Anthea Taylor

Introduction: feminism and contemporary celebrity culture

In November 2014 TIME magazine nominated ‘feminist’ in its annual ‘word banishment poll’ to identify and denounce the most overused words, phrases, diminutives and acronyms of the year; thereby pla...

‘The urge towards love is an urge towards (un)death’: Romance, masochistic desire and postfeminism in the Twilight novels

Stephanie Meyer’s enormously popular Twilight saga of teen vampire romance novels is commonly referred to as the young adult fiction equivalent of what the Harry Potter series was for children. Central to the series, which sells in the tens of millions globally, is an adolescent romantic relationship that, as I will show, is in many ways masochistic. Interrogating gendered subjectivity within the series, particularly in regard to its teenage narrator, Bella Swan, and her relationship with the hyper-idealized vampire hero, Edward Cullen, this article analyses the way the four narratives figure adolescent feminine desire as well as how they link eroticism and death. It also positions the series within broader feminist debates about postfeminism within popular culture, and explores how (and, with more difficulty, why) a masochistic relationship and an undead subjectivity for a teenage girl are seen as utopic sites of possibility in these narratives. If, as Nina Auerbach argues, each age produces the vampire it requires, then might Edward Cullen and his teen vampire bride suggest about the current, purportedly ‘postfeminist’, context and young women in particular?

blogging solo: new media, ‘old’ politics

This article focuses on the blogosphere as an oppositional field where the meanings around contemporary Western womens singlehood are contested, negotiated and rewritten. In contrast to dominant narratives in which single women are pathologised, in the blogs by, for, and about single women analysed here, writers aim to refigure womens singleness as well as providing resources, support and a textual community where others can intervene and contribute to the re-valuation of single women. These blogs also function as alternative forms of knowledge, seeking to (re)legitimise womens singleness and to trouble their aberrance and social liminality. Rather than only considering the form in isolation from its content, this article analyses the discourses deployed by bloggers and within blogs and how women bloggers publicly perform their very singleness as part of a personal and political strategy of re-signification. In this way, while cautious not to overestimate the democratic potentialities of the so-called blogosphere, it underscores the important cultural – and indeed political – work being undertaken by single women therein. Moreover, by demonstrating how these blogs use discursive tactics commonly associated with feminisms second-wave – womens consciousness-raising; identity politics; deploying and reiterating the famous feminist dictum: ‘the personal is political’; naming discrimination; and empathy and community-building – it argues that they are using so-called ‘new’ media for what is now problematically believed to be ‘old’ (feminist) politics.

Germaine Greer's Adaptable Celebrity

There is little doubt that Germaine Greer is the Wests, and especially Britains, most well-known feminist. This article, looking at her more recent public appearances, argues that Germaine Greer has proven adept at adapting her feminist celebrity, especially through various (and often comedic) performances on quiz and lifestyle programmes on British television. In particular, she exemplifies what has been called an “unruly woman”; that is, she is a transgressive figure who uses the space provided by these new entertainment formats not simply to reinforce her celebrity but to circulate (and perform) a particular feminism. Her celebrity, and her relationship to the mainstream media in Britain especially, has shifted and evolved over time and therefore provides an important case study into the complicated operations of celebrity as well as the feminism–media nexus itself. As an instance of gendered celebrity—and that of a feminist especially—that comes to at once trouble and buttress certain celebrity logics, Greer illuminates the political importance of this ground for feminism and helps to underscore that feminist celebrity is a distinct, and developing, mode of public subjectivity which celebrity studies and feminist media studies have thus far failed to significantly address.

