Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and the Archive

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 books in feminist cultural studies, including Celebrity and the Feminist Blockbuster (2016).

• Introduction: ‘For their sake I must keep at it’: Celebrity, audiences, and archived letters 1. ‘The archive will put matters right, for posterity’: Greer’s Curatorial Labour 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!’: Reader-writers and Feminist Journalism 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: ‘Messages in a bottle’: Reframing Greer’s Legacy

‘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.'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.'Graeme Turner, author of Understanding Celebrity, University of Queensland