Consuming Germaine Greer: Celebrity Feminism, Audiences, and The Archive

Across many decades in the limelight and through multiple media forms, the provocative celebrity feminist Germaine Greer has consistently deployed her attention capital to actively shape popular understandings of gender, sexuality and feminism itself. While the present Greer is certainly a deeply problematic figure for feminism, her extensive archive (held at the University of Melbourne) provides an opportunity to assess the considerable impact of her celebrity feminism on readers and viewers over many decades. Letters collected and curated by the famous feminist offer unique insights into how audiences historically have engaged with Greer and her specific brand of feminism. Although they are epistolary acts of self-construction, these written historical traces of how Greer and her feminism made readers and viewers think and feel bring the crucial cultural, ideological, and affective work that celebrity feminists do – and have done for decades – into sharp relief. In particular, the vast correspondence contained in the Greer archive, including in response to her first feminist bestseller, The Female Eunuch (1970), illuminates how and why self-professed fans came to affectively invest in this iconic feminist. Offering a nuanced reassessment of Greer’s celebrity feminist labour and its effects over time, this paper also reflects upon the use of archival methodologies in celebrity and fan studies to better come to terms with the social and political function of celebrity.

Speaker

Associate Professor Anthea Taylor is Chair of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of five monographs in feminist cultural studies, including Germaine Greer, Celebrity Feminism and The Archive (2025). Her Greer research was supported by an ARC Discovery grant (DP170100755), and she is currently completing a new book on Greer’s The Female Eunuch.