‘Blockbuster’ celebrity feminism

Feminism’s implication in the circuits of celebrity has routinely been figured as problematic, seen as antithetical to feminist modes of activism and a refusal of hierarchies. Nonetheless, celebrity has always been central in delimiting the kinds of feminisms (as well as feminist histories) that have become visible in the Western mediasphere. The ‘celebrity zone’ is indeed, as Jennifer Wicke (1994) argued nearly 20 years ago, the ‘material culture in which we have our being as feminists’ (p. 776), and this is even more the case in our current climate where the meanings of feminism are more highly contested than ever. How, therefore, might we define ‘celebrity feminism’ as the first step to better understanding its cultural and political function? Like other ‘modalities of renown’ (Newbury 2000), celebrity feminism is a complex, internally variegated, evolving phenomenon (Taylor 2008). Although celebrities from certain industries at times deploy the capital afforded by this status to publicly articulate various political positions, including those that can be broadly considered feminist, when I invoke the term ‘celebrity feminists’ I refer to women whose fame is the direct product of their feminist intervention into public discourse. Whether we agree with their specific ‘brand’, their feminist enunciative practice is the primary reason for their celebritisation. In this regard, over the past 50 years or so, the most highly visible feminist celebrities have been authors of popular feminist works of non-fiction, including Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch), Gloria Steinem (Outrageous Acts of Rebellion), Anne Summers (Damned Whores and God’s Police), Susan Faludi (Backlash), and Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth). Amongst others, all these women have, at various times and by no means uncontentiously, come to be recognisable as the ‘public face’ of modern feminism (and of course we should be mindful that other feminisms have been problematically excluded as a result). They have each produced at least one ‘feminist blockbuster’ (Henderson and Rowlands 1996), bestselling works of non-fiction that have come to shape the ‘public identity’ (Van Zoonen 1992) of modern feminism in the West. The key arguments of these books have been taken up within the mainstream mediasphere and become metonymic of feminism. It is largely through these individual high-profile women that feminism remains in the public consciousness (Pearce 2004). They have, therefore, been central in constructing, publicising, and popularising, feminism(s). Such women – ‘feminism’s big girls’ (Henderson 2006) – exemplify the specific intersection of feminism and celebrity that can be called ‘blockbuster celebrity feminism’. Most of these books have been reissued, repackaged and rebranded several times for new generations, helping sustain their authors’ feminist celebrity – in some cases for

Nine lives: postwar women writers making their mark

Combining historical research and archaeological evidence, Fantastic Dreaming maps the culture contact between Wergaia speakers of the Wotjobaluk people and Moravian missionaries in north-west Victoria. The focus in this valuable work is on the relationship between European material culture and the spatial and gendered organisation of the mission station, and the Aboriginal Australians who lived there. Using Ebenezer Mission as her primary case study from its inception in 1859 until its closure in 1904, Jane Lydon charts the changes experienced by the Wergaia people, from the missionisation process in the nineteenth century through to the contemporary issues facing these people and the site itself today. Though Ebenezer Mission was founded to transform its Aboriginal occupants, Lydon shows that it became vital to those occupants’ physical and cultural survival over time. Situated on traditional Wergaia country, Ebenezer became an escape for the people sent to live there: whether from the ravages of dispossession as a result of the ever-encroaching colonial frontier, or from discriminatory policies aimed at regulating Aboriginal peoples’ lives. Lydon also shows that Ebenezer provided the space for the continuation of cultural traditions, including those associated with kinship and ceremony, in what she calls ‘‘strategies of mobility, evasion, and concealment’’ (p. 159). That Lydon repositions the mission as crucial to its occupants’ survival is a key strength of this book. Often viewed as sites of oppression and dispossession, mission settlements became, and continue to be, a highly important part of Aboriginal identity. Although the spiritual and cultural connection to traditional country remained strong, the mission site itself also became the site of a new type of dreaming. This can be seen on Palm Island, to which people from across Queensland and as far away as Western Australia were forcibly moved in the first half of the twentieth century. In later decades, these same people would collectively identify as Bwgcolman, with the island itself the geographic locus for their identity. While an insistence on the role of missions in sustaining Aboriginal traditions and creating new ones is an important aspect of Fantastic Dreaming, its main focus is on the missionising process, and specifically, the use of material culture in the domestic setting to achieve this. European notions of gender and domesticity were transposed into the mission houses, as was European material culture. Accompanied by assumptions of acculturation, Aboriginal use of Western goods was taken as evidence that the occupants sought to escape their perceived evolutionary position to become part of ‘‘civilised’’ society. Lydon challenges this by moving beyond the Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, March 2012, 111 121

