The Gender Politics of Ghosted Celebrity Memoir Hannah Yelin
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Subjectivity for Sale: The Gender Politics of Ghosted Celebrity Memoir Hannah Yelin Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) School of Art, Media and American Studies University of East Anglia March 2016 ©This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged. [90,959 words] Abstract This thesis examines the memoirs of contemporary, young, female celebrities with a particular focus on gender, agency in self-representation, and ghostwritten authorship. Although the thesis explores examples which range across fiction, photo-diary, comic-strip, and art anthology, as well as more ‘traditional’ autobiographical forms, it argues that a strong set of representational conventions is at play, prescribing particular constructions of female subjectivity. These memoirs exist within what this thesis terms a wider economics of access, in which young, female celebrities trade the appearance of access to their commoditised subjectivity and/or exposed bodies. This thesis investigates both the demands of the genre, and the potentially resistant strategies which may work to temper them. Yet even the most seemingly non-conforming examples evidence the weight of convention upon them and point to the limits of the representational possibilities for highly visible young women. This thesis contends that such questions of access and self-representational agency must be interrogated in relation to the genre’s visible mediation. These texts, which are widely understood to be ghost-written, invite consideration of how can we understand collaborative construction and its implications for both agency and ‘authorship’. Case- studies have been organised around female celebrities from different media ‘fields’ - reality TV stars, popstars and ‘glamour’ models - and the thesis explores the examples of Jade Goody, Paris Hilton, Katie Price, Pamela Anderson, Jenna Jameson, Lady Gaga and M.I.A - examining the ways in which self-representation is shaped by the media specificities of the particular celebrity’s domain. By theorising celebrity memoir - as gendered, as ghost-written, as an agentic intervention, and as a negotiated terrain which makes its negotiations exceptionally visible on the page – this thesis provides new ways in which to understand the modes of self-representation available to women on a public stage, and the discourses which structure and limit them. 2 Contents Introduction 6 Research questions Why this research is much-needed About the chosen celebrity case studies Methodology Chapter summaries Chapter 1. Critical and Contextual Review 22 Cultural contexts: Celebrity memoir as broadsheet hate object Critical contexts: Celebrity Memoir as scholarly ‘bad object’ Historical contexts: selling gendered access to the commodified celebrity private life The 21st century celebrity context Theorizing authenticity: in celebrity and in autobiography Literary critical approaches to the ghosted celebrity author Celebrity studies approaches to celebrity agency Postfeminism and the memoirs of contemporary, young, female celebrities Memoir within gendered celebrity culture Chapter 2. Sex, Trauma and Access in the Porn Star Memoirs of Katie Price, Pamela Anderson and Jenna Jameson 52 Introduction Porn debates and textual fantasies 2.1. Sanitizing sexual trauma: The competing agendas of Pamela Anderson’s Star The ‘glamour girl’ memoir: narrative subject/corporeal object Ghosting the ‘glamour girl’ memoir: between fact, fiction, constructedness and the ‘real’ Jameson & Strauss: a case study in the problematics of ghosting celebrity memoir 2.2. Nakedness vs. exposure: consent and the ‘snatch’ Writing the ‘glamour girl’ body: ‘Well hello! I admit that I’m fake.’ ‘Simplified and made visible’: public privates and the performance of extreme femininity 2.3. The contradictions of ‘empowered’ femininity in the ‘glamour girl’ memoir Negotiating cultural value: claiming status of creative agent Constructing female sexuality: service and hyperbole Conclusion 3 Chapter 3. ‘White Trash’: Class, Race and Authority in the Reality TV Star Memoirs of Jade Goody, and Paris Hilton 97 Introduction 3.1 Goody and Hilton: an unlikely pair of celebrity class anomalies Goody and her ghost: negotiated agency Hilton and her ghost: ‘It’s all about taking charge and branding yourself’ Goody as autobiographical subject: shame, confession and authority Memoir as agency Hilton as autobiographical subject: elliptic denial, camp play and supplementary, extratextual worlds 3.2 Talentless ‘White Trash’ celebrity: undeserving rich or poor Celebritisation as class drag ‘White trash’ celebrity as lack of self-control Whiteness as an unmarked category: comparing Hilton and the Kardashians ‘White trash’ as failure of femininity and wilful self-display Conclusion Chapter 