme had sought – certainly much more methodological diversity in the field than when his 2010 critique was penned. To give just one example, the recently completed Routledge Companion to Gender and Celebrity, which I co-edited with Joanna McIntyre (forthcoming), gives some sense of the richness in methodological terms that is indeed coming to characterise the field, with authors taking a vast range of approaches, including: critical discourse analysis, digital ethnography, textual analysis, archival research, and qualitative approaches such as surveys and interviews with both celebrities and their audiences. However, taking Graeme's lead, I would suggest that further reflexivity in the field not just on why we are studying celebrity but how is crucial to this question about what we want the field to do/be as it moves forward.

In his 2010 piece, as elsewhere, Graeme also emphasised the need to focus on how celebrity cultures, audiences and industries operate in different contexts (2010a: 16), while also acknowledging transnational flows. An emphasis on the specificities of distinct national and regional contexts and cultures was also a laudable commitment that drove much of Graeme's work, from his early studies on Australian media cultures to his later work with Anna Pertierra and Graeme Turner (2012) and Jinna Tay and Graeme Turner (2015) on television, and Fame Games – published in 2000 – which remains the only book-length study of the celebrity industries in Australia. We can never talk of celebrity culture in the singular but must always focus on the culturally specific ways it is manufactured and sustained in distinct national contexts (Loxham, in press). It is, he notes, difficult to provide ‘an account of the cultural function of celebrity that will have equal explanatory power in all the contexts in which it arises’ (2014: 142; see also 2010a: 17). As Graeme's work reminds us, we must always attend to historical and cultural specificities – in celebrity studies and indeed beyond – especially when considering questions around consumption: ‘making sense of the politics implicated in consuming celebrity at any one point in time is always going to be a complicated, nuanced, and contextualised process’ (2014: 142). In response, the field has more recently taken account of such complexities and contexts, through – for example – calls for the ‘internationalisation’ (Xu et al., 2021) and ‘decolonisation’ of celebrity studies (Xu et al., 2025), which seek the displacement of its longstanding Anglo-centrism and focus on the Global North. While there is still some way to go in terms of unsettling the Anglo-American assumptions and epistemic frameworks that continue to mar the field (McIntyre and Taylor, in press), there is nevertheless much more work being done, particularly on East Asian celebrity cultures (Xu et al., 2024; Cai, 2024; Guo and Taylor, 2025), to help shift these biases in the ways that Graeme had encouraged.

Conclusion: doing celebrity studies, Turner-style

As for so many other aspects of cultural studies, Graeme Turner's intellectual legacy for celebrity studies is immense, as I hope to have shown here. Personally, both my own research trajectory in feminist celebrity studies would not have been possible without his support and trailblazing scholarship, and my debt to him is profound. Graeme's work on celebrity has long been a core part of his cultural studies; not only did he exhort all of us to reflect upon our own practices, but he also offered a model for how to do the most generative kind of work in this field. In addition, his astute commentary on celebrity studies as a research field urges us to always be clear about how we are doing such work and what is stake in the kinds of methodological and theoretical commitments we make.

To return to the quotation from Fame Games, and indeed the sentiment of all Graeme's writing on fame and stardom, we need to better and more deeply understand how celebrities ‘are folded into our understandings of the world’ (Turner et al., 2000: 15) – this is one of the key reasons why they matter and why they are important for cultural studies. There is, however, much left to say about the overdetermined processes of celebrification alongside the uses that audiences make of celebrity and the industries which sustain them; as Graeme himself put it, ‘even when approached from a number of angles, there will be much about celebrity we still don’t know’ (2014: 157). Building upon his foundational work, we can exhibit greater curiosity about celebrity and its cultural function in the twenty-first century, including how it changes as and when the media industries themselves do. Graeme emboldened us to ask these questions and to seek out more productive ways to answer them. We can, in his honour, strive to do celebrity studies in the ‘multi-factoral, conjunctural and multi-disciplinary’ (Turner, 2010a: 19) ways he encouraged, making this field richer, bolder, and more relevant in the context of celebrity's ubiquity.