Introduction
Much of the popular scholarship surrounding the House of Windsor, the British royal family, draws on celebrity and star studies to examine how their public personae are manufactured. Red-carpet appearances reiterate the family’s elevated status through wealth and glamor. In A Berry Royal Christmas (BBC, 2019), television personality and chefs Mary Berry and Nadiya Hussain make holiday-themed desserts with Prince William and Princess Catherine (henceforth referred to as Kate Middleton). Such specials are intended to give the public the illusion of proximity and intimacy as we watch the royals flounder at baking.
But the celebrity is only one side of the equation. Without fans to consume media like this, the Windsors would still be royalty, but their celebrity would have no real value. Royal fans remain understudied, yet as the British monarchy’s overt political influence has waned over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Windsors’ fans are what keep them central to popular culture, endowing them with symbolic importance as objects of adoration and economic importance as objects of consumption.
In recent years, the Windsors have seen an uptick in scandals, revelations of criminality, and fractures between family members that is in many ways commensurate with a general increase in negative news and politics in the social media era. The general questions asked on social media and in the popular press following such moments are typically: Will the people continue to support the monarchy under these conditions? and Which side of this internal royal controversy will people be taking? Putting aside support for a continued constitutional monarchy (a political question), a fan studies approach shows us that affective interest in the royals as celebrities (a cultural question) will not decrease. Fan studies’ recent turn toward studying toxicity and “ugliness” shows how even controversy gives fans the opportunity for discussion and debate, which generates buzz that keeps the Windsors present in the pop culture Zeitgeist.
This article will examine two key areas of royal fandom. First, I look at the relationship between fandom and consumption practices. The release of royal memorabilia is a standard practice during milestone events, with officially sanctioned merchandise benefitting the Royal Collection Trust and other charities. I argue, though, that the Windsors’ reach extends beyond these direct modes of consumption to television, film, and literature created by fans. Second, I examine gossip, scandal, and anti-royal sentiment through the lens of anti-fandom. Doing so shifts the question to how affective engagement with the Windsors, whether positive or negative, is part of a larger cultural project that provides ongoing mediated entertainment, encourages consumption, and keeps the royals culturally relevant when they may no longer be politically so.
Eating the Rich: Fan Consumption and Production
Royal fans can be found in multiple spheres, with a variety of fan practices. Fashion Websites like Duchess on a Budget chronicle how to shop and dress like Kate Middleton for significantly less money. In literature, loosely fictionalised versions of the Windsors pop up frequently. In Jasmine Guillory’s The Royal Holiday (2019), main character Vivian gets to stay at Sandringham House when her daughter is hired to style an unnamed duchess (intended to reference Meghan Markle) for the royal family’s public appearances at Christmas. Alongside fictionalised television like The Crown, nonfictional programming, including news interviews and television specials, gives fans more opportunities to watch and consume.
Literal or figurative consumption is at the heart of fan practices. For Cornel Sandvoss, consumption is a “generally understood language through which one’s identity is communicated and assessed” (Sandvoss 3). Building on this premise, Mel Stanfill sees consumption as less about directly buying objects than watching the object of fandom, participating in activities supplemental to it, and interacting with it through transmedia (84). Licenced and unlicenced products of the royal family are easy enough to purchase online and at tourist shops across London. It is easy enough to see how these products contribute to the global economy. Perhaps less immediately evident are the forms of production and consumption that interest me: the creation of Websites, literature, film, and television inspired by the Windsors, but created by fans. These more indirect examples do not provide direct financial benefit to the Windsors. Instead, fan creators and producers profit while fan consumers benefit from the pleasure they get consuming these texts.
S.J. Bennett’s novel The Windsor Knot (2020) is a murder mystery set at Windsor Castle. When a Russian man dies after a dinner party, palace officials are quick to declare it a freak accident to avoid scandal. The police believe the victim was murdered, but their lines of investigation are unsatisfying to Queen Elizabeth, who begins to investigate the murder with the help of a young woman who works in the security office. This fictionalisation of Elizabeth’s life and personality is an example of real-person fan fiction, a fictional story written about a real person, often without their authorisation. For this reason, real-person fan fiction remains “more contentious than stories about fictional characters for the ways it might violate privacy and cross the boundaries of appropriateness”, yet it remains “an incredibly popular form of writing that spans all forms of celebrities across time” (Kies).
