Anthea Taylor | The University of Sydney (original) (raw)
Books by Anthea Taylor
Germaine Greer Essays on a Feminist Figure, edited by Maryanne Dever, Anthea Taylor & Lisa Adkins, 2018
Single Women in Popular Culture: The Limits of Postfeminism (Palgrave Macmillan), 2012
Has the way single women are represented in western popular culture really changed over the past ... more Has the way single women are represented in western popular culture really changed over the past few decades? What might the single women we find in chick lit novels, on reality television shows, and in self-help manuals reveal about postfeminism and its politics? From Bridget Jones to Carrie Bradshaw, the single woman has become more visible than ever before, prompting some commentators to suggest that she is now celebrated where once she was denigrated. However, in this book Anthea Taylor compellingly demonstrates how the single woman – despite appearing at times to be glamorized – continues to be a deeply problematic figure in popular culture. Drawing upon a wide range of media forms, she finds that singleness is commonly represented as a state that women must actively work to overcome, while coupledom is vigorously promoted as a postfeminist 'choice'. In this thought-provoking book, Taylor foregrounds how postfeminism operates in tandem with neoliberalism to limit the stories being told about single women. Characteristic of the book's nuanced approach, she also examines sites where women are attempting to refigure and validate singleness, including the blogosphere. Making an important contribution to scholarship on both singleness and postfeminism, Single Women in Popular Culture is a timely and politically engaged account of how modern single women are represented – and why it matters.
Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture, edited by Anthea Taylor and Joanna McIntyre, 2020
This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in w... more This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields-actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities-and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia's colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.
What is a celebrity feminist? How does celebrity feminism differ from other forms of renown? How ... more What is a celebrity feminist? How does celebrity feminism differ from other forms of renown? How might it shape popular understandings of feminism? In the first book-length study of its kind, Taylor contends that Western celebrity feminism, as a political mode of public subjectivity, cannot in any simple way be seen as homologous with other forms of stardom. She convincingly argues that the most visible celebrity feminists in the mediasphere have been authors of bestselling works of non-fiction: feminist ‘blockbusters’. While many celebrities have recently sought to add feminism to their brand, the figure of the blockbuster feminist author is predominantly famous because of her feminism. Revisiting the figure of the celebrity feminist and the ideological and cultural work she has performed over many decades, Celebrity and The Feminist Blockbuster explores how these texts and their authors have shaped the public identity of modern feminism. In Part I, dealing with Helen Gurley Brown, Betty Friedan, and Germaine Greer, all women who continue to culturally reverberate, Taylor maps the maintenance and development of their celebrity over decades, throughout placing an emphasis on the kinds of feminisms they have come to embody and how they have worked to actively manufacture their public personae. For the second part, she turns her attention to contemporary figures such as Naomi Wolf, Sheryl Sandberg, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Amy Poehler, and persuasively demonstrates that the blockbuster remains crucial in feminist celebrification but is now being augmented with other forms, including social media. Through these case studies, Taylor demonstrates that rather than being a new phenomenon, self-branding and public persona-building have always been central to celebrity feminism. Advancing celebrity studies by placing the figure of the feminist front and centre, Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster is essential reading for all those interested in gender, popular feminism, and the politics of renown.
https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Mediating\_Australian\_Feminism/BcVPjCHH1ykC?hl=en
Papers by Anthea Taylor
Australian Feminist Studies, 2020
In March 1971, American women's magazine McCall's published an extract of Germaine Greer's The Fe... more In March 1971, American women's magazine McCall's published an extract of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. Myriad unpublished letters to the editor contained in the Greer archive at the University of Melbourne reveal that the magazine's readers were largely dismissive of Greer's feminist vision. These reader-writers, best conceptualised as 'anti-fans', took both author and editor to task for criticising them as wives and mothers. Through an analysis of these letters, this article argues that their authors contested Greer's burgeoning authority as a second-wave celebrity feminist largely by pathologising her, invoking essentialist assumptions about femininity, and mobilising discourses of 'choice' more commonly understood as the product of a 'postfeminist' representational environment. Through their anti-fan practices, they challenge Greer's attempts to deprive housewives of agency, deploying rhetorical strategies that are at once reliant upon and highly critical of second-wave feminism. By complicating dominant ways of framing the feminist past and the postfeminist present, this article demonstrates how celebrity feminists, including 'blockbuster' authors, have historically always elicited complex affective responses.