Greer now: editorial

Germaine Greer is undoubtedly one of the West’s most iconic feminists, and her public visibility never seems towane. Overmany decades she has worked actively to shape the public meanings that accrue to feminism. The academy, however, has always had an ambivalent relation to Greer – especially in light of her status as a star feminist author. While many feminist critics have sought to destabilise the troublesome academic–popular binary which privileges the former as the more ‘authentic’ form of feminism, the lack of a sustained critical engagement with Greer reveals that it persists. Even in Australia, Greer’s immense contribution to feminist thought is rarely situated within academic scholarship. Not only is it uncommon for undergraduate students to be given Greer’s work on survey courses on feminist theory but there have been surprisingly few critical studies of The Female Eunuch let alone her subsequent publications. Yet The Female Eunuch is one of second-wave feminism’s most widely consumed publications, and its celebrity author has come to embody and indeed expand our understanding of second-wave feminism in a way that few others have. The lack of critical attention to thiswork and its author is evenmore remarkable, given that research seeking to explore women’s understandings of modern feminism has shown that Greer has played a pivotal role, with interviewees often seeing her as synonymous with the second wave (Bulbeck 1997; Dux and Simic 2008). Similarly, letters received by Greer from readers of The Female Eunuch make clear that the book, and the copious media appearances of its author, had a transformative impact on many women. Indeed, the enduring cultural reverberations of Greer and her groundbreaking ‘feminist blockbuster’ are evident in the articles contained here, with a number being preoccupied with teasing out new understandings of its production and reception. The Female Eunuch has not been Greer’s only substantial contribution, however. A prolific writer, Greer has produced a series of popular and academic works, including The Obstacle Race (1979), Sex and Destiny (1984), Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989), The Change (1991), Slip-Shod Sybils: Recognition, Rejection and the Women Poets (1995), The Whole Woman (1999), The Boy (2003), Shakespeare’s Wife (2007), On Rage (2008), and most recently, White Beech (2013). As these titles suggest, throughout her career she has intervened in, and helped precipitate, public debates well beyond feminism and, as Donald McManus demonstrates in this issue, she also built an academic career based on her initial training as a literary scholar. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly her status as an iconic feminist that has endured across her entire public career. That is,

Celebrity (post)feminism, the Sixties feminist blockbuster and Down with Love

This article critically engages the 2003 film, Down with Love, directed by Peyton Reed and starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, in terms of how it invokes feminist discourses (and indeed celebrities) from the Sixties as part of its attempt to rewrite feminist history in accordance with the broader cultural logics of postfeminism. Down with Love, the book within the film, engages intertextually with various forms of writing, including the 1960s “feminist blockbuster” (texts like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl) as well as the modern self‐help genre. Barbara Novak (Zellweger’s character) publicizes her prototypical feminist text through the American mediasphere and thereby develops a national profile as a celebrity feminist advocate of women’s sexual emancipation and greater participation in the public sphere. As this article shows, Down with Love intervenes in intramural feminist debates over the commercialization, and celebritization, of modern feminism while invoking assumptions about the so‐called “postfeminist” context of the film’s consumers.