While it is tempting to think of The Windsor Knot and the series to which it belongs as mere fun, we should not be so quick to dismiss its relationship to the longstanding tradition of fan-created fiction. Henry Jenkins describes fan fiction as “reworking borrowed materials” more than “recovering the author’s meaning” (53). In fan-created works like The Windsor Knot and The Crown, fans are able to make their own meanings and personae separate from any image-making done by the Windsors and their communications teams.
Anti-Royalists and Anti-Fans: Loving to Hate
From 2020 to 2022, popular stories about the Windsors were overwhelmingly characterised by controversies and scandals. Harry and Meghan’s announcement that they were retiring as “senior” royals prompted a flurry of articles about whether the Queen approved this plan, sometimes claiming she had orchestrated it or she was completely surprised by it. Articles speculated on rifts between Charles and Harry, and William and Harry, and the Sussexes’ legal suits against various media outlets further mired them in controversy. Within those same years, Prince Andrew gave an interview about his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, who was arrested in 2019 for sex trafficking of minors (“Prince Andrew & the Epstein Scandal”), and subsequently also stepped down from his royal duties to protect the family from scandal by association. In 2021, Prince Philip died, and prior to his funeral, various media outlets speculated on whether Harry and Andrew would attend and, if they did, how they might be received by their family. The funeral was held at Westminster Abbey during the COVID-19 pandemic, a spartan affair in which the family members were segregated by household, leaving a very sad visual of Queen Elizabeth sitting alone.
The years 2022-2023 was especially jammed with royal events. The queen’s funeral took place in September, an eight-hour television affair that was preceded by televisual displays of “the Queue”, a ten-mile-long line of mourners awaiting their turn to pay their respects to her coffin. Updates on the Queue’s length and wait times were covered across media outlets, and continuous coverage was even available in Parliament. On Twitter, the account @QE2Queue provided real-time updates to assist prospective mourners at finding its end and anticipating how long they might be in line. As of the time of writing, the account, which has not been active since the Queue formally ended on 18 September 2022, still has nearly 3,000 followers.
In December 2022, Harry and Meghan’s self-titled six-part docuseries debuted on Netflix, shortly followed by the release of Harry’s memoir Spare in January. Though Harry’s memoir spends far more pages chronicling an unhappy childhood and the trauma he experienced over his mother’s death, the book, like the docuseries, touches upon how Harry and Meghan fell in love and began a courtship away from prying eyes. Both pieces of media frame them as star-crossed lovers whose romance was never fully accepted by the royal family, and whose harassment by the paparazzi was not only ignored but even perpetuated by the royal family.
In May, the banner year came to its logical conclusion with the coronation of now King Charles, which, like Elizabeth’s funeral, received extensive television coverage. Her funeral was portrayed in the media as a sombre affair in which the entire world grieved the loss of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch (and the second longest in the entire world). Charles’s coronation coverage, by comparison, seemed more cynical, noting the pomp and circumstance did not seem to mesh with modern visions of the monarchy. As with the queen’s funeral, gossip sites and other media speculated on whether Harry would attend. He did—alone—and sat several rows behind William and the other senior royals, just a mere spectator.
Such gossip and speculation help to foment further consumption of the royals and the sharing of that consumption through fan-to-fan gossip and buzz. As Graeme Turner notes, we might typically think of celebrity gossip as material for so-called “trashy” outlets like tabloids and gossip sites, part of the “tabloidization” of popular culture, but “the alignment of commercial interests of the magazine and celebrity is at its most seamless at the higher end of the market” (490). Studying the intersection between celebrity and fandom, Divya Garg argues that “affect operates as a collective force by which fan communities operate and are sustained”, in many ways “bridging the gap between the private and the public” (18)—the private fan emotion and practice of consuming the public image of the celebrity; the private life of the celebrity vs. the public display of affect by the fan. A fan’s relationship to any cultural text, whether it is television or a celebrity, “operates in the domain of affect”, which can be “defined qualitatively, by the infection of the particular investment, by the nature of the concern (caring, passion) in the investment, by the way in which the specific event is made to matter to us” (Grossberg 56-57). Affect is central to any fannish engagement.