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Celebrity and The Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
This chapter examines the most well-known ‘third wave’ feminist, Naomi Wolf. However, rather than... more This chapter examines the most well-known ‘third wave’ feminist, Naomi Wolf. However, rather than focusing solely on her earlier blockbusters, The Beauty Myth and Fire with Fire, and their role in Wolf’s celebrification, Taylor also engages with Wolf’s most recent popular book, Vagina, to consider how her celebrity has transformed. Given that this book was widely criticized for its biological essentialism and new age rhetoric, Wolf turned to social media to effectively rewrite its reception, as well as to buttress her own contested celebrity. Through an examination of Wolf’s Twitter practice, Taylor illustrates how new media function as a key means through which contemporary blockbuster celebrity feminists can work to intervene in the public meanings of their own persona, work, and feminism—especially when their authority is being put under strain in other discursive spaces.
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and The Unsettling of Postfeminism, 2019
Postfeminism In and Out of Context In this introductory chapter, we discuss the ways in which man... more Postfeminism In and Out of Context
In this introductory chapter, we discuss the ways in which many analyses of postfeminism neglect questions of cultural specificity, and instead draw upon and thereby reproduce a hegemonic version of postfeminist culture. In contrast, our study positions postfeminism as a historical descriptor in a specific context, namely, referring to popular culture produced for an implied audience of women in Australia from 1996-2018. We detail the genres examined, postfeminism’s nexus with neoliberalism, and introduce the concept of semioscapes, which refers to the imaginary landscape that characterises each genre. We conclude with considerations of the critical efficacy of the term ‘postfeminism’.
Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and The Unsettling of Postfeminism, 2019
In this chapter, drawing out the semioscape of confidence and care, we consider the role that bea... more In this chapter, drawing out the semioscape of confidence and care, we consider the role that beauty vloggers, as micro-celebrities, increasingly play in providing advice and support to girls and young women, bringing into being ‘digital intimate publics’ that represent important spaces of community and belonging. Analysing two popular Australian beauty vloggers – Lauren Curtis and Danielle Mansutti – we find that, despite also taking part in the production of normative femininities, feminism (as in our other case studies) is neither disavowed nor forgotten as these vloggers perform a contemporary version of sisterhood and care.
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
In this chapter Taylor examines Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham, celebrities who represent the mid-po... more In this chapter Taylor examines Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham, celebrities who represent the mid-point between women who are famous because of their feminism and those who later chose to add feminism to their ‘brand’. For these two celebrities, feminism has always been central to their creative practice, and is thereby integral to their renown; it also clearly underpins their books, Yes Please and Not That Kind of Girl respectively. In each case, their comic blockbuster memoirs have worked to sustain their feminist celebrity in important ways but, as Taylor comprehensively demonstrates, these bestselling texts represent only one part of the equation. Accordingly, engaging with Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls website and Lena Dunham’s Lenny e-newsletter, Taylor argues that, in addition to literary works, celebrities are increasingly deploying new media to shape public conversations around feminism.
Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture, edited by Anthea Taylor and Joanna McIntyre, 2020
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
Germaine Greer Essays on a Feminist Figure, edited by Maryanne Dever, Anthea Taylor & Lisa Adkins, 2018
Single Women in Popular Culture: The Limits of Postfeminism (Palgrave Macmillan), 2012
Has the way single women are represented in western popular culture really changed over the past ... more Has the way single women are represented in western popular culture really changed over the past few decades? What might the single women we find in chick lit novels, on reality television shows, and in self-help manuals reveal about postfeminism and its politics? From Bridget Jones to Carrie Bradshaw, the single woman has become more visible than ever before, prompting some commentators to suggest that she is now celebrated where once she was denigrated. However, in this book Anthea Taylor compellingly demonstrates how the single woman – despite appearing at times to be glamorized – continues to be a deeply problematic figure in popular culture. Drawing upon a wide range of media forms, she finds that singleness is commonly represented as a state that women must actively work to overcome, while coupledom is vigorously promoted as a postfeminist 'choice'. In this thought-provoking book, Taylor foregrounds how postfeminism operates in tandem with neoliberalism to limit the stories being told about single women. Characteristic of the book's nuanced approach, she also examines sites where women are attempting to refigure and validate singleness, including the blogosphere. Making an important contribution to scholarship on both singleness and postfeminism, Single Women in Popular Culture is a timely and politically engaged account of how modern single women are represented – and why it matters.
Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture, edited by Anthea Taylor and Joanna McIntyre, 2020
This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in w... more This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields-actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities-and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia's colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.
What is a celebrity feminist? How does celebrity feminism differ from other forms of renown? How ... more What is a celebrity feminist? How does celebrity feminism differ from other forms of renown? How might it shape popular understandings of feminism? In the first book-length study of its kind, Taylor contends that Western celebrity feminism, as a political mode of public subjectivity, cannot in any simple way be seen as homologous with other forms of stardom. She convincingly argues that the most visible celebrity feminists in the mediasphere have been authors of bestselling works of non-fiction: feminist ‘blockbusters’. While many celebrities have recently sought to add feminism to their brand, the figure of the blockbuster feminist author is predominantly famous because of her feminism. Revisiting the figure of the celebrity feminist and the ideological and cultural work she has performed over many decades, Celebrity and The Feminist Blockbuster explores how these texts and their authors have shaped the public identity of modern feminism. In Part I, dealing with Helen Gurley Brown, Betty Friedan, and Germaine Greer, all women who continue to culturally reverberate, Taylor maps the maintenance and development of their celebrity over decades, throughout placing an emphasis on the kinds of feminisms they have come to embody and how they have worked to actively manufacture their public personae. For the second part, she turns her attention to contemporary figures such as Naomi Wolf, Sheryl Sandberg, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Amy Poehler, and persuasively demonstrates that the blockbuster remains crucial in feminist celebrification but is now being augmented with other forms, including social media. Through these case studies, Taylor demonstrates that rather than being a new phenomenon, self-branding and public persona-building have always been central to celebrity feminism. Advancing celebrity studies by placing the figure of the feminist front and centre, Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster is essential reading for all those interested in gender, popular feminism, and the politics of renown.
https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Mediating\_Australian\_Feminism/BcVPjCHH1ykC?hl=en
Australian Feminist Studies, 2020
In March 1971, American women's magazine McCall's published an extract of Germaine Greer's The Fe... more In March 1971, American women's magazine McCall's published an extract of Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. Myriad unpublished letters to the editor contained in the Greer archive at the University of Melbourne reveal that the magazine's readers were largely dismissive of Greer's feminist vision. These reader-writers, best conceptualised as 'anti-fans', took both author and editor to task for criticising them as wives and mothers. Through an analysis of these letters, this article argues that their authors contested Greer's burgeoning authority as a second-wave celebrity feminist largely by pathologising her, invoking essentialist assumptions about femininity, and mobilising discourses of 'choice' more commonly understood as the product of a 'postfeminist' representational environment. Through their anti-fan practices, they challenge Greer's attempts to deprive housewives of agency, deploying rhetorical strategies that are at once reliant upon and highly critical of second-wave feminism. By complicating dominant ways of framing the feminist past and the postfeminist present, this article demonstrates how celebrity feminists, including 'blockbuster' authors, have historically always elicited complex affective responses.
