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Start Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
23-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
After a decade of sustained, collective effort, the #FreeBritney movement realized its greatest achievement on September 29, 2021 when Jamie Spears, the father of American pop star Britney Spears, was suspended as the conservator of her estate. While the rapid-fire revelations of the conservatorship case have startled many casual observers, this twilight climax of Britney Spears’ public life is owed in part to the fans and activists of the #FreeBritney movement that have striven to bring awareness to her situation and end the conservatorship since 2009. This paper situates #FreeBritney at the intersection of online social movements and fandom. Using a dual approach of interviews with fan activists and textual analysis of primary #FreeBritney sources (tweets, fan podcasts, Instagram posts, online forums, etc.), I first develop a thorough understanding of the #FreeBritney movement, and then compare it against established frameworks used to analyze social movements and fandom activities, referencing previous scholarship from Hargittai (2015), Lingel (2017), and Jackson et al. (2020). This analysis of #FreeBritney contributes to literature on fandom studies, digital activism, and celebrity, demonstrating how these fields uniquely interact to suggest new understandings of “fan activism.” Though Spears herself has occupied an ambivalent status within feminist critiques of popular media, her conservatorship arrangement speaks to key feminist concerns of women’s agency and autonomy, particularly in the context of celebrity and surveillance. In this way, this investigation of #FreeBritney holistically analyzes the implications of one of the most successful social movements of recent memory.
Fan-Powered Digital Activism in the #FreeBritney Movement
After a decade of sustained, collective effort, the #FreeBritney movement realized its greatest achievement on September 29, 2021 when Jamie Spears, the father of American pop star Britney Spears, was suspended as the conservator of her estate. While the rapid-fire revelations of the conservatorship case have startled many casual observers, this twilight climax of Britney Spears’ public life is owed in part to the fans and activists of the #FreeBritney movement that have striven to bring awareness to her situation and end the conservatorship since 2009. This paper situates #FreeBritney at the intersection of online social movements and fandom. Using a dual approach of interviews with fan activists and textual analysis of primary #FreeBritney sources (tweets, fan podcasts, Instagram posts, online forums, etc.), I first develop a thorough understanding of the #FreeBritney movement, and then compare it against established frameworks used to analyze social movements and fandom activities, referencing previous scholarship from Hargittai (2015), Lingel (2017), and Jackson et al. (2020). This analysis of #FreeBritney contributes to literature on fandom studies, digital activism, and celebrity, demonstrating how these fields uniquely interact to suggest new understandings of “fan activism.” Though Spears herself has occupied an ambivalent status within feminist critiques of popular media, her conservatorship arrangement speaks to key feminist concerns of women’s agency and autonomy, particularly in the context of celebrity and surveillance. In this way, this investigation of #FreeBritney holistically analyzes the implications of one of the most successful social movements of recent memory.
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Bio
Akhil Vaidya (he/him) is a student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His main research interests are within cultural studies, pop culture, and celebrity.