Transgressive Figure Research Articles

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

Queering Material Nature: Bewitched Bodies and the Limits of the Enlightenment

Queering Material Nature:Bewitched Bodies and the Limits of the Enlightenment Melissa Sheedy "The notions of less abstract natures, as man, dog, dove, … do not deceive us materially, yet even these are sometimes confused by the mutability of matter and the intermixture of things."1 "The old woman would at one moment be stroking the little dog, at the next talking to the bird … As I regarded her, I began to shudder, for her face twitched the whole time and she kept shaking, … so that I could not tell what she really looked like."2 From Goethe's grimoires to Lessing's lessons, the literatures and philosophies of the eighteenth century mark many turning points in the discursive and material relationships between humankind and nonhuman nature. A renegotiation of the boundaries between observation and intuition, these discourses articulate a gendered natural world that is at once static, vulnerable, and ripe for the intellectual plucking, while also dynamic, incomprehensible, and unexpected. From the "Man of Reason's" dominion over the landscape3 to Kant's claim that, for the entirety of the "fair sex," the step into Enlightened maturity is both too onerous and too dangerous,4 the bifurcation of a feminized nature at odds with a rational masculine civilization is predicated on long-standing culturally codified norms. Despite these pervasive binaries, the literature of this period is alive with queerly material oddities and marvelous bodies, embodied within the transgressive figure of the witch or witch-like woman. To engage with these mercurial materialities, I propose a queer ecocritical framework that explores depictions of the natural world as a subversive, agential force that resists perception and control. One example of this resistance can be found in Ludwig Tieck's Der Blonde Eckbert ("Eckbert the Fair"), which, I argue, queers Enlightenment epistemes by exploring taboo relationships and desires, unruly nature, and unexpected, transgressive bodies. Reading Tieck's 1797 novella through a queer ecocritical lens sheds light on our understanding of the human and more than human and reveals new potential for transgressing and transcending heteropatriarchal norms. Given the gendered and, at times, contradictory conceptions of nature and the natural world within Enlightenment discourses, feminist material ecocriticism provides a fruitful lens through which to consider binary structures such as culture/nature, reason/emotion, conqueror/conquered, and [End Page 155] heteronormative/queer, all of which relate by analogy to the overarching male/female dichotomy.5 Within this framework, the recent "material turn"6 in ecocritical and environmental scholarship comprises an interdisciplinary set of approaches toward matter and material nature that foregrounds nonhuman agency and decenters the human subject.7 It seeks to deconstruct the conventional gendered nature/culture dichotomy that conceptualizes the natural world as an entity oppressed, exploited, and feminized, thus posing a direct challenge to the patriarchal view of the conquests of (male) human reason.8 This perspective acknowledges nature as an omnipresent force with fluid boundaries and recognizes the political voice of the more-than-human realm. Through this conception of nature as a network of interactive matter in possession of intentionality and agency, material feminism repositions and redefines the key players in the traditionally reinforced nature-culture hierarchy. In their deconstruction of heteropatriarchal hegemonies, critical discourses in material feminism and queer theories can be brought into conversation with one another. Coined in 1991 by Teresa de Lauretis,9 queer theory encompasses a paradigm of approaches with the goal of acknowledging and making space for a variety of positionalities with respect not only to sexuality, but also race, gender, and age. In the sense of transgressing and transcending heteronormative structures and histories,10 "queering" has vital implications for environmentalism and ecocritical studies. On the one hand, queer theory challenges the idea of a sexually normative nature rooted in biologically sanctioned reproduction,11 but it also comprises a discursive troubling of these pervasive dichotomies. Like feminist ecocritical approaches, it offers a means to deconstruct the gendered depictions of the more-than-human realm and acknowledge a natural world with a range of enacted identities and bodies that do not fit into the patriarchal world order. As Sue-Ellen Case suggests, queer theory "works not at the site of gender...

MAGDALENA CAMACHO, LA CAMARONES, UNA CELESTINA EN LA LIMA DEL SIGLO XVIII. HECHIZOS Y CONJUROS AMATORIOS ANTE LA INQUISICIÓN

This article examines the transgressive figure of Magdalena Camacho “La camarones”, who due to her superstitious practices embodied the profile of the unorthodox female who moves outside of patriarchal structures. Recognized by those who knew her well as a great witch, Camacho fluctuated between a constantly transgressive everyday existence and imaginaries based on prejudice and stigma. She was tried before the Inquisition from 1662 to 1664 in Lima, and her case file exemplifies situations, in which the protagonists are not the people on trial, but the spell they cast. Estrangement, the search for love, social or economic wellbeing were just some of the conflicts that Camacho resolved with her spells.

