Figure skater Johnny Weir and his soon-to-be-ex-husband Victor Voronov.

More interesting than the current wave of TMZ coverage and tell-all Access Hollywood interviews, though, was the absence thereof before the official divorce announcement on March 19th. On February 11th, Voronov tweeted a photograph of the temporary restraining order he had filed against his husband, which detailed the night Weir allegedly assaulted Voronov and was subsequently arrested. Though the tweet was later deleted, it remained uploaded long enough for fans to save and repost it on various forums. And yet, the celebrity media, usually eager to sniff out scandal (especially scandal backed up by legal documents) remained silent.

On the surface, this may be unsurprising. The mainstream media has a long history of turning a blind eye to accusations of domestic violence leveled at male athletes; this may, actually, be the most masculine-coded role Weir has ever played in a media narrative. But the all-pervasiveness of the media silence is notable, and more likely stems from the fact that, at the time of the aforementioned tweet, Weir was in Sochi, Russia, covering the Olympic figure skating events for NBC alongside fellow former Olympian Tara Lipinski. Weir and Lipinski were the media darlings of the Sochi Olympics, lauded for their flamboyant outfits and keen commentary alike; in the aftermath of the Games, NBC even gave them a spot covering fashion at the Academy Awards. NBC had an obvious financial stake in not letting its star commentator fall from grace in the middle of its Olympics coverage.

Johnny Weir with Tara Lipinski in Sochi.

But the American media also had a political stake in not letting Weir, an openly gay former U.S. Olympian, become the face of same-sex domestic violence. Russia’s recent anti-gay legislation had become one of the biggest media talking points of the Sochi Games, and much of the moral high ground the U.S. held came from the recent Supreme Court dismantling of the Defense of Marriage Act and the country’s overall better track record on LGBT issues. The last thing anyone wanted to give Russia was evidence that the most visible gay man at the Games was in a same-sex marriage that wasn’t working.

Ironically, Weir himself, a known Russophile, had already found himself embroiled in controversy when he expressed his support for the U.S. presence at the Sochi Games and decried the anti-Russia protests organized by various LGBT organizations. In an article for the Falls Church News-Press, Weir wrote, “Many activists also believe that change starts with a revolution, a term that terrifies me. I am not against activism in any way, but I don’t have the strength of character to not only revolutionize my life on a daily basis but also the lives of others.” This desire to distance himself from LGBT activism is consistent with past statements Weir has made – he has no interest in being a role model, and has always seemed much more comfortable with his media image as skating’s “wild child.”

Yet the burden of representation remains. Weir and Voronov’s marriage had already been framed as a success story on the road to full LGBT equality. Now that the divorce announcement is official and the Olympics are over, the media has seized on the story as Weir and Voronov engage in one of the most high-profile same-sex divorces in American legal history. Voronov’s crisis manager, Wendy Feldman, has made this unprecedented quality explicit: “This case is really a true test of equal rights — in marriage and now divorce,” she said, in a statement released soon after the divorce announcement. And Voronov, Weir, and the media alike aren’t keen to let anyone forget that this is a gay divorce. From Voronov’s claims that Weir “forced him out of the closet” and only married him because a “Georgetown-educated lawyer” would make for a useful character on his (now-defunct) reality show, to the debate about whether or not Voronov should have worked during their marriage (rather than letting Weir alone bring home the bacon), discursive constructions of heterosexual and homosexual gender roles have become integral to the media narrative surrounding the divorce.

The domestic violence accusations bring in another level of ugliness, especially after Weir’s no-holds-barred account of what “really” happened the night he was arrested, which includes implications of attempted rape on Voronov’s part. The divorce raises questions about the power dynamics of money, fame, perceived femininity, and domestic abuse, even as the more shallow media coverage focuses on Weir’s collections of furs and Birkin bags and Voronov’s demand that Weir return the family dog.

How Weir and the media handle the rest of the divorce proceedings will be telling. Weir’s star text, as a media personality and as one of a small number of openly gay American athletes, is at stake, but so is, despite Weir’s protestations, the popular image of gay marriage and divorce in America. Weir may not want to be anyone’s hero, but he likely doesn’t want to be anyone’s villain, either – and in the black-and-white world of media narrative, he may not get to choose.

Much of our writing about our LeakyCon experience so far has explored a perceived blurring of previously assumed cultural categories at play in LeakyCon, including a destabilization of identity categories, a merging of fan, geek, and nerd in a general celebration of “awesomeness,” and a conflation of niche and mainstream, subcultural, and pop cultural. In my previous post, I spoke specifically about a blurring between celebrity and fan that permeated many of my LeakyCon experiences. I focused primarily on the ways in which stars positioned themselves as fans by demonstrating their fannish cred.

