Cult Adjacent | I spent most of last week binging made-for-TV biopics and docuseries like Janet Jackson's docuseries on Hulu. As I watched the old concert footage spliced in between the interviews, I couldn’t help but wonder about culty celebrity fandoms. You already know that I do not think that any group of people brought together by a love of a given “thing” is a cult. However, you also know that I love poking around at things that have culty elements, such as a group of people coming together to obsess over a given person, place, or thing. I read through this 2005 article about one of Michael Jackson’s molestation cases and other celebs who maintained the support of their fanbases despite heinous charges. The article provided excellent insight into the mind frame of fans who reject any possibility that their idols may be flawed, or worse, criminals. I found this quote especially odd, “Fans of Bryant, Stewart and Jackson are not just supporting idols and pop icons they believe have been wrongly accused of crimes, experts say. They consider them to be members of their family.” I wrote a little about this in May, in the Unexpected Fandom post but I will continue to think about the “cult of celebrity.”
The Big Post | I came across the Conspirituality podcast recently (I may have mentioned it before) and I cannot stop seeing its influence. I have listened to a few episodes so far and the general theme is to explore examples and consequences of converged “right-wing conspiracy theories and faux-progressive wellness utopianism.” While I was aware that this particular type of conspiracy movement existed, I did not know there was a name for it.
I was inspired by Conspirituality and this mini-documentary to do more research into this wellness/conspiracy overlap. Charlotte Ward and Dr. David Voas published a 2011 article titled “The Emergence of Conspirituality” in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. In the article, Ward and Voas argue that while others have addressed conspirituality in their own research, no one else had written a detailed discussion of the word. They assert that research on conspirituality might be traced back to the late 90’s research on the political conspiracy theorist David Icke. However, actual movements that relied on joint wellness-conspiracy theories can be linked back to counter-culture movements of the 1960s. We talked a bit about the socio-political transformations that made the peaceful and controlled environments of cults seem appealing here.
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