ABSTRACT
This chapter takes an active approach to the way fans and audiences consume celebrity culture. It draws upon a number of arguments and illustrations to demonstrate the affective and empowering way that stars and celebrities, fans and audiences, create spaces of cultural activation where new intensified relations are forged. While reading or making sense of audience responses is crucial, tendency to dismiss the agency that is so palpably there, in the first place, is one of the failures of the work being carried out in this field. David Bowie embodied a particularly transgressive and transcendent form of agency, which was drawn upon to both garner support for the identity positions they were seeking to take up, or which offered a life-affirming way of overcoming obstacles. The chapter demonstrates the way Bowie has positively impacted upon migrant identity and how notions of the self and selfhood move across sheets of belonging and estrangement – themselves connected to age, gender and sexuality.
