Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture Global Gender Series

This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural andgendered 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.

Introduction: ‘Gendering Australian celebrity’, Part I; Celebrity masculinities and settler colonialism 1: ‘From mild colonial boy to Jake the Paed: Rolf Harris and Australian celebrity masculinity in the UK’, 2: ‘The manly whiteness of Russell Crowe’, 3: ‘Johnathan Thurston, Indigeneity, and technologies of masculinity in Australian sporting celebrity culture’, Part II; Feminist politics and celebrity feminisms 4: ‘Celebritised anger: Theorising feminist rage, voice, and affective injustice through Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette’, 5: ‘Clementine Ford, online misogyny, and the labour of celebrity feminism’, 6: "Good" girl turned "bad": Tracey Spicer’s memoir, celebrity feminist journalism, and #MeToo activism in Australia’, Part III; Queer celebrity and marginalised subjectivities; 7: ‘Interviewing a queer national celebrity: Carlotta as an "outsider within" Australian celebrity culture’, 8: ‘"It was nice for me watching that, because [Magda Szubanski] was very calming": LGBTIQ+ Australians respond to marriage equality activism’, Part IV; Self-presentation and celebrity femininities; 9: ‘"I can call myself Australian if I want to": Natalie Tran and Asian Australian femininity on YouTube’, 10: ‘Disarming femininity: Annabel Crabb, celebrity, politics and culture’, 11: ‘"Australian TV’s golden girl": Asher Keddie, Offspring, and the celebrity motherhood narrative’

Anthea Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of four monographs in feminist media and cultural studies, the most recent of which is Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism (with Margaret Henderson, Routledge, 2020). Her book on Germaine Greer, celebrity, and the archive is forthcoming with Routledge.

Joanna McIntyre is a Lecturer in Media Studies at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. She has published extensively in the fields of media studies, trans studies, celebrity studies, and queer theory, including in the European Journal of Cultural Studies. Her monograph, Transgender Celebrity, is forthcoming with Routledge.