Popular culture and (Post)feminism: Review articles

Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds, 2007. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Geek Chic: Smart Women in Popular Culture. Sherrie A. Inness, ed., 2007. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Over the past few years a number of collections have appeared that seek to assess the impact of feminism on various genres of popular culture: television, film, women’s magazines, popular writing, and news media. Two of the most recent samples of this critical preoccupation are Interrogating Postfeminism and Geek Chic, both published in 2007. Though the latter is focused specifically on one form of gendered representation in contemporary media culture*the intelligent woman (seemingly the ultimate femininefeminist hybrid)*the former more broadly considers how postfeminism informs, and circulates in and through, such popular representations. Overall, both collections adopt perspectives that are more nuanced than much previous criticism on the now undeniable intersections of feminism and media culture. These collections, then, exhibit a move away from the condemnatory approaches within feminist media studies that conceived of feminism’s engagement with media culture and media culture’s engagement with feminism as a priori negative. That said, the ambivalence marking the stories they tell about this interaction also suggest that contemporary manifestations of this engagement are no cause for simple celebration. Interrogating Postfeminism’s introductory essay identifies the collection’s key critical, political and ethical imperatives. Its editors suggest: ‘We argue that the transition to a postfeminist culture involves an evident erasure of feminist politics from the popular, even as aspects of feminism seem to be incorporated within that culture’ (5). The collection seems underpinned by a definition that stresses the negativity of postfeminism*an appropriation of feminism without its politics. The collection seeks to (re)open questions about gender, sexuality and representation that it argues postfeminism has rendered invisible, while also emphasising that women who invest in these texts and their ‘compelling’ narratives are not simply the cultural dupes invoked in earlier studies (21). Focused largely on texts produced in the United States and the United Kingdom*its editors seeking to ‘explore the intersections between British and American popular feminism as postfeminism’ (14)*the diversity of the essays is impressive and marks it out as an important contribution to feminist cultural studies. The book would have been strengthened by an analysis of how (if?) postfeminism manifests in other Western contexts, however. Nonetheless, it covers a wide range of texts, and offers analyses that are incisive and politically engaged, emphasising the exclusions of postfeminism and its maintenance of certain vectors of power. In addition to how postfeminism operates in film, television and music, new ‘lifestyle’ television formats such as What not to Wear (Roberts) and Queer Eye for the

Misreading feminists/feminists misreading: Helen Garner, literary celebrity and epitextuality

On 8 August 1995 renowned Australian author Helen Garner gave a speech to the Sydney Institute about her controversial work of ‘non-fiction’, The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power. An edited transcript of this speech appeared in the following day’s edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian and received press coverage throughout the nation, including in the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph Mirror, Courier Mail and Hobart Mercury. As part of the broader, highly volatile media event in which the book became embroiled, this speech addresses the many public readings of the book that had come to circulate in the Australian mediascape in the months immediately following its publication. The text generated a substantial amount of media coverage*the majority of which was much more complicated and dialogic than has hitherto been acknowledged*and it polarised various sections of the feminist, academic and general community. Rather than centring on responses to the book in public discourse from journalistic commentators, this article is concerned predominantly with Garner’s own substantially overlooked response, and contribution, to these various public readings of her text in Australian print media. By using Gerard Genette’s Paratexts (1997), coupled with recent work on celebrity, I highlight how this speech works as a form of authorial ‘epitext’ that impossibly attempts to close down particular interpretations of the text (specifically by its feminist readers) with which its author disagreed. In this article, I am most concerned with the way Garner, in this one hypervisible instance, inserts herself into critical commentary about the text and in the process mobilises particular assumptions about non-fiction, authorship and feminism. What does it mean to have an author speaking back, or rather against, particular public interpretations of her text? What form do such interventions take? Can the author’s success in such a project ever be guaranteed? In March 1995, after a protracted legal battle, Picador/Pan Macmillan published a work of ‘non-fiction’ by Helen Garner. The book was based loosely on events at Ormond College, a prestigious residential college of the University of Melbourne, in 1991. The Master of the college was alleged to have sexually harassed two young female students from the university residence under his care and, failing resolution through the college’s internal grievance procedures, was subsequently charged with indecent assault in 1992. In The First Stone (1995b; hereinafter TFS), Garner maps her deeply emotive, personalised response to these events. The publication of TFS had captured Australian media attention in complex and diverse ways for at least the proceeding two years; one of the media event’s most visible periods of ‘discursive turbulence’ came following Garner’s speech to