New Rules for Old Age: Gavarni, the Goncourts and Les Lorettes vieillies

This article examines caricaturist Paul Gavarni’s lithographic series Les Lorettes vieillies and Jules and Edmond de Goncourt’s short text La Lorette as two conflicting visions of the lorette, a type of nineteenth-century prostitute celebrated in literary and visual sources. The Goncourts’ text has previously been studied for its explicit aim to break the rules around representing the lorette; this essay argues, however, that Gavarni’s little-known images were in fact more radical. Exploring the ways in which Les Lorettes vieillies humanizes the experience of the ageing lorette, a taboo topic in other sources, this article shows how the series challenges society’s norms around age and gender. Finally, one should consider Les Lorettes vieillies, published at the same time and in the same newspaper as La Lorette, as an important intertext informing the Goncourts’ own presentation of the lorette as a transgressive figure.

“A Voyage of Discovery”: Reimagining the Walking Woman through Nineteenth-Century Diaries

This article uses a corpus of manuscript diaries to illuminate the practices and meanings of everyday mobility that shaped the lives of nineteenth-century Englishwomen. The female pedestrian has typically been characterized by scholars as a marginal or transgressive figure whose movements are interpreted through comparison to a masculine peripatetic tradition. “A Voyage of Discovery” seeks to broaden our understanding of what it meant to move through the world as a woman in the nineteenth century. Drawing from the narrated experiences of a broad range of little-known diarists, this article outlines a paradigm of “everyday adventure” to describe walking's status as an unremarkable act that nevertheless creates the potential for event and variety. In so doing, it expands on feminist concepts of the everyday, elaborates on the under-theorized relationship between walking and the body, and reassesses the boundaries of socially acceptable mobility.

"Had I been a painter": Lolita and the Perversity of Interart Relations

Abstract: Discussions of interart relations have often relied on a rhetoric of sexual perversion to reaffirm artistic borders, from G. E. Lessing's Laocoön (1766) to twentieth-century theories of medium specificity. This article considers the "perversity" of interart relations embedded in Lolita , Nabokov's novel of pedophilia. While the commingling of the arts is a key aspect of Nabokov's visual poetics, the logic of this principle is interrogated in Lolita . Whether perceiving Lolita as a visual image or imagining a mural of their sexual union, Humbert repeatedly attempts to transfigure his temporal narrative into the spatial realm of the visual as a means of preserving his "nymphet" from the corruption of time. This, I suggest, is analogous to Nabokov's own artistic efforts to escape the temporal progression imposed by sequential narrative form by appealing to the visual arts. By examining Lolita within the context of a long-standing discourse that sees relations between the sister arts as perverse, I argue that the novel's overt transgression of sexual taboos discloses an underlying aesthetic anxiety about the transgression of interart boundaries, in particular the novel's aspiration towards spatial form. Central to this is the novel's reworking of the Pygmalion myth, one of the foundational myths not only about artistic creation, but about the artist as a transgressive figure who violates aesthetic as well as erotic laws. The article ultimately concludes that, in Lolita , Nabokov revalorizes the sequential aspect of narrative (and the temporality of re-reading) as a positive attribute of novelistic form, not as something to be overcome in imitation of painting.

Pirate-states: Imagining the geography of media piracy

Intellectual property (IP) history has long pointed to certain nations as sources of copyright infringement, but these linkages are now systematically produced through annual Special 301 reporting by the US government and media industries. Exploring connections between infringement and nation, this article poses three concepts. Anti-piracy discourse produces a pirate repertoire, a stock of familiar transgressive figures deployed in efforts to combat piracy. These include the pirate-state, a figure used to name and shame nations as hotspots for IP infringement. Cumulatively, pirate-states form a broader geography of media piracy, mapping the world in terms of hubs for unauthorized flows of cultural content. This article views the Special 301 as a representational mechanism for creating a centre–periphery vision imagining ‘the West’ and its infringing others. Although 301 reporting can therefore be read as a statement of discursive power, the article argues this influence remains circumscribed, as is shown by the case of Ukraine.