4. Art, Authorship and Authenticity in the Visual Pop-Star memoirs of M.I.A and Lady Gaga 136 Introduction: autobiographical images in an economics of exposure 4.1 Visual autobiography, art school framing and claims to creative agency The ontology of celebrity memoir and the workings of images Ghosted authenticity and access: consent, boundaries, and what is in (and out of) the frame 4.2 Pop persona and M.I.A.’s performance of difference M.I.A.’s hybridity and ambivalence: invoking and rejecting stereotype M.I.A.’s autobiographical instrumentalism 4.3 Gaga’s liberatory gospel? The containment of Gaga’s resistant femininity Conclusion Conclusion 185 Bibliography 194 Figures 215 4 Acknowledgements My hugest thanks go to my supervisor Su Holmes. You bring precious humanity and sanity to academia and showed faith in me and my project at a time when I had little to give either. For finding time for me amongst all you do, I am extremely grateful. Milly Williamson and Melanie Williams, thank you for giving me your time, expertise and a really positive examination process. From UEA, I thank Sarah Churchwell and Sarah Garland for your help as the project took shape. Rachel McLennan, thank you for a transferring up process so constructive that it spurred me on for a long time after. Cecile Jackson, thank you for your hospitality and wisdom. To my PhD cohort, Bridget Dalton, Morwenna Chaffe, Eilidh Hall, Ed Clough and Nicole Willson, there have been many points when your friendship truly saved the day. I “salute” you. At Oxford Brookes, I thank my whole team for their support and faith in me. Special thanks go to Leander Reeves and Michele Paule for their friendship, hospitality, wicked fun and academic fairy dust. One couldn’t hope for better colleagues or pals. Angela Royston, my first and most generous reader, thank you. I am grateful to Lise Dilling-Hansen and all those at Aarhus University that enabled my visiting scholarship to your beautiful city and to UEA’s Arthur Miller Centre for funding my visit to Cornell University in New York. Lisa Downing and Will McMorran, you presided over the first crucial step towards this crazy enterprise: my learning to take seriously the potential of my own intellect. Philip McGowan, thank you for your patience when I was a less than model student. Jack Royston, you have loved and supported me through this process as if your reserves of kindness, patience and understanding were infinite. I realise they cannot be and know how very lucky I am. I look forward to the opportunity to refill those reserves and support your own endeavours, to show that I believe in you the way that you have consistently believed in and had ambition for me, and to continue finding joy amongst whatever difficulty comes next. Ros Yelin, for everything you gave in the difficult early years, thank you. And for protecting the time and space I would need to build a life on my terms, thank you. I am so proud of you, and gain all my confidence and ability from having long known that, with or without this PhD, I can make you proud of me too. You lead me by example with your independence, intelligence, humour, hard work, commitment to learning and strength of feeling – all of which are as intensely in effect as ever in your eighth decade. These words are inadequate. I love you. I am grateful for the quirk of history that meant that I was born at a time when I could access good quality, free education: not born so early that I had to fight for my right to be educated as a woman, and not born too late to benefit from free, means-tested university education. I am not sure I would have found my way had I been starting my higher education in the economic climate my students find themselves in today. This research was made possible by a Graduate Studentship from the University of East Anglia, for which I am extremely thankful. And to those behind the scenes in the Humanities Graduate School administration, you do excellent work. 5 Introduction This thesis argues that the ghost-written memoirs of contemporary, young, female celebrities are a site for the study of self-determination. Within them, famous women tell us their story, in their ‘own words’. However, it is an open secret that constellations of ghost writers, management and market forces orbit these texts, undermining assertions of authorship or unfettered access to subjectivity. As a result, the ghost-written memoir inhabits a complex grey area between biography, autobiography, fact and fiction. Any attempt to understand these texts must therefore reconcile the authors’ dual roles as self-expressing subject and object within a highly commercialised market for female celebrity subjectivity. This thesis will examine how female celebrities are represented in their memoirs, and how these representations relate to the wider gender (as well as class and racial) politics of contemporary celebrity.