Unseemly

Fame-shaming suggests that those who identify as women and openly pursue public recognition transgress the bounds of propriety and good taste. In Unseemly, Lorraine York analyzes fame-hunger accusations that have been directed at “fame whores” and “drama queens” from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, showing how these women have creatively handled such accusations. From Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Barbara Strozzi, Eliza Haywood, and Sarah Bernhardt to Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, Madonna, Kim Kardashian, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, York shows how fame-shaming has been informed by expectations of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

The unease that gives rise to public shaming of women who desire fame, says York, is a reaction to their skillful use of emergent media, whether print, film, secular song, science fiction, reality television, political speech, or social media. Fame hunger is not, as some assume, the last refuge of the untalented. To the contrary, women who have been accused of an unseemly thirst for celebrity turn out to be especially adept at emergent and boundary-breaking forms of cultural expression.