Le processus d’autonomisation des dieux dans le Japon médiéval. Le cas de Kirime dōji

This study follows in the footsteps of the methodological guidelines formulated by Jean-Pierre Vernant on the importance of considering gods as powers who build a system between them. The article looks at the construction process of Kirime, a minor deity of the pantheon of the three shrines of Kumano (south of Wakayama Prefecture) during the medieval period, whose representation in the maṇḍala of Kumano shows him with his right leg amputated. It will be shown that the empowerment of this deity from his tutelary god, Kumano’s gongen, was possible through the intensification of ancient ties with another subordinate deity, Akomachi, celebrated at Fushimi Inari Shrine (Kyoto). The study mainly draws on the analysis of the rite of expelling auxiliary spirits, or gohō okuri, that the pilgrims performed on their return from Kumano at Inari Shrine. I show that the manipulation of these dangerous and protective spirits was entrusted to the Myōbu deity, assimilated to Akomachi, and through her, by the Shinto-Buddhist equivalents, to the ḍākinī, dangerous Buddhist deities. The question of the origin of the one-legged nature of the god leads us to see this figure as the synthesis of mythical elements related to the mastery of water with the transgressive figure of the Buddhist king Kalmāṣapāda.

The Transgressive Figure of the Dancing-Girl-in-Pain and Kanai Mieko’s Corporeal Text

In ‘The Transgressive Figure of the Dancing-Girl-in-Pain and Kanai Mieko’s Corporeal Text’, Hannah Osborne analyzes the figure of the dancing-girl-in-pain in Kanai Mieko’s 1968 essay, ‘Nikutairon e jostesu dai’ippo’ (‘Towards a Theory of Corporeality’). She advances that, through its discussion of this transgressive figure’s manifestation in both the folk stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the butō of Hijikata Tatsumi, Kanai’s essay articulates a radical understanding of both body and text whereby the body (and its consciousness) serves as a template for text, and the two are seen to intersect with each other across performance spaces. As such the figure holds profound implications for a re-understanding of literature as a shared event akin to performance, and of the act of reading as an active re-writing (rather than a passive reception) of the text’s meaning. For Osborne, the uniquely corporeal theory of Kanai Mieko encourages readers to actively engage with interpretive boundaries. This is later made explicit in Kanai's 1984 essay, "Text/Reality/The Body," which echoes Barthes notion of the writerly text in advancing that "[t]ext itself has a body, and it is particularly text that relentlessly attempts to exceed its own body that is very corporeal in nature." Finally, looking at some of the strategies that Kanai herself deploys in her fiction, notably "Rotting Meat," we see how such a theory might explain how gendered systems which underpin the generation of meaning itself through literature might be overturned.

The Queer Contact Zone: Empire and Military Masculinity in the Memoirs of Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot, 1750–1810

The cross-dressed female soldier played a prominent role within Anglophone popular culture from the American Revolution through the Napoleonic Wars, appearing in ballads, comic operas, plays, and life writing. Feminist and queer analyses of these figures have largely been celebratory, framing historical military cross-dressers as working-class heroines or important examples of an emerging model of female masculinity. However, these interpretations have yet to acknowledge how these transgressive figures' claims to subjectivity as representatives of the British military depend upon active participation in the imperial project. These female soldiers' ability to perform masculinity is contingent upon a narrative and discursive investment in colonialism, violence, and racial hegemony. Using concepts from contemporary decolonial theory as a point of entry into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular culture, this article documents how the memoirs of two combat veterans–Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot–serve as early examples of what Jasbir Puar and others describe as "homonationalism." By repeatedly marking the difference between their own "queerness" and the strangeness of the cisgender women, slaves, and indigenous people they encounter, Snell and Talbot garner legitimacy within the dominant by aligning themselves with masculinity, patriotism, and imperialism. Re-examining these warriors' self-proclaimed "surprising adventures" within their colonial context reveals an unsettling relationship between queer historicism and the history of imperialism.

Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras by Kathryn Wichelns

Reviewed by: Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras by Kathryn Wichelns Leonardo Buonomo Kathryn Wichelns. Henry James's Feminist Afterlives: Annie Fields, Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 178 pp. $99.99 (hardcover). In Henry James's Feminist Afterlives, Kathryn Wichelns provides an original contribution to Henry James scholarship by examining James's complex treatment of gender issues through the figures of three women authors—Annie Fields (1834–1915), Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), and Marguerite Duras (1914–1996)—who variously engaged with him and/or his work. For these women, writes Wichelns, James "is a male author who closely explores women's inner lives, as they negotiate existing ideas about gender and selfhood during the unprecedented transformations brought about by the late nineteenth-century period" (2). Spanning different historical periods, cultural contexts, languages, as well as genres (letters in the case of Fields and Dickinson, drama in the case of Duras), Wichelns argues cogently for a combined feminist and queer reading of James's work. By delving into the social and historical milieu in which each of these women authors operated, Wichelns calls attention to the ways in which their relationships (whether real or vicarious) with James offer us insights into his stance on femininity, masculinity, and societal conventions and norms. In the first chapter, which serves as an introduction, Wichelns notes that her chosen material has received scant attention either because it is not easily accessible (James's letters to Annie Fields) or because its relevance to James studies has been underrated (Dickinson's epistolary references to James's The Europeans and Duras's French-language stage adaptations of James's "The Beast in the Jungle" and The Aspern Papers). While James's epistolary communication with Fields will become more widely available as the publication of The Complete Letters of Henry James progresses (the latest volume covers the years 1883–1884), Duras's Les Papiers d'Aspern and La bête dans la jungle have so far remained untranslated into English. For this reason, Wichelns's extensive quotes from the plays, accompanied by their rendition in English, are a valuable tool for those scholars who cannot read them in the original. [End Page E-11] From a purely methodological standpoint, there appears to be a discrepancy between the chapter devoted to Annie Fields and those that focus on Emily Dickinson and Marguerite Duras. In chapter 2 ("'Those Who Know': Henry James and Annie Adams Fields"), Wichelns looks primarily at the way in which James perceived and addressed Fields in his letters to her, especially after Fields, following the death of her husband (publisher and editor James T. Fields), entered into an intimate, marriage-like relationship with Sarah Orne Jewett. On the other hand, in chapter 3 ("Emily Dickinson's Henry James") and chapters 4 and 5 (dealing, respectively, with Duras's plays La Bête dans la jungle and Les papiers d'Aspern) the focus is on the way in which James was perceived and addressed by Dickinson and Duras. Thus, in chapter 2 we learn a great deal about James's subtly sympathetic acknowledgement of Fields and Jewett's relationship and his bond with both women (but, in particular, with Fields) on the basis of a shared cultural, literary, and social heritage. The emphasis here is on the use, as it were, that James made of his correspondence with Fields, as a private space in which he could explore, and to some extent implicitly sanction, non-normative gender roles and relations. By contrast, the chapters that follow highlight the use James was put to by two women authors who found in his work a vehicle for their critique of conventional femininity and patriarchal power. Regardless of this shift in perspective, throughout the book Wichelns's analysis consistently opens up fresh venues to reassess James's sense of cultural and national identity, as well as his attitude toward women's issues and indeed his own sexuality. For example, in chapter 2 Wichelns offers a stimulating comparison between, on the one hand, both James's sometimes severe pronouncements on transgressive figures, such as Oscar Wilde and George Sand (whose public personas troubled him...

Rosalía de Castro’s El caballero de las botas azules and Charles Perrault’s Le chat botté : Parody, Critique and a New Social (Dis)order

This article examines Rosalia de Castro’s novel El caballero de las botas azules as a creative parody of Charles Perrault’s Le chat botte. In it, I argue that the novel demonstrates de Castro’s radical ideas about gender roles and the stagnation of 19th-century Castilian society through its dialogue with Perrault’s tale, showing how de Castro’s novel is an inverted parody of Perrault’s fairy tale that advocates for societal change instead of protecting the status quo. The parody becomes clearer through de Castro’s ironic recreation of the characters from Puss in Boots, transforming them into transgressive figures that interrogate traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity. The novel also parodies the moralistic tone of fairy tales by insisting that people need to “bell the cat” and address toxic social norms head on, essentially promoting the idea of revolution.

