Unseemly

Lorraine York’s Unseemly: The Invention of the Fame-Hungry Celebrity Woman explores the history of fame-shaming, the queasy sense that women who openly pursue public recognition (or are thought to do so) transgress the bounds of good taste and propriety. York analyzes fame-hunger accusations that have been directed at women from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, from Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Barbara Strozzi, Eliza Haywood, and Sarah Bernhardt to Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. York contends that the uneasiness about women desiring fame is informed by social expectations regarding gender, sexuality, race, and class, and is a reaction to women taking up emergent media and using them well, whether the medium is print, film, secular song, natural philosophy, science fiction, amatory fiction, reality television, political speech, or social media. In vivid contrast to the frequent assumption that fame hunger is the last refuge of the untalented, women who have been accused of an unseemly thirst for celebrity turn out to be especially adept at cutting-edge forms of cultural expression.