But performing fannishness was not the only ways stars blurred the line between fan and celebrity and destabilized the fan/celebrity relationship. They also frequently expressed their love for and awe of fan creativity and fan investment. They described fan creativity as similar to their own experience as budding artists, and talked about the way in which fan work has inspired and influenced their current creative endeavors. At a panel for press questions, I was able to ask the cast of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries about their responses to the fan creativity elicted by the web series. The cast’s replies emphasized the way in which the creative work of fan production felt humbling and awe-inspiring to the actors, and also reflected their own experiences as aspiring cultural participants and artists. Ashley Clements, who plays the series’ title character, talked about how she was herself inspired by the creative inspiration fans drew from the web series: “I mean it was always incredible when our show inspired people to make anything, from fan art to fan fiction to videos and to all the dolls and anything. It was just inspiring that we inspired them to make something.”

In a similar vein, Daniel Vincent Gordh (William Darcy in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries) talked about the impetus behind fan work as akin in spirit to the type of creative calling that inspired the cast members to be artists.

We all have things like that, art (that)… inspired us at some point during our development… in such an impactful, deep way… that it inspired our creativity, and I think is the reason that we’re doing this… I think that this is part of the general nature of art and how it operates in our society. But there was the part of awe that *we* were the ones doing this, it’s … a kind of a coming of age, almost, for me as an artist at least to be like “oh, and now I’ve gotten to a place where we’re able to release this and it’s continuing the cycle.”

Gordh’s words cast fans and actors as similarly artistic and creative minded but perhaps at different stages in their realization of (or professionalization of) this creativity. While this might suggest an erasure of the differences between professionalized creative labor and fandom’s logics of the gift economy, wherein fan artists don’t necessarily strive to become professional artists, I did not sense an overriding assumption that all fans want to be professional artists or are only at the beginning of their path to do so. Rather, fan creativity and professional creativity seemed to be recognized as concurrent and complementary modes of cultural expression in contemporary popular culture.

The most memorable story I heard over the whole Con was in Mary Kate Wiles’ response to my question about fan work. (Wiles played Lydia in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries; I’ve written about Wiles’ web series work and relationship with fans here.) She described an instance in which a particular work of fan creativity directly influenced her own performance choices in a key episode in LBD:

My favorite experience, along with seeing fans talk to the characters on twitter or whatever, was that on the morning that we were to shoot the episodes when Lydia finds out about the sex tape and is recovering from that, I found a fan fiction that was about Lydia and Wickham’s relationship. And I read it that morning, and it was so much like what I had pictured in my head, and in it Wickham gives her a necklace. And because I had read it that morning and was going to shoot that afternoon, I ended up picking a necklace that was to be from him. And that was such a crazy thing for me to experience, having made work that made someone else make something that then inspired me… how cool is that? That you’re getting to interact with your audience in a way that contributes to your own storytelling. I think it’s just so beautiful, and it’s something that you don’t really get to do, ever. You don’t get to do that on a movie or TV show. It’s wonderful that we’ve gotten to experience that.

I find myself quite compelled by this story, most especially by the notion that a piece of fan fiction could directly influence a small but significant detail in a source text. We all know of stories of fan fiction premises that have surfaced in official productions, both with and without the consent of the fan authors. But this instance, the way it was framed by Wiles, seems much more a personal response to a piece of fan artwork, in turn embedding a personal detail into a larger production in a way that isn’t even necessarily meant to translate to viewers. This anecdote offers a landscape that personalizes fans and actors as creative interpreters working together to weave popular culture, one web series/plot interpretation/wardrobe detail at a time.

For more on LeakyCon 2013, read:

– Part one (“Where the Fangirls Are“)
– Part two (“On Wearing Two Badges“)
– Part three (“Fans and Stars and Starkids“)
– Part four (“From LGBT to GSM: Gender and Sexual Identity among LeakyCon’s Queer Youth“)
– Part six (“Redefining the Performance of Masculinity“)
– Part seven (“Embracing Fan Creativity in Transmedia Storytelling“)

Ever since NBC first broadcast the Oscars in 1953, they have served as a sort of Authenticity Litmus Test. Massive star ‘meet-and-greets,’ whether telethons or awards shows, allow fans to see what appears to be the authentic and unmediated star: oh, look, here’s George Clooney, uncognizant of the camera, just hobnobbing around with buddy Matt Damon!  Of course, The Golden Globes presents itself as even less mediated; nevertheless, stunts like the direct address, tears, and blown-kisses of admiration between former co-stars and current nominees at this year’s awards facilitate the believe that the Oscars presents the ‘real’ actors behind the performances for which they are being honored.