Food for Thoughts: Thinking through Cannibals and Plagiarists

This article weirdly pairs the cannibal and the plagiarist as moral monsters – figures outside of conventional societal and legal categories – to argue that monstrous logic can offer potential correctives to common laws that otherwise demonize transgressive figures. An introduction to Mark Fisher's analysis of the “weird” will complement the tracing of the figure of Richard Parker throughout three literary texts and one historical text: Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Mat Johnson's Pym, and A.W. Brian Simpson's Cannibalism and the Common Law. Demonstrating the familiar and repeated tropes associated with nautical survival cannibalism, or “the custom of the sea,” this article claims the economic and political motivations that often underlie travel narratives relegate any monstrous and humanist concerns to a secondary, lesser importance. The conclusion suggests that thinking through monstrous categories may offer alternative solutions to contemporary problems of conspicuous consumption, resource ownership and exhaustion, and environmental crisis.

Of Famines and Females

Laksmi Bratakathas in Bengal are religious narratives of the eponymous Hindu goddess who presides over prosperity symbolized through an abundance of rice. The reciting of these Laksmi Bratakathas is a sacral duty of the women of the Bhadralok, which remains a popular practice even today. The period of rise and proliferation of these specific narratives, from the eighteenth century onwards, coincides with catastrophic famines with which imperialism in Bengal starts and ends and which provide the historical motivations for requesting the intervention of the goddess of plenty. But there is a deliberate mystification of hunger as Laksmi displaces the problem of famine onto the axes of vice and virtue, which are specifically located in the transgressive figure of the 'New Woman'. Since this is also the period which ushers in a new construction of gender relations, the displacement in these Bratakathas is of critical importance. The article examines the ideological framing of hunger by locating the matrices of the colliding and colluding histories of colonialism, class and gender.

Pedagogia palhacesca: a escola do só eu no ensino regular

O presente trabalho refere-se a uma reflexão crítica acerca das potencialidades transgressoras de uma pedagogia palhacesca, realizada numa escola da rede municipal de Uberlândia-MG. A partir da apropriação de uma poética ridente, de aspectos palhacescos e a inserção do palhaço como figura transgressora no âmbito escolar, no que tange a proposta de construção de uma escola risonha, foi possível perceber possibilidades, construir sonhos, subverter a lógica, poetizar momentos, descontruir o cartesianismo e eleger o riso como ritual de quebra de paradigmas na educação básica.

"Publish Little, but Publish Well": An Interview with the Founders of Tramp Press

"Publish Little, but Publish Well":An Interview with the Founders of Tramp Press Paige Reynolds (bio) Tramp Press is an independent Irish publishing house founded by Lisa Coen and Sarah Davis-Goff "to find, nurture, and publish exceptional literary talent."1 Named for the transgressive figures who people the drama of J. M. Synge, Tramp has, since its founding in 2014, published a small, steady stream of award-winning books, including Sara Baume's Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015) and Mike McCormack's Solar Bones (2016). They have also published reprints of neglected fiction in the Recovered Voices series, among them Charlotte Riddell's A Struggle for Fame (1883; reprint 2014) and Maeve Kelly's Orange Horses (1990; reprint 2017). They have produced timely collections as well, including Dubliners 100 (2014), in which contemporary writers reimagine Joyce's famed stories, and A Kind of Compass: Stories on Distance (2015), a collection of short stories from international writers considering distance as a theme. Coen and Davis-Goff have created a nimble business model that is simultaneously approachable and rigorous: They are committed to reading everything in the "slush pile," the sobriquet used to describe unsolicited manuscripts received by publishers, as well as to integrating their progressive politics with their mission to publish extraordinary fiction. In their endeavors they have successfully merged new and traditional practices to support writers, employing social media such as Twitter and Instagram very effectively to promote the brand, but also meeting face-to-face with booksellers and attending public readings with their authors. In December 2016 Coen and Davis-Goff met with Paige Reynolds to discuss Tramp's past, present, and future.2 [End Page 372] PAIGE REYNOLDS: Can we begin with Tramp's origin story? How did you initially conceptualize the press after you met working together at Lilliput Press here in Dublin? I have read articles in which the decision to start Tramp sounds like the start of a caper movie: "Well, we're young women in publishing and we'll just have to create a job for ourselves!" LISA COEN: That is literally the case! I remember having lunch in [the restaurant] Seven Seven Seven, where Sarah said, "This'll probably just be part-time." SARAH DAVIS-GOFF: I cannot believe I said that. I mean, we are not people who work part-time at anything, ever. Apart from the fact that we could not find jobs, there was a real need for a fresh look at publishing in Ireland. We were, as you mentioned, working at Lilliput, and while there, this incredible manuscript from Donal Ryan came in that took a while to get people interested in, even though it was obviously something very special. That put the frighteners on me, thinking that there are great manuscripts out there that are being completely ignored on the slush piles. Those manuscripts really need a voice and a champion. Publishers were not publishing with their gut, and publishing according to what you think the market wants is always death. Plus, we wanted to provide diversity to the publishing industry in Ireland. If for example only middle-aged guys are in a position to say yes or no to manuscripts, my experience is that they will generally be saying yes to works by other middle-aged guys. LC: We knew there were important manuscripts being neglected. I remember people saying, "Why did the Celtic Tiger not produce any great writers?" I think there are two reasons for that. One is that people actually had jobs, and so maybe did not take the risk because they had to pay the mortgage. But I also think publishers were not looking for great, challenging work. There are a lot of very conservative choices being made, particularly by large U.K. houses. They are leaving a lot of good stuff behind and publishing things that are very similar. I am very wary of this conversation about this great new wave of Irish literature. The great work has always been there, but there has not been anyone to champion it. [End Page 373] PR: Has new media created ways to find new voices? SD-G: Lisa McInerney is a...

