Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive, the first scholarly book on this internationally renowned feminist, draws upon Greer’s largely unexplored archive to demonstrate her impact on readers and viewers since the 1970s.
Across many decades in the limelight, and through multiple media forms, the provocative Greer has worked to shape audience understandings of gender, sexuality and feminism. Through deep engagement with archival material, heavily curated by Greer herself, Anthea Taylor offers a compelling reassessment of Greer’s celebrity feminist labour and its effects over time. Examining archived letters from fans, anti-fans, and those in-between, this innovative volume shows how and why readers and viewers have come to affectively invest – or disinvest – in this iconoclastic feminist.
Advancing debates about the social and political function of celebrity, Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive is essential reading for scholars in Gender Studies, History, Archival Studies, and Media and Cultural Studies.
Introduction 1. ‘The archive will put matters right, for posterity’: Greer as Curator 2. You are the twentieth century messiah!: Blockbuster Fan Mail 3. ‘The best thing to happen to night-time television’: Consuming the Televisual Greer 4. ‘Greer has done it again!’: Feminist Journalism and Letters to the Editor 5. ‘Miss Greer is the most pathetic eunuch of all: Anti-fandom in McCall’s Magazine 6. ‘Steve is twice the Aussie icon you will ever be’: Nationalistic Misogyny and the Irwin Hate Mail Conclusion
Biography
Anthea Taylor is an Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of four monographs in feminist cultural studies, including Celebrity and The Feminist Blockbuster and the co-authored Postfeminism in Context.
‘Germaine Greer is one of the world’s most famous celebrity feminists, a fact confirmed by her voluminous archive of reader (and viewer) correspondence. Following her lengthy immersion in this extraordinary archive, Anthea Taylor has emerged with a rich and insightful account of the relationship between Greer and her many audiences.'
Professor Michelle Arrow, author of The Seventies: The Personal, The Political and the Making of Modern Australia, Macquarie University
‘Using previously unavailable archival materials, Anthea Taylor’s groundbreaking study explores the complex relationships between feminism, celebrity and the public through an insightful and carefully nuanced analysis of the close management of those relationships by that most public of celebrity feminists, Germaine Greer.'Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner, author of Understanding Celebrity, University of Queensland