But just because a star can act — or can attract attention to his/her personal life — doesn’t mean that she should be trusted with enlivening a 3.5 hour show.   Some stars, such as Robert Downey Jr., can spice up the most dour material; others (read: Cameron Diaz) can’t even read the teleprompter — or improvise when the teleprompter forgets to change the name of the presenter.

So when a star gets on stage, reads a prepared speech, either presenting or accepting an award, and fails to say something either poignant or hilarious, a little something dies inside the fan.  Unlike a star’s endearing ‘just like us’ moments featured in US Weekly, these banal Oscar flubs and speeches  simply make the star appear unworthy.  For example:  no matter how arduously the writers tried to make fun of Baldwin and his ‘authentic’ feelings of inadequacy…it still didn’t ring true, or even humorously.  I could see both Baldwin and Martin trying to squirm out of the bad-writing straightjackets they had been laced into, but I still felt that my belief in Baldwin as intrinsically funny was forever compromised.

And while some stars’ appearances seem to perfectly confirm their dominant images — I’m talking to you, Dude — they don’t necessarily engender elevated feelings of appreciation and devotion.   A pitch-perfect speech, on the other hand, can perform such heavy rhetorical lifting.  And, to my mind, the only person who did this last night — and did it in spades — was Robert Downey Jr.

Secondly, the stars aren’t dead, despite no small number of eulogies in recent years.  Granted, there will certainly be some interesting postmortem concerning what the triumph of The Hurt Locker — the smallest grossing Best Picture in history (and one that killed off its only ‘name’ actor in the first ten minute — says about the future of the industry.  As Roger Ebert tweeted to conclude the ceremony, “Shortest Oscar story in history: ( ! > $ )”  But while  The Hurt Locker‘s win affirms that the Academy itself still values embodied acting, shouldn’t Avatar’s ridiculous financial success indicate that expensive technology, rather than expensive stars, actually bring in the audiences?

Yes and no.  First, it’s no mistake that the three STARS of the Avatar — Zoe Saldana, Sam Worthington, and Sigourney Weaver — were all presenters at the awards.  Their faces, even if modified and blue, are essential to the heart and soul and success of that film, however ideologically repugnant you might find it.  While other directors posed with their actors in last month’s Vanity Fair, James Cameron was photographed with his massive camera.  It’s ironic, then, that following Avatar’s virtual shut-out, Cameron’s stars received far more stage time than he did.

Even more importantly, the two main contenders for Best Actress starred in FOUR big hits this year (Bullock in The Proposal and The Blind Side…and we’ll conveniently forget All About Steve; Streep in Julie & Julia and It’s Complicated).  Stars aren’t dead, then — they’re just working for less.  The $100 million paycheck that characterized Tom Cruise’s halcyon 1990s is gone.  But they stars still do draw audiences: see, for example, the behemoth $116 million opening weekend of Alice in Wonderland, a product presold via concept, director, and star.

This year’s Oscars attempted to bring aspects of Old Hollywood glamour back to the show.  To my mind — and I’m by no means alone, judging from the Twitter cacophony from last night — it was stilted, poorly edited, and embarrassingly written.  There was not a single shining moment, save the glorious win by Kathryn Bigelow.  There was no Brangelina; no Pitt Porn; no Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise or even Edward Pattinson.

But when Mo’Nique went backstage after accepting her award, she was asked about her choice of outfit: a blue dress and a gardenia in her hair.  Apparently she choose both because they were exactly what Hattie McDaniel had worn, nearly seventy years ago, when she became the first African-American to win an Academy Award.  Stars — and our memories of them, their presence and even their appearances on awards shows — matter, and the Academy Awards are a piquant reminder of why.

For a star’s triumph, coupled with residual goodwill affiliated with his or her image, can allow us to forget what she is being awarded for.  Was Jeff Bridges being awarded for his performance — or for being Jeff Bridges?  And what function did Sandra Bullock’s star image — that of the tremendously nice, likable, girl next door  — play in glossing over the parts of her winning performance, and the film in which it finds itself, that are so insidiously and quietly dangerous?  I love and am enthralled by stars, but find myself constantly reminding myself, and others, of the maxim at the very heart of star studies: stars embody ideologies, but they also mask their work.  The spectacle — of the awards themselves, of a dress — can distract us from the complex labor performed by the star image in propping up dominant understandings of race, sex, sexuality, and what it means to live in America today.

And finally: LiveTweeting the Oscars with a gaggle of media scholars was far more amusing than watching them.  Next year: join in!  And please share your own thoughts on the show — and the stars — below.