Fandom-As-Religion In Erika Doss's Elvis Culture

In a 2005 publication related to her 1999 book, Elvis Culture, Erika Doss drew more than a religious analogy about the posthumous fandom surrounding Elvis Presley. Doss writes, “My references here to ‘religion’ are not meant as metaphorical or rhetorical flourishes, nor do I want to mitigate the reverence that many fans have for Elvis as a ‘kind of’ religion” (2005, 69). This sentiment, that Presley is a “ ‘kind of’ religion,’ ” is but one in a body of literature I refer to as Fandom-as-Religion or more specifically, celebrity music Fandom-as-Religion, to make a distinction between a segment of fan studies known as media fandom. Celebrity music fandom-as-religion, which I herein refer to as fandom-as-religion literature (for brevity), maintains

The reason for this time period most likely related to the twentieth anniversary of the death of Presley in August 1997, and is still an accepted if contended notion today (see Hills 2013; Duffett 2014; 2013a). Upon examining Fandom-as-Religion literature, the tendency to align fandom with religion relates to attempts to understand the expression of fan emotion, sentiment, action, and identity. In my dissertation I challenge these attempts based on contrasting data I collected among the fan communities of John Lennon and Johnny Cash in the form of participant observation and formal interviews with fans. I also offer alternative interpretations rooted in data of dead celebrity fandom. Where fandom-as-religion literature offers extreme accounts of fan emotion, sentiment, action, and identity my data suggests temperate and more mixed evidence of the fan

These three areas act as a Venn diagram of interpretation, where the field of religion and popular culture provides a broader lens of interpretation, fan studies more specific, and fandom-as-religion literature is of immediate concern. My data is the correction for all three with most of the critique targeted at fandom-as-religion literature. Some fandom-as-religion texts, such as Doss (1999) and Cavicchi (1998) are fan ethnographies, while other texts in this category include scholars such as Rodman (1996) and Jindra (2000) who make similar arguments, but do not conduct their own field study. These scholars may quote fan interviews conducted by other scholars, but their method does not include their own ethnographic fieldwork. This latter category comprises the bulk of texts in fandom-as-religion as fan studies, as a whole, does not include a large number of ethnographic works among fans of celebrities. As the majority of fan studies research relates to media fandom and media fandom traditionally did not include much ethnographic work, thus ethnography in fan studies is relatively