ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of decades of commentary about fans as exemplars of the mass audience, almost three decades ago a pair of publications on the subject dominated the popular discussion. As a subject matter in fan studies, the hegemony of telefantasy drew attention to the interaction between serial television programming and its fans. However, fandom is a very wide-ranging socio-cultural phenomenon. While the participatory culture tradition has been the dominant strand of fan research in cultural studies, it is not the only one. Unfortunately, however, celebrity following has also been inadequately conceptualized in other areas of the field. Notions of the fan as consumer or pseudo-religious devotee contain the idea that celebrity is an exchange value, that it matters and can be conceptualized deductively in relation to fandom in general. The chapter suggests that fan research has struggled with integrating celebrity following and it aims to address that by proposing a selective appropriation of Emile Durkheim's sociology of religion.