Following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, media sites, royal experts, and celebrity scholars expressed concern about the immense public outpouring of grief (McKibbin 15). While “it is often argued that there was a surplus of ‘fantasy’ in people’s relationships with her”, Richard Johnson notes that “fantasy accompanies all our relationships” (513). Johnson continues to investigate ways mourning for Diana was sometimes framed as grief among those who celebrated her “liberation from royal wifedom” (518)—that is, just after gaining back a life lost symbolically to the monarchy, she lost her life materially. At other times, mourning for Diana was a sign of being a “liberal royalist” who had hoped for her to change and modernise the monarchy, a hope that was lost upon her death and the “ceremonial trappings of war (gun-carriage, soldiers, pacing male mourners)” that “contrasted with her own disassociation from the royal culture” (520). My point here is not to dwell on the significance of Diana as princess or ex-wife, or on the media events that were her untimely death and subsequent funeral, as these have all been written extensively about. Rather, I use this example to demonstrate how such writings focus on the wrong tension. Public outpourings of grief at Diana’s death do not necessitate questions about the appropriateness of grieving a celebrity not personally known. The presumption that grief is only for those who had intimate knowledge of the deceased is a misunderstanding of how emotions and fandom work.
The politics of mourners, whether for Diana or more recently for Queen Elizabeth, should not be presumed, nor should those of anyone on a particular side of the royal “feuds”. To support Harry’s move to California, for example, might not make a fan an anti-royalist. A fan’s relationship to the politics of the monarchy and its place in British (and global) political history and culture is likely too complex and nuanced to be captured by their affect for particular royals or by their enthusiasm for royal gossip and appearances.
Thus, instead of thinking of public interest and consumption of the Windsors as an indication of royalist or anti-royalist sentiment, we are better off thinking in terms of fandom and anti-fandom. In addition, to be an affective relationship, often tied with consumption, fandom, for Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, is also a way in which “we interact with the mediated world” and “form emotional bonds with ourselves and others in a modern, mediated world” (10). In later work, Jonathan Gray examines anti-fans, “those who strongly dislike a given text or genre, considering it inane, stupid, morally bankrupt and/or aesthetic drivel” (“New Audiences”, 70). Using the example of the American television series The Simpsons (Fox, 1989-present), Gray observes a “near perfect correlation between loving and disliking The Simpsons and seeing it, respectively, as critical of America and American life, or as yet another symbol of crass American cultural chauvinism” (“New Audiences”, 71). In other words, given the emotional response that those who disliked the series had for it, and their willingness to participate in things like social communities to share that dislike, Gray finds that fandom and antifandom “exist on a Mobius strip, with many fan and antifan behaviours and performances resembling, if not replicating each other” (“Antifandom” 845). Likewise, royal fans and anti-fans both watch King Charles’s coronation, some to sneer, some to admire; fans and anti-fans might both read Spare over one weekend, eager to see what juicy gossip about the Windsors’ private lives Harry has shared. The consumption practices of fans and anti-fans are often the same, and while their affect moves in different directions, it often matches in quantity.
Conclusion
Space limitations have not permitted the presentation of more examples of royal fan affect, anti-fandom, and practices of consumption. Future research, for instance, might consider how “the Queue” functioned as a kind of fan convention, or how other celebrities publicly enact their fandom of the Windsors. By taking a fan studies approach, though, this article argues for a reframing of how we think about positive and negative responses to royals.
At the time of Charles’s coronation, the Independent reported that while upkeep of the Windsors cost the British taxpayers an estimated ₤500 million per year, the “monarchy’s brand” contributed nearly ₤3 billion to the British economy (Hirwani). That figure is more than many brands, such as The Hunger Games, that we think of as having thriving fandoms (“List of Highest-Grossing Media Franchises”). It is therefore fitting to frame the royals as a brand and set of texts consumed by, and at times produced by, fans.
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May 2, 2024
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