The Role of Æschere’s Head

This article draws on evidence from archaeological investigation and land charters to argue for the influence of Anglo-Saxon execution practice on the representation of Æschere’s head in Beowulf. The poet’s depiction of the discovery of the severed head of Hroðgar’s retainer in a space defined as a borderland, where it has been left by his killer, Grendel’s mother, can be seen to reflect the Anglo-Saxons’ own judicial decapitation and display practices, which saw the heads of transgressors displayed on estate boundaries. Critics have identified similar echoes of decapitation on a border elsewhere in the corpus. The article argues that the severed head of Æschere is staged in this way to disturb the reader both through the violence done to the human body and through the sense of the unheimlich created by the hostile ‘other’ figure of Grendel’s mother recognisably echoing the corporal punishment practices of Anglo-Saxon society. Grendel’s mother is a transgressive figure who treats a key member of the Danes’ society, an individual with whom the poem’s Anglo-Saxon audience would identify, as a transgressor, highlighting the lack of human control over her landscape.

Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things: Disability in <em>Game of Thrones</em>

Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things: Disability in <em>Game of Thrones</em>

Popular Journalism, Religious Morality, and the Canadian Imaginary: Queers and Immigrants as Threats to the Public Sphere

In Canada, opposition toward GLBQ identities and practices has been almost entirely religious in nature. On the other hand, antipathy toward “undesirable” immigrant profiles—ironically, often those perceived as homophobic and misogynistic—has been articulated through arguments about the supposed incompatibility of their religious values (usually Islamic) with “Canadian” mores. This paper analyzes a variety of national news media to demonstrate how the transgressive figures of the immigrant and the queer are composed in a powerful and particular way through journalistic attitudes toward and understandings of religion. In particular, I examine a discursive framework emergent in reporting on two recent tragedies—one, the 2011 suicide of the gay Ottawa teenager Jamie Hubley, and the other, the 2009 Shafia family “honour killings.” I argue that this reporting disingenuously evokes a commitment to tolerance without occasioning a substantial interrogation of what is really being tolerated and why.

Germaine Greer's Adaptable Celebrity

There is little doubt that Germaine Greer is the West's, and especially Britain's, most well-known feminist. This article, looking at her more recent public appearances, argues that Germaine Greer has proven adept at adapting her feminist celebrity, especially through various (and often comedic) performances on quiz and lifestyle programmes on British television. In particular, she exemplifies what has been called an “unruly woman”; that is, she is a transgressive figure who uses the space provided by these new entertainment formats not simply to reinforce her celebrity but to circulate (and perform) a particular feminism. Her celebrity, and her relationship to the mainstream media in Britain especially, has shifted and evolved over time and therefore provides an important case study into the complicated operations of celebrity as well as the feminism–media nexus itself. As an instance of gendered celebrity—and that of a feminist especially—that comes to at once trouble and buttress certain celebrity logics, Greer illuminates the political importance of this ground for feminism and helps to underscore that feminist celebrity is a distinct, and developing, mode of public subjectivity which celebrity studies and feminist media studies have thus far failed to significantly address.