From bad girl to mad girl:
British female celebrity, reality products, and the pathologization of pop-feminism
“Hi everyone, I’m Kerry.
You probably think you know everything about me already,
but don’t believe all that crap you read in the papers. I’ve got bipolar,
so I have my highs and I have my lows… Watch the show.
You never know, you might even like me!”
The statement above forms the introduction to, and advertising campaign for, a 2008
MTV UK docusoap entitled Kerry Katona: Crazy in Love. The show charts the ‘day to
day life’ of Katona, a high-profile British celebrity and former member of the girl band,
Atomic Kitten. Katona joined the Kittens in 1999 at the age of just 19, and left in 2001
after suffering a mental breakdown and becoming pregnant. During her days with the
Kittens, Katona was represented in the tabloid press as the most notorious band member
– a brazen, busty, foul-mouthed, lower-class, binge drinking “bad girl”. She was
represented as the ex-soft-core porn model and lap dancing “wild child” who successfully
transitioned to more respectable fame as a pop star. Yet, Katona was also represented as
the hard-faced little sister of the power-girls, “ladettes”, and “wild child” pop-feminists of
the 1990s, such as the Spice Girls.
As a “bad girl”, Katona has attracted consistently and aggressively conflicting attention.
She is locked in to a vicious and contradictory bond with the British tabloid and celebrity
media: she has been hailed as a survivor and as “Best Celebrity Mother”, while she has
also been branded “Worst Celebrity Mother” and, most pervasively, “Crazy Kerry”. In
2006, with her public image at an all time low, Katona released an autobiography,
entitled Too Much, Too Soon: My Story of Love, Fame, And Survival. The book is a rags
to riches story of brutal childhood neglect, addiction, and domestic abuse. It also details
the wild “excesses” of early fame, breakdown and recovery, and her ongoing battle with
mental illness.
Part of her motivation for publishing the book was clearly to try to gain agency and try to
“rebrand” her negative media persona. “Star agency” is, as Marshall points out,
increasingly reduced to such “privatized, psychologized representation of activity and
transformation” (Marshall, cit. Williams, 118). Accordingly, Katona’s transformation
involved explaining how her chronic mental illness in part contributed to her “bad girl”
persona. The “real Kerry” is represented as a woman with agency and self control, who is
psychologically self-actualized and likeable, and has, above all, matured from “bad girl”
to “good” woman. Yet her celebrity persona remains the product of an ongoing and
vicious battle with the British tabloid and gossip media, with stories emerging (on an
almost daily basis) about breakdowns, hospitalisation, bad mothering, stays in rehab,
custody battles, and her scandalous past.
Katona’s career is now comprised of a steady stream of what can be termed “reality
products” - autobiographies, reality TV shows, docusoaps, a column in OK! – a celebrity
gossip magazine, self-help literature and blogs. Her role in popular culture is as an
identity-as-such, and her career is an ongoing process of managing, repudiating, and
creating the scandals that afford her media attention. She is ‘Crazy Kerry’ whose mad,
mad life promises relentless and lucrative media content.
Far from being unique, Katona’s decision to disclose mental illness as part of her
rebranding is indicative of a trend in post-feminist celebrity culture, whereby the bad
girl/mad girl-redeemed script is a recognisable genre of female celebrities’ reality
products. There is now a propensity for ‘bad girls’ such as Katona to renounce their
apparent negations and transgressions of acceptable femininity as symptomatic of mental
illness. These frequently take the form of using reality products to make penitent
apologies for “bad girl” behaviour and involvement within pop-feminism. Yet
repackaged bad girls habitually reassert their sanity - and seek social acceptability and
cultural worth - by engaging with and invoking deeply problematic discourses about the
relationship between femininity, fame, and mental health, and reactionary stereotypes
derived from the tabloid press.
When Germaine Greer contemplates the “bad girl” in The Whole Woman, her 1999 study
of the construction of the contemporary female body, she insists that we address “the
brief and catastrophic career”’ of such “girls behaving badly” and “girls on top”, because
“though the career of the individual bad girl is likely to be a brief succession of chaotic
drinking, casual sex … with consequences she will have to struggle with all her life, the
cultural phenomenon is depressingly durable” (Greer, 310). Greer invites us to question
the enduring cultural construction of the “bad girl”, not as a courageous rebel, but as an
ill-fated casualty. Far from being empowered or radical, the bad girl’s apparent refusal to
conform to conventional femininity can be seen as making a virtue out of an inadequacy.
Yet the bad girl’s career is both tragic and transitory: she is, from the outset, fated to an
unhappy end. Greer’s invitation also begs the question of what female behaviours are
considered bad, and why the women who display these behaviours attract – and often
seek to attract - negative attention. If the bad girl archetype is depressing, does this mean
that the women who are labelled as such should become “good”? And, if so, what process
of transformation - of self-making - might that involve?
What if the girl turns out not to have been bad, but mad? What if her rebelliousness - her
excesses, provocativeness, and belligerence – are reframed as pathological, as
symptomatic not of a frustrated and ostensibly feminist refusal to conform, but of mental
illness? Does her self-pathologization conceal and reinforce repressive gender structures
she once transgressed?
This “bad-to-mad-girl” genre is indicative of a complicated postfeminist backlash against
what can be identified as the pop-feminism of the 1990s. In its British context, popfeminism took the form of the self-proclaimed feminist “ladette” and “Girl Power”
cultures. ‘Pop-feminism’ refers to the quasi-feminist rhetoric overtly staged within
popular culture and organized around female celebrities who embraced the “bad girl”
stereotype and who were both derided and revered in the tabloid media for that very
reason. British “bad girl”, “Girl Power”, and “ladette” cultures were promotional devices
for girls bands, most notably the Spice Girls, to describe a new kind of liberated and
empowered femininity marked by assertiveness, provocation, and success. But they were
also media constructs to describe an apparently new breed of boisterous and scandalising
female celebrities. The label “ladette” was both applied by the media and embraced by
the wolf-whistling-beer-drinking-independent-bad-girls epitomized by actresses such as
Billie Piper, and TV and radio presenters such as Gail Porter, Denise Van Outen, Zoe
Ball and Sara Cox.