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Celebrity and The Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
This chapter examines the most well-known ‘third wave’ feminist, Naomi Wolf. However, rather than... more This chapter examines the most well-known ‘third wave’ feminist, Naomi Wolf. However, rather than focusing solely on her earlier blockbusters, The Beauty Myth and Fire with Fire, and their role in Wolf’s celebrification, Taylor also engages with Wolf’s most recent popular book, Vagina, to consider how her celebrity has transformed. Given that this book was widely criticized for its biological essentialism and new age rhetoric, Wolf turned to social media to effectively rewrite its reception, as well as to buttress her own contested celebrity. Through an examination of Wolf’s Twitter practice, Taylor illustrates how new media function as a key means through which contemporary blockbuster celebrity feminists can work to intervene in the public meanings of their own persona, work, and feminism—especially when their authority is being put under strain in other discursive spaces.
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and The Unsettling of Postfeminism, 2019
Postfeminism In and Out of Context In this introductory chapter, we discuss the ways in which man... more Postfeminism In and Out of Context
In this introductory chapter, we discuss the ways in which many analyses of postfeminism neglect questions of cultural specificity, and instead draw upon and thereby reproduce a hegemonic version of postfeminist culture. In contrast, our study positions postfeminism as a historical descriptor in a specific context, namely, referring to popular culture produced for an implied audience of women in Australia from 1996-2018. We detail the genres examined, postfeminism’s nexus with neoliberalism, and introduce the concept of semioscapes, which refers to the imaginary landscape that characterises each genre. We conclude with considerations of the critical efficacy of the term ‘postfeminism’.
Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and The Unsettling of Postfeminism, 2019
In this chapter, drawing out the semioscape of confidence and care, we consider the role that bea... more In this chapter, drawing out the semioscape of confidence and care, we consider the role that beauty vloggers, as micro-celebrities, increasingly play in providing advice and support to girls and young women, bringing into being ‘digital intimate publics’ that represent important spaces of community and belonging. Analysing two popular Australian beauty vloggers – Lauren Curtis and Danielle Mansutti – we find that, despite also taking part in the production of normative femininities, feminism (as in our other case studies) is neither disavowed nor forgotten as these vloggers perform a contemporary version of sisterhood and care.
Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster, 2016
In this chapter Taylor examines Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham, celebrities who represent the mid-po... more In this chapter Taylor examines Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham, celebrities who represent the mid-point between women who are famous because of their feminism and those who later chose to add feminism to their ‘brand’. For these two celebrities, feminism has always been central to their creative practice, and is thereby integral to their renown; it also clearly underpins their books, Yes Please and Not That Kind of Girl respectively. In each case, their comic blockbuster memoirs have worked to sustain their feminist celebrity in important ways but, as Taylor comprehensively demonstrates, these bestselling texts represent only one part of the equation. Accordingly, engaging with Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls website and Lena Dunham’s Lenny e-newsletter, Taylor argues that, in addition to literary works, celebrities are increasingly deploying new media to shape public conversations around feminism.
Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture, edited by Anthea Taylor and Joanna McIntyre, 2020
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019
Australian Literary Studies, 2008
Journal of Australian Studies, 2012
Drawing upon the example of Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and her de fa... more Drawing upon the example of Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and her de facto partner, Tim Mathieson, this chapter considers the ways in which concerns around the ‘legitimacy’ of this relationship worked in tandem with other deeply embedded discourses about the ‘illegitimacy’ of her leadership within the Australian political and media spheres to call into question her credibility as prime minister. If successful leadership is presumed to require a successful relationship (as in a state sanctioned, heteronormative one), what happens when the celebrity political couple is not so easily assimilated into these loaded gendered narratives? Although much has been written about how, as PM, Gillard was subject to intense misogyny from other politicians, journalists and even ‘ordinary’ citizens via social media, this chapter seeks to interrogate what her representation reveals about the operations of contemporary celebrity culture as well as the ongoing privileging of marriage.
Celebrity Studies, 5:1-2, 75-78, DOI: 10.1080/19392397.2014.887537
Feminist Media Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2013.810165
There is little doubt that Germaine Greer is the West's, and especially Britain's, most well-know... more There is little doubt that Germaine Greer is the West's, and especially Britain's, 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.