Lazarus Rises: Storying the Self in the Migrant Fandom of David Bowie

The role of auto-ethnography in the study of music fandom has a very limited and side-lined history. While it is certainly true that fan voices have been used to explore how music idols have been identified with, and why they matter at the level of identity and belonging (Groene and Hettinger, 2015; Lowe, 2003), this work often imposes a meta-frame on the empirical method, substituting voices of fans for a top-down analysis and interpretation. Our approach by contrast, outlined in this talk, is to draw both upon autoethnography and to allow our fellow fans to “story” their own responses in an attempt to get beneath the modes of feeling that music fandom ignites—situated, as it will be, within the narratives that people construct as they talk these stories.