It is the work of this essay to explore the ways in which many of these women have
produced reality products, such as autobiographies and documentaries, in which they
emphatically reject their pop-feminist celebrity persona and their once bold ‘wildness’ as
symptomatic of mental illness. It explores three superlative examples of British “bad
girl/mad girl” pop-feminists who, after a long period of media antipathy and subsequent
indifference, re-gained media attention through revelations of mental illness: Spice Girl
Geri Halliwell, “ladette” Gail Porter, and ‘wild child’ Kerry Katona. As these women
entered their late 20s and early 30s, their celebrity persona became surplus to popular
culture – their “bad girl” excesses were incompatible with the shift toward “girlie”
culture, and their sex-appeal was compromised by “aging” bodies. These one-time “bad
girls” now almost exclusively produce autobiographical reality products that describe a
continual process of self-making that is interrelated with their representation in the
tabloid media. As such, they seek to remake and rebrand themselves in noticeably similar
forms, by making revelations of mental ill health through reality products, through
dramatic physical makeover, making commitment to public service and charity, and
claiming redemption through motherhood. They now seek public roles as charity
ambassadors, psychological and diet gurus, and producers of products for children.
Setting the record straight, then, means asserting “I’m not bad, I’m mad…!”
Narratives about, and images of, “real-life” mental illness are profuse in contemporary
popular culture, from psychologized reality television shows such as Big Brother,
confessional and chat TV, to weblogs and docusoaps. These images help to shape public
attitudes toward mental illness. In fact, many studies have established that most people in
the West receive their basic information about mental health from the mass media. For
example, pivotal research in the 1990s by the Glasgow Media Group established that
representations of mental illness have tangible and powerful social effects in the UK
(Philo, passim). Also, the 1991 Daniel Janklovich Group survey found that 87% of
Americans cited television as their main source of information about mental health, with
76% citing newspapers, 75% magazines, and 51% friends and family Diefenbach and
West, 181. See also: Wahl, 1995, 3; Heaton and Wilson, passim). Given the extent to
which mental health has become an urgently topical issue in contemporary society more
generally, it is possible to assert that sectors of the audience for these images and
narratives are the ever more unwell. Between 1990 and 2000, diagnoses of mental illness
in Western countries more than doubled such that almost 30% of people are diagnosed
with mental illness at any one time. And this figure is likely to increase; in 1997, The
World Health Organisation warned of a pandemic, and epidemiological studies predict
that by 2020, mental illnesses will be the most significant Western health problem and
will be the primary cause of disability after heart disease (WHO; Murray and Lopez;
Mind). If celebrity is now central to popular culture, then the mentally ill celebrity
occupies a potentially influential position in terms of stigma reduction and public
awareness campaigns.
The market for the celebrity memoir of mental illness also intersects with that of a
pervasive culture of psychological transformation, self-help, and makeover products.
McGee persuasively argues that self-help books serve to reinforce traditional moral
values and gender roles in consumer capitalist culture in which emotional and
psychological health is equated with material success: one's sense of self, and one’s
ability to be a successful self, is a commodity that operates according to the market
(McGee). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the celebrity culture in which being a
self - 'being somebody' - is the fundamental substance of a career. In terms of the
gendering of self-help, McGee points out that, in self-help literature, the mythic narrative
of the "self made man" is juxtaposed to the narrative of the "self-salvaged" woman. For
McGee, the female consumer is encouraged by lifestyle makeover gurus such as Oprah
Winfrey who use domestic and "female" qualities such as the nurturing, support, and
emotionality, to achieve material success. Similarly, celebrities such as Madonna profit
from the “femme fatale turned mother” archetype whose emotional stability and ongoing
profitability seem to depend to a large part upon embracing an essential maternalism.
(McGee, 203 n.19) The work of being a celebrity, then – of being a commodifiable “self”
– is intrinsic to the gendered nature of consumer capitalism and celebrity product.
For example, in the UK, celebrity misery memoirs are routinely published by Ebury Press
- a factual content imprint of Random House. They are categorized in bookstores under
“mind-body-spirit” and “self-help” sections (as well as “autobiography”), and they are
promoted as guides to life by legitimate celebrity experts on mental illness. They also
overlap with “misery-lit” - the increasing number of first-person accounts of trauma. This
genre started in earnest with the publication in 1993 of Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It,
and has now reached saturation point with the creation of a distinct bookstore category:
“true life”. These texts usually follow a generic format: considering and narrating
personal suffering from a position of wise reflection with the stated intent of imparting
compassionate wisdom to the reader.
Yet as the celebrity confession of mental illness is partly an appeal for cultural value, and
partly an attempt to reconstruct a new persona, then the messages imparted in celebrity
narratives of mental illness can be deeply problematic – especially in terms of shaping
conceptions about what is “normal” and what is “pathological”. Yet we should not
dismiss the genuinely positive and consolatory role that celebrities can play in stigma
reduction by offering empathetic and gratifying representations of mental health
recovery. As comedian Ruby Wax explains regarding her 2002 Ebury autobiography
How Do You Want Me?, “‘There’s such as stigma when you’re mentally ill [so] I’m
speaking up for those people. If you have a show-business career you can get away with
it – either you have a one-woman show, or you’re sectioned...”’ (Wax, cit. Johnson)
Confessional and autobiographical mediums are clearly gendered. Stephen Harper, for
example, notes how revelations of mental illness by male stars, such as Stuart Goddard
(Adam Ant), are seen as a therapeutic act of “self-fashioning”, rather like McGee’s “selfmade man”. They are seen as indicative of creativity and courage and can function to reconsolidate and increase men’s “cultural power” (Harper, 316). Like McGee’s “selfsalvaged woman”, female stars’ revelations of mental illness are tragedies, melodramas,
and narratives of “failure” that undermine their creative agency and diminish their
cultural power. The ‘bad boy’ image of hedonistic excesses – drug and alcohol addiction,
promiscuity, violence – is in many ways acceptably masculine. If “bad girl” hedonism is
“unfeminine”, then rebellious and uncontained female celebrities are, by default,
somehow insane. Salacious media reporting of female crisis celebrity reinforces the
unrelenting representation of female celebrities per se as pathologically narcissistic and
out of control. As such, the need for famous women to rebrand their psyches and reveal
mental ill health is paradoxically both self-creating and self-defeating.
Celebrity autobiographical products about mental illness are self-reflexive texts
predicated on a knowingness of the need to continually remake the self within popular
culture. As Holmes and Redmond observe, tabloids, celebrity autobiographies, and gossip
magazines ‘would now seem strangely empty without celebrity disclosures ranging from
the horrors of plastic surgery to eating disorders, and drug and alcohol abuse, not to
mention “confessions” about depression’ (Holmes and Redmond, 289). As they rightly
point out, ‘to observe this is not to trivialise the experience of any of these matters
(whether associated with celebrities or not) but only to point out their increasing
conventionalization within celebrity discourse’ (Ibid).
Celebrity autobiographical products also appear at increasingly early career stages.
Katona, for example, was 26 when she brought out her first autobiography. In Making
Fame Ordinary, Jo Littler defines contemporary celebrity culture in terms of compulsory
intimacy and emotionality. This values discourses of ‘authenticity’, ‘reflexivity’ and
‘keeping it real’ (Littler, passim). The precipitate autobiography is a recognisably
contemporary genre produced by “stars who appear only too keen to tell us very early on
in their careers about how they are unheavenly and how they have dirty emotional closets
to clean out” (Littler, 20). Again, it is important to point out that this genre is deeply
gendered in that female celebrities remain subject to the narratives of tragedy and failure
that Harper describes, as well as to the disturbing fixation in the contemporary media on
constructions of female celebrity in crisis. Moreover, the tabloidization of contemporary
culture has been framed, by Levy amongst many others, as a process of "feminization" by
which constant attention to individuals, and to emotionality, domesticity, relationships,
physical appearance, sickness, and trauma has overtaken the "masculine" sphere of
politics and social affairs.
In terms of the gendered nature of the celebrity autobiography, British examples include
life-writing and reality products by “power girl” Geri Halliwell, Victoria Beckham, “wild
child” actress Daniella Westbrook, leading “Ladettes” Gail Porter and Billie Piper, and
glamour model and professional celebrity Katie Price (aka “Jordan”). Piper’s Growing
Pains (2006), for example, reveals her struggle with anorexia, Westbrook’s The Other
Side of Nowhere (2006) details her anorexia and the contours of the very public cocaine
addiction that famously destroyed her nose, and Price’s Pushed to the Limit (2008)
contains revelations about post-natal depression, stress, and anxiety. All of these women
found fame at a very early age, were known as bad girls and/or pop-feminists, and were
the subjects of innumerable scandals about drink, drugs, sex, and generally being ‘out of
control’.
For the women in question, their celebrity depends on their both being in and out of
control – not only of their public images, but of themselves. Yet this lack of control can
be culturally valuable: the mentally unwell celebrity woman is, by default, not in control
of her person/persona, but she is also therefore, seemingly unmediated and “authentic” in
Littler’s sense of the term; Rebecca Williams explains the exchange of power and
privileges between the celebrities and the media as only the impression of ‘star agency’
(Williams, 112). Although they are produced in reaction to a relentlessly prying media,
their autobiographical reality products are also almost always a uniquely controllable
means of (re)constructing a public persona. Through the memoir, one can offer emotional
intimacy, dispute or create media scandals, and assert authenticity. Documentary and
interviews can be edited and misappropriated, but the autobiographical product –
conforming to genre conventions, designed for a sympathetically receptive “misery
market”, and rigorously managed by a publicity team – is generally under strict industrial
control.
What is more, celebrity as such – being somebody - can be a precarious means of trying
to transcend discontent. Media attention on what Holmes and Redmond term ‘fame
damage’ undermines the promise of celebrity as a means of success because one ‘risk[s]
everything to lose your own sense of self’ and ‘gamble your identity to acquire wealth, to
become acknowledged, to become somebody’ (Holmes and Redmond, 3). The fame-
seeker, the wanna-be-somebody, can be ‘a split figure, dissatisfied and unhappy’ who
reaches out for fame as the promise of ‘plenitude or ontological and existential
wholeness’, yet only finds selflessness (Ibid). Fame damage evidences a shared sense of
psychological inadequacy, as well as exposing the failure of celebrity to end this
inadequacy: ‘In the modern world one is psychologically damaged, whether it is an
anomic fan or a lonely famous person’ (Ibid).
What follows explores the autobiographical reality products of three British female
celebrities, Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, “ladette” Gail Porter, and ‘wild child’ Kerry
Katona, as superlative examples of the ways in which the pathologization of popfeminism is intertwined with revelations of mental illness and contemporary reality
genre. In Halliwell’s autobiographies If Only (1999) and Just for the Record (2002) and
documentary Geri (1999), she talks candidly about her struggle with eating disorders and
depression; in the memoir Laid Bare: Love, Survival, and Fame (2007) and numerous
interviews and reality shows, Gail Porter discusses her public breakdown and mental
illnesses ranging from bipolar disorder to stress-related alopecia; in Too Much, Too Soon
(2007) and the docusoap Crazy (2008), Katona discloses her anorexia, depression, drug
addiction and bipolar disorder, and in her self-help book, Survive the Worst, Aim for the
Best (2007), she explains her experience of, and recovery from, these illnesses while
imparting lifestyle advice to the reader.
Halliwell, Porter, and Katona’s autobiographical and reality products are especially
indicative of a backlash against 1990s pop-feminism, as well as of the ways in which
female celebrities now seek to intervene in a media culture already primed and impatient
to pathologize female celebrity. What is more, they describe mental illness as instigated
by an apparently unruly female body – eating disorders, self harm, sexual promiscuity
and post-partum depression.
In essence, Halliwell, Porter, and Katona’s autobiographical products pathologize their
pop-feminism as an escape from mental health problems, and as the cause of mental
health problems. The narratives follow a set format: re-narrate the breakdown of fame,
discuss early childhood trauma, explain “bad girl” behaviour as symptomatic of mental
illness caused by trauma, explain fame as a pathological lack of sense of self and fameseeking as a symptom, explain how the celebrity false-self collapses under the pressures
of fame, and explain the processes of, and motivation for, recovery as redemption though
motherhood. By making over “bad girl” personas, their reality products initially attracted
enough positive attention to allow their subjects to re-emerge into the celebrity
mainstream. To be in control of their selves and their bodies, they repudiate the “bad girl”
behaviours they once proudly promoted as ‘feminist’.
Ginger to Geri: Mind and Body Makeover
One of the most disheartening aspects of the un-conforming female is that she is
portrayed as a ‘girl’ – diminutive, infantile and pubescent. “Girl Power” was primarily
aimed at adolescents, and even political female movements organized themselves as ‘riot
girls’. ‘Riot Girls’ offered an ostensibly repackaged feminism as a form of defiance
against social power through an essentially female strength, whereas “Girl Power”
offered a more playful ideal of individualism, attitude and material success. “Girl Power”
was also dedicated to sexual forthrightness and ‘girls on top’ pleasure seeking which
often took the form of provocation and exhibitionism. Halliwell’s Spice Girl character,
Ginger Spice, was the most vociferous exponent of “Girl Power”: ‘I was always serious
about “Girl Power” and felt that the Spice Girls were on a mission to save girls and lift
their self-esteem’ (Halliwell, Just, 93).
“Girl Power” coincided with the dramatic shift in British politics from Conservative to
New Labour leadership in 1997. In a classic interview in political magazine The
Spectator, Halliwell cited Margaret Thatcher as ‘the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our
ideology – “Girl Power”’ and their first single, ‘Wannabe’, as “an anthem to Thatcherite
meritocratic aspiration” (Montefiore, 14). Yet as Justine Ashby explains “Girl Power”
became synonymous with New Labour sloganeering and the high-profile ‘Blair’s Babes’
- 120 new female MPs elected in 1997, the largest amount of women ever to sit in the
House of Commons. “Girl Power” complimented the idea that ‘Blairism would usher in a
new, more democratic era in which opportunities for women would be there for the
taking’, yet “Girl Power” ‘confounded any real attempt to politicize it’ (Ashby, 129)
In terms of its vaguely feminist rhetoric, “Girl Power” has been both praised and vilified
by feminists. Kathy Acker, for example, praised “Girl Power” as ‘‘Being who you
wanna’ and not taking any shit’ (Greer, ibid). In contrast, Rosalind Coward denounced it
as ‘a good label to use in any situation in which girls might be putting themselves
forward in new, brash, ‘unfeminine’ ways’ (Coward, 122), complaining that “Girl
Power” was, in essence, a declawed and market driven caricature of the more earnestly
feminist and political Riot Girl movement. Ginger may have espoused feminist rhetoric,
but Halliwell firmly rejects it: ‘feminism is bra-burning lesbians. It’s very unglamorous.
I’d like to see it rebranded. We need to see a celebration of our femininity and softness’
(Halliwell, cit. Moorehead, 14).
As Ginger, Halliwell enjoyed media affection for her provocative behaviour. In 1996, for
example, at the height of Spice-mania, her old glamour photos emerged and were
published in Teazer porn magazine. Rather than threatening her career, the photos played
into the “Girl Power” image; she braved the scandal and went on to pose for Playboy in
May 1998. Yet by the late 1990s, Halliwell became derided for her ‘brashness’; as Spice
Girls’ fans grew up and her mischievousness came to look like clichéd adolescent
rebellion. Rapidly, Halliwell’s kudos diminished with the transition from post-feminist
“Girl Power” to “girlie culture”.
When Halliwell left the Spice Girls in 1998, media speculation was rife and her first
autobiography, If was an attempt to create closure. The book charts her early life, her
“wannabe” desire for fame, and her decision to leave the band and “move on”.
Simultaneously, the remaining Spice Girls issued their own collective biography, Forever
Spice, which only briefly mentions Geri’s departure (Spice Girls, 1999). Halliwell
quickly embarked on a video diary, and accepted an invitation from esteemed filmmaker
Molly Dineen to combine the footage with a “warts and all” documentary entitled Geri.
The film was an attempt “to understand me and what happened to me” (Halliwell, ibid,
105). Using the media to find a sense of self was risky, yet the film showed a vulnerable
side to her image: “I probably revealed more than I should about my loneliness and lowself esteem, but I was feeling lost [and] looked to the film for help” (Ibid). She used the
film to “work through it very publicly and very loudly” (Ibid), but she was aware of the
popularity this openness and uncertainly could have because of the burgeoning market for
reality products showcasing the construction of authenticity and intimacy that Littler
describes as the structure of contemporary celebrity. As Halliwell puts it:
In the eighties stars like Michael Jackson and Prince had an air of mystery
about them and they came across as untouchable and inaccessible but in the
21st century that no longer works – people want aspirational figures who are
also accessible. Even during the making of the documentary, I realized that I
couldn’t give people a one-dimensional character any more because that’s
not what they wanted. The public want to see you, feel you, and touch you
enough to know that you are real. That’s exactly what they got! (Ibid)
H alliwell also sees the documentary as a political commentary on “fame damage” and
consumerism that “‘blew away the myth that celebrity brings happiness [and] questions
our values because it makes you think about whether material things bring happiness”
(Ibid, 126). She also saw it as potentially inspirational: “I believed that sharing my
vulnerabilities and letting others see how I was feeling, I might help one person deal with
their own problems and realize that they are not alone’ (Ibid, 105). Geri enjoyed huge
ratings, and viewers were mostly sympathetic to the “real Geri” behind the cartoonish
Spice Girl façade: “The whole Ginger illusion thing had been completely shattered.
Suddenly people realized that I was a real person with real feelings who gets lonely and
unhappy just like they do ... Many people came up to me to thank me’ (Ibid, 126)
Halliwell’s second autobiography, Just for the Record is a diary that plots her solo career.
Along with her un-ironically titled first single Look at Me and her album Schizophonic,
Just narrated her transition to a solo singer as an ongoing battle against mental illness.
Becoming “Geri” was about pathologizing “Girl Power”. In the book, Halliwell
apologizes for her wild behaviour, claiming that “Girl Power” didn’t work for her
because it was a displacement of depression: “it was like putting on a uniform. You don’t
have to think, you don’t have to deal with being a human being, and that was perfect for a
vulnerable young woman who didn’t want to feel anything” (Ibid, 94). She goes on to
reject Ginger’s pop-feminism and laddishness as symptoms of such mental instability and
self-alienation.
Haliwell’s book promotes her dramatic physical, as well as psychlogical, makeover.
Over 50% of Just comprises pictures of the newly authentic Geri. The front cover is a
picture of an extremely thin Halliwell posing topless with a tape measure around her sizezero waist. The image constructs her body as evidence of her psychological stability and
authenticity, as well hinting at the candid revelations she will make. After being
photographed leaving an Overeaters Anonymous meeting, Halliwell’s dramatic physical
transformation was the subject of tabloid scandals that potentially jeopardized her solo
career. In Just… she confronted this by affirming that she had suffered from anorexia and
bulimia since adolescence, and that her eating disorder intensified after her father’s death,
whereupon she joined the Spice Girls. “Podge Spice”, as she was known in the media,
was adolescent - a late bloomer who was sexually unconfident and emotionally
immature, physically inhibited by late menses, still developing breasts, and puppy fat.
After leaving the group, she claims that she was able to gain control of her body and cure
her depression through Yoga.
In her book she asserts that the real Geri is authentically small, yet conflicting media
reporting both rewarded her endeavours and over her amazing ‘new body’ and insinuated
that she was really anorexic. Geri’s ‘mind-body-spirit’ Yoga DVD’s were one of her
most lucrative products in that they were produced in reaction to positive speculation
about how everyday women could ‘get Geri’s body’. Also, Halliwell was one of the first
celebrities to endorse that now fashionable form of exercise as a mind-body-spirit
panacea.
Yet while Halliwell uses her makeover products to talk about her recovery from eating
disorders, they also showcase a modishly size-zero body. In many ways, media reporting
of her dramatic transformation instigated the contemporary media obsession with seeking
out signs of the unruly and fame-hungry female body, and constructing the female
celebrity body as both pathologically and essentially physically remarkable. Halliwell’s
body became an immediately visible signifier of both her sense of stability and media
gossip abut her eating disorder and mental instability. Any and all changes in her body –
perceived, or real – are, as is the case for all contemporary female celebrities, central
preoccupations in media constructions and deconstructions of her celebrity person ain
terms of emotional wellbeing and value.
By the early 2000s, other ex-Spice Girls became subject to accusations of mental illness –
notably (once again) eating disorders. Victoria Beckham – Posh Spice – endured
vigorous speculation about her own dramatic weight loss and physical makeover. Tabloid
coverage of her miraculous “recovery from pregnancy” instigated media obsession with
scrutinizing the female celebrity body for signs of post-partum ugliness, sexual
unavailability and undesirability and mental and emotional instability. Beckham initially
denied the rumors, stating: “with the other [Spice] girls I have a responsibility as a role
model. Some young fans might get the wrong idea” (bbc.co.uk, 1999) However, in a high
profile interview on the primetime Parkinson TV show just months later, she intimated
that she had an eating problem, but that it was related to pregnancy (Ibid).
In her 2001 autobiography, Learning to Fly, Beckham revealed that she had suffered
from anorexia as a psychopathological reaction to fame but has now recovered. Like
Halliwell, Beckham was at pains to state that her now, dramatically thin body, is
authentic because she is mentally stable, the (less famous) “real me”. The book was an
attempt to “set the record straight on the controversies that surround her especially
regarding her new appearance” (bbc.co.uk, 2001). As Learning was published, Beckham
was trying to launch a solo career with the unfortunately titled single Out of My Mind.
And ex-Spice Girl Mel C has also revealed suffering anorexia and bulimia during her
career. Through these autobiographies and documentaries, “Girl Power” was
reconstructed as mentally and physically disempowering.
Gail Porter: Mental Health and Public Service
Simultaneous with the rise of “Girl Power” in Britain was the emergence of a new “lad”
and “ladette” culture which appeared as a defiant reaction to the caring, sharing,
emotionally open “new man”. “Lad” culture involved rebelling against the apparent
“feminisation” of society in order to reclaim an essential, unreconstructed and shared
masculinity. “Ladism” found expression not through specific celebrities but through
male-oriented buddy magazines such as GQ, Loaded, and FHM, which trade on softporn, wilful immaturity, and compulsory hedonism. First coined in 1995 by advertising
agency Collett Dickenson, “ladette” referred to refer to a growing market of young
women and female celebrities engaged in similarly “male oriented” activities including
drinking and sport, and whose behaviour is judged to be “unfeminine”. In so much as it
was seen as empowering and quasi-feminist, “ladettism” meant embracing hedonism as a
means of “taking on men at their own game” and “giving as much as you get”.
Gail Porter was a darling of both the “lad” and “ladette” scenes, known for numerous
scandals about her hedonism, her willingness to appear naked in “lad’s” magazines, and
her overt displays of sexuality. Porter started as a runner before breaking through in 1995
as a presenter on Scottish and UK-wide children’s television shows including Scratchy
and Co. and Fully Booked. Increasingly represented as a wild-child sex symbol, her
notoriety came into conflict with her image as a wholesome children’s. Porter created
scandals by appearing naked in soft-core shoots for FHM, GQ, and Loaded at the same
time as Halliwell’s photos appeared in Teazer and Playboy.
Firmly established as a “ladette”, by 1998 Porter transitioned from children’s presenter to
mainstream music shows like Top of the Pops. Notoriously, in May 1999, naked
photographs of Porter were projected onto the Houses of Parliament as a marketing stunt
for FHM. Porter claimed to know nothing about the stunt, and thus reacted nonchalantly
at how her image was used and delighted by the fuss it had caused. Yet she is now at
pains to distance herself from “ladette” culture and assert a more “feminine” self:
We were all called “ladettes”. [After] the Spice Girls and “Girl Power” in the mid-90s
there’s been all this stuff about “sisters doin’ it for themselves”, challenging men at
their own game [but] I’ve never had the slightest inclination to be a man or, rather, a
lad’ (Porter, 150).
In The Daily Mail tabloid supplement, Femail, fellow ladette, Sara ‘Coxy’ Cox, also
recanted her unfeminine behaviour: ‘“ladette” is a word that makes my toes curl now’,
says Sara, screwing up her pretty nose in disgust… ‘It was a younger me’” (Cox Cit.
Hardy).
Porter’s career came to an abrupt halt in 2005 through a mental breakdown that was
initially made visible by her sudden hair loss, and then became a media scandal after a
much reported suicide attempt. Suddenly, “Ladette-Gail” was “Mad-Gail”. After a period
of recovery, she was approached in 2006 by Ebury to write an autobiography, and she
agreed to write the book to counteract negative press about her illness. Throughout Laid
Bare, Porter describes being a ladette in terms of a lack of self and loss of agency that
became defining symptoms of her mental illness. She was ‘acting’; playing a role foisted
on her because she was pretty, provocative, and partied a lot. When she unashamedly
appeared in public without hair and spoke candidly about alopecia and depression,
tabloids such as The Daily Mail suggested that she was paying the price for her laddish
misbehaviour, going so far as to ask ‘did she deserve it?’ (See: Hogan)
Porter says she would not have agreed to write her book or make documentaries had
stories about her mental ill health not prompted such media derision. Her public image
can, potentially at least, edify the public by de-stigmatizing women’s mental ill health.
She is attractive to organisations that are “keen to garner celebrity support as they raise
news profile of an issue and engender affective identifications” (Littler, p.17). Porter is
now indivisible from “mad Gail”, and has not appeared publically in any context that
does not focus on her mental health. For example, in a high profile 2006 BBC
documentary One Life: Gail Porter Laid Bare, she talks about living with bipolar illness
and alopecia to educate the public about both of these conditions. Yet her apparent
altruism is constantly undermined by way of reference to her “madness” and fameseeking. In an indicative interview with columnist Phil Hogan in UK broadsheet The
Observer, Porter explains her motivations while Hogan interprets what she is saying in an
analytical stance shared with the reader:
I feel able to ask her whether she would have written this book if she’d still
had her hair. ‘No’ she says, twiddling with one of her false eyelashes which
has become unhinged [sic]. ‘When I first got approached [by Ebury], I was
not interested. I’m so bored of all these girls who have written about 20 books
by the time they’re 25. I didn’t want anyone to know about my sex life or who
I fancied. But I thought that this was a different take on a celebrity book …
I’m 36 now and I’ve had my fair share of strange things happen’. By this, she
means her history of mood swings, anorexia, episodes of binging of one sort
or another and self harm (on holiday in the Maldives, she needed 10 stitches
to repair a wound self-administered with a Swiss Army knife). There’s a story
about sleepwalking too (out of her flat on to the streets of Soho) and a terrible
crisis point when she wakes up on ‘suicide watch’ in hospital after overdosing
on sleeping pills and vodka (Hogan, 14).
Like Halliwell, Porter understands her story as a positive intervention in the public sphere
whereby she might use her celebrity notoriety to speak openly about mental illness and to
reach out to other women. She clearly differentiates her autobiographical work from
apparently “shallow” celebrity product because she sees it not as a cynical attempt to stay
in the public eye, but to provide some form of public service. In this way, her book is
sold as an informative book in the ‘social and health issues’ and ‘mental heath’ sections
of booksellers such as amazon.co.uk, and her films are presented as “serious”
documentaries meant to edify the viewer and reduce stigma. As Harper notes, scandals
about celebrities’ madness may function by ‘reassuring audiences that, far from being a
barrier, mental distress may in some sense constitute a rite of passage leading, ultimately,
to social and/or professional success’ (Harper, 314).
Yet, as I have sought to establish in this article, while Porter’s transition to heroic
survivor and “someone just like you” offer renewed value and purpose, her altruism is
habitually undermined and pathologized by the media as the attention seeking of another
burnt out “ladette”. Porter is routinely derided because public knowledge about her
mental illnesses can undermine her ‘authenticity’ and because she can be using her illness
to pursuing authenticity. Appearing without her hair, for example, she makes a seemingly
and tragically defiant refusal to recover and to conform to idealized images of femininity.
Returning to Hogan, for example, he notes that her bright forthrightness conflicts with an
‘eyelash which has become unhinged’ (Hogan, 14). This betrays a general urge to
devalue female celebrities’ credibility by taking an analytical stance to undermine and
assess their state of mind. Hogan is analyzing neither attitudes to women’s mental illness
nor the postfeminist culture in which celebrities like Porter are constructed; he is
pathologizing Porter’s willingness to speak about her experiences in the public sphere,
and her daring to be seen with no hair. Eactio to her appearance focuses on comparing
bald Gail to the 1990s pin-up Gail, and attitudes to her alopecia are, of course, highly
gendered. One can compare Porter’s public appearance at this time with reaction to
Britney Spears shaving off all of her hair as a sign of her mental instability. In Porter’s
case, her unattractiveness– the physical manifestation of her mental state - effectively
ended her career as anything but a professional mad woman. But Porter parries that, now
she is no longer seen as attractive, she can do ‘serious’ work:
With big eyes and blonde hair I was going to get fluffy jobs [then] your hair
falls out and you get invited to go to Cambodia to do a documentary on intercountry adoption… I’m probably going to have a longer career now than I
might have – because how long can you be blonde and pretty for? I keep
seeing in the papers, “Oh, poor Gail’s gone mad!” Everyone wants to feel
sorry for you, but I’m fine, I’m great (cit. Hogan, ibid)
Porter regularly appears in public to raise awareness of mental illness, global poverty and
women’s heath. She shuns the ‘heroic survivor’ label, yet exerts agency by inviting
media interest in her strangeness: ‘I refuse to be called brave or a victim. I urged charities
to capitalize on my novelty value’ (Ibid). Likewise, Halliwell works as a UN Ambassador
for women’s health and for breast cancer awareness charities, yet her role is undermined
by similar cynicism about her sincerity and motivations. In an article in The Guardian
newspaper entitled “We’re all for Girl Power, we just don’t want this girl to have any”,
feminist Marina Hyde comments acerbically on Halliwell’s charity work:
Pay attention, apocalypse-forecasters: Geri Halliwell has held talks in
Washington in her role as UN ambassador … one of these Washington power
players describes Geri as ‘a shining example of how one woman can make a
difference for the health and dignity of women everywhere’. Um ... is it OK to
say, "Not in my name" at this point?’ (Hyde, 12)
This type of reporting is predicated on the ostensibly un-feminist assumption that it is
acceptable for these women to comment on “private” feminine spheres, but not
apparently “public”, masculine, spheres.
Kerry Katona: the Madness of “Keepin’ it Real”
By the late 1990’s, pop-feminism had become synonymous with the notion that liberated,
independent, and progressive, females participate in, consume and exploit sexual
consumer products. Younger wannabes like Katona, who had cut their teeth on “Girl
Power”, were embracing its message of liberation and empowerment through celebrity
and provocation.. Halliwell, Cox, and Porter all took amateur and glamour modelling
work before they were ‘discovered’. In Cox’s case, it led to her presenting Channel
Four’s “Girl Power” Girlie Show showcasing bad girls, “lad badgering”, pop music, and
celebrity gossip. Their bodies were a valuable commodity, and soft-porn was a seemingly
‘feminist’ route out of poverty and fame-lessness. In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy
explains the mainstreaming of pornography as the rise of ‘raunch culture’ – apparent
sexual assertiveness that perniciously veils female misogyny, whereby women attempt to
compete with men by sexually objectifying themselves as well as other women. Yet Levy
argues that in contemporary feminist debates about porn, the “artificial schism reinvents
itself: the Good Girls who exhibit fear and repulsion [and] the Bad Girls who get a kick
out of being politically out of line” (Levy, 115). (See also Fairclough in this issue).
Likewise, pop-feminist ideals of sexual freedom and pleasure seeking quickly became
absorbed into a postfeminist culture in which the sex industry is seen as empowering for
women and a lucrative and acceptable career choice, where “good girls” can also be
“bad”.
For fans of the “power girls” and “ladettes” such as Katona, selling the female body
became not a barrier to, but an quasi- feminist vehicle for fame. At aged 16, Katona
commissioned a glamour portfolio for the “page-three” topless pin-up in tabloid
newspaper, The Sun. She wanted the photos to start a career, not in pornography but in
mainstream popular culture. In Too Much, she explains that she pursued glamour
modelling as a practicable route out of poverty and abuse, and because of her lack of
education: “I did have a 34DD chest and a size 6 waist, so I decided the way forward was
to become a page-three model [because] perhaps this would make a difference to my life’
(Katona, Too, 138). Her pictures were not used in The Sun because she was underage,
but on leaving high-school Katona started worked as a lap dancer until being
“discovered” dancing at a nightclub by a dance music band called “The Porn Kings” who
were looking for dancers to accompany them on tour. After her dancing success, Katona
was approached by Andy McCluskey, a music producer looking to start a new “Girl
Power” band which eventually became Atomic Kitten.
Katona’s fame in the Kittens was predicated, she claims, on her genuinely ladette persona
- on a refusal to be anything other than herself. Despite having only sung Karaoke,
Katona was invited by to join the Kittens because McCluskey told her “your rawness is
just what we want. Just be yourself” (Ibid, 154). The Kittens “were so real. We didn’t
pretend to be anything more than we were” (Ibid, 150). Yet the band also imitated their
big-sister power girls, and were “sold as the new-Spice Girls” (Ibid, 179). With striking
similarity to the trajectory of Halliwell’s pop stardom story, Katona is now at pains to
state that, rather than being authentic, being a Kitten was actually an avoidance of facing
her demons and her deteriorating mental state: “Being one of the Kittens was like
acting… I wasn’t being myself” (Ibid, 120).
Katona’s celebrity has always been intensely inconsistent. She is widely considered to be
a brave survivor of a brutal childhood and transcendent “white trash”, yet has been
dubbed by the tabloids as a “Bingeing Hellcat” and “Drunken Slapper”. As a Kitten,
Katona quickly became a scapegoat for the moral panic in Britain surrounding drinking
and its impact on young women.
Katona explains her behaviour as nascent bipolar disorder brought about by childhood
abuse and the pressures of fame. Part of maintaining some kind of celebrity for Katona
involves repeatedly generating a ‘real’ and ‘likeable’ self, while simultaneously refuting
scandals and contradicting an extremely negative media image. After becoming pregnant
and suffering a mental breakdown, Katona left the Kittens and devoted herself to her
husband, boy-band star Bryan McFadden. In 2003, She returned in 2003 to present a
daytime magazine show called Loose Women, a role that played on both her bad girl and
white trash mother images. She also appeared as both judge and contestant on reality
talent contests including You’re a Star and Stars in Their Eyes, and was interviewed
regularly in magazines and on television. Her second big breakthrough came when she
won the nation’s affection in 2004 by winning I’m a Celebrity, Get Me out of Here! - a
reality surveillance show in which lesser and erstwhile celebrities are trapped in a jungle
and compete in gruesome trials. On leaving the jungle, Kerry was as a national treasure –
“Our Kerry” and “Queen of the Jungle” – and hundreds of fans turned up outside her
house to welcome her home. Yet tabloid stories about drug addiction quickly re-focussed
media attention on her as an at-risk and unfit mother. She eventually checked into
“rehab” at the London Priory clinic where innumerable celebrities go for private
treatment.
In 2005, Katona appeared as the quintessential ladette in her Pygmalion reality show,
entitled My Fair Kerry, in which she stayed with an Austrian Count and Countess
learning how to be “the perfect lady”. The show was intended as light-hearted
behavioural correction, and to demonstrate to the public that she was a bad girl who
wanted to change. The show followed the format of another British Pygmalion reality
show called Ladette to Lady in 2005 which was integral to the backlash against “ladette”
pop-feminist culture. In the show, to win prizes, usually working class women are taken
to finishing school to be chastised, tamed and trained in traditionally “ladylike” skills.
Although highly sensationalist in tone, the program was sold as a quasi-public service
intervention into Britain’s out of control female youth culture, drawing on discourses of
psychological therapy and behavioural correction to “cure” a recognisably “bad girl” low
class pathology. The show would “transform some of Britain’s most extreme bingedrinking, sexually shameless, anti-social rebels into respectable young ladies”. Viewers
are invited to see if the women will change or will be “stay stuck in their vicious cycles
forever’ (ITV).
During filming of My Fair Kerry, Katona became mentally unwell and increasingly
uncertain of her own identity. She felt humiliated by the programs which appeared to
focus on erasing her “unacceptable” low class identity and on “curing” her of her
pathological personality. She states that “hearing [them] tell me that so much about me
wasn’t good enough when I felt so low was horrible” (Katona, Ibid, 302). The show
ended with scandalized scenes of Katona drunk and obviously unhappy. Soon afterwards
she was admitted to rehab at the Arizona Cottonwood centre where she was diagnosed
with bipolar illness.
In 2006, Katona returned with self-produced reality products, including autobiographies,
reality TV, docu-soaps, and self-help books. Her 2006 Ebury autobiography, Too Much,
is a traumatic story of childhood neglect and domestic violence, rise to fame, mental
breakdown and lone motherhood that narrates her urge for fame, her inability to deal with
fame, and her infamous wild child persona as symptoms of bipolar psychopathology. Her
2007 Ebury self-help book, Survive the Worst, Aim for the Best, is classified under the
“mind-body-spirit” section in bookstores as a guide to life written from harsh experience
intended to help other women. Like Porter, Katona’s books have the potential to rebrand
her as a wise, and possibly even an inspirational, figure who has survived abuse and
neglect and come out of it a better person. She has the right to not only to voice her
experiences, but to impart advice to others. Katona emphasizes that celebrity is the prize
for her unhappiness, and that she can help her fans by showing that even “trash” like her
can make it: “It’s so much worse when you’re famous. I want people to say ‘If she can do
it, so can I’” (Katona, Survive, 15).
There is reason to believe that the genre of celebrity memoirs and other reality products
about mental ill health have reached saturation point such they are now released into an
increasingly cynical market. As amazon.co.uk reviewer D. J. Read complains: “this is
something like Katona's 5th (yes 5th) autobiography, no small achievement for someone of
such meagre fame … as you would expect, it is half-baked nonsense only aimed at trying
to wring out some pity [so] she can resurrect her floundering career” (Read). He goes on
to criticize the over-abundance of too-similar narratives: “people are getting cheesed off
with this kind of (ghost written) nonsense” because the market is “saturated by this dross
from Z-listers” (Ibid). Negativity and cynicism about the financial motivation for
confession conceals the sad irony that the woman with little or no sense of self is ‘ghost
written’ for the celebrity market because tabloid constructions of “bad girls” and female
crisis celebrity appears more real than she is.
Bad Girl to Good Woman: Redemption through Motherhood
For the ex-bad-girl, transitioning to good woman depends on her fitness as a mother or,
better still, as the persona of the “yummy-mummy”. As McGee tells us, celebrities are
subject to, and construct, the “femme fatale turned mother” archetype whose stability and
value is predicated on transitioning enough to accept an essential maternalism. (McGee,
Ibid). The work of being a commodifiable “self”, then, and of producing selfhood as a
commodity, is intrinsically gendered. This is in keeping with the ways in which
celebrities such as Madonna and Katie Price (Jordan) challenge their “bad girl” images
by appealing to a virtuous, genuine, and material maternalism. Yet this role is precarious
in that the women have to be a definite certain kind of mother, the redeemed “good
mother”.
The mummy role is acceptably feminine and also appeals to the generational nostalgia
and life changes of a once-teen fan base who are now in their 30s. Halliwell’s next career
step, for example, was to produce children’s books, Eugenia Lavender, promoted as the
“re-launch of ‘Girl Power’” for the next generation. Yet promotional interviews, in the
June 2008 edition of Glamour magazine for example, do promote the books so much as
assess her appearance in terms of her mental health. Despite repeated dramatic weight
gain and loss, Halliwell makes renewed assertions in the interviews of having recovered
for the sake of her daughter, Bluebell Madonna (Glamour). More overtly, in The
Guardian, Marina Hyde dismisses Halliwell’s maternalism as insincere and as contrived
as “Girl Power”: “Geri has totally bought into this version of herself. And don't forget
she's about to start on your daughter with her forthcoming range of empowering
children's books about a thinly disguised Geri Halliwell character called ‘Ugenia
Lavender…’” (Hyde, Ibid). While stereotypes can be used to rebrand celebrities, neither
the bad girl nor the mother are acceptably ‘authentic’ to the media.
Porter, also, is involved with numerous children’s charities and states that her daughter,
Honey, is her motivation for recovery, sobriety and stability, yet she is still represented as
“mad Gail”. Sara Cox expresses similar feelings about being “cured” by motherhood: “‘I
enjoy my roles as a mum and caretaker of the house. I really relish those roles and I think
I’m good at them. I’m much happier now than I’ve ever been” (cit. Hardy). Yet her
interviewer, Rebecca Hardy, notes that this is “not quite the brand image Sara created for
herself during those L-word years, talking about her intimate self, her sexual appetite, her
partying, her breasts” (Hardy). While these women’s maternalism may dissipate the
perceived threat of pop-feminism, neither is accepted as “real”.
Katona’s vacillating status in the affections of the media can be charted through the UK’s
‘Best Celebrity Mother’ polls – she won best mother in 2002 and 2005, and then worst
mother in 2008 - when tabloid allegations of drink and drug addiction branded her an
“unfit mother” who should have her children taken away. Since 2004, she has been
employed as the public face of a long-running ad campaign for the budget retailer Iceland
Frozen Foods – tagline: “Mum’s gone to Iceland!” And since 2006, Iceland has
sponsored the I’m a Celebrity reality show that Katona won in 2004. In the role of
‘regular working class mum’, Katona was chosen to reflect the company’s mostly lowincome, female, celebrity fixated consumer base.
When she joined the campaign, the tagline changed to “That’s why mum’s go to
Iceland!”, framing Katona’s maternal image as a shared, pluralized identity, and
focussing attention on the products to suggest that even a celebrity like Katona chooses to
buy Iceland products even though she does not have to buy them because of low income.
She was dropped from the campaign after negative media attention around her drug use,
but rehired in 2008 when her public image seemed to becoming more positive.
Katona’s background is still said to appeal to Iceland’s female consumers because of
social shifts away from the traditional nuclear family. As Lucy Barrett in The Guardian
puts it:
Katona is not being wheeled out as a role model – far from it – but as a
personality that plenty of Iceland’s consumers can identify with. As well as
struggling with her demons, she has experienced divorce and a second
marriage, and had children with two different men…Perhaps the former
Atomic Kitten’s antics as played out in the tabloids help to raise [Iceland’s]
profile along with hers (Barrett, 10).
Katona’s popularity depends on her ability to promote herself as a good, sane, working
class mother despite her circumstances. In the 2008 show Crazy, Katona expresses that
being frank about her illness and letting the public get intimate with her as a mother could
reclaim public affection. In the advertising campaign, she tells the viewer ‘I’m pregnant,
as you can see, very pregnant, and I’m even going to give birth on TV. So watch the
show, you never know, you might even like me!” Her invitation evinces the ways in
which contemporary celebrity culture is intractably fixated on domestic intimacy and on
the vacillations of the fame-hungry female body.
Ad campaigns for Crazy integrates Katona’s most negative media images of “bad girl”,
mad woman, and (un)fit mother. The brand image portrays Katona and husband Mark
bound together in matching straitjackets with the restraints pulled tight over her heavily
pregnant belly. A tie-in competition invites viewers to ‘upload a crazy picture to win
Kerry’s straitjacket!’ Katona’s attempts to establish herself as a survivor are undermined
because her mental health and fitness to mother are being parodied.
In later episodes, Katona undergoes a breast-reduction and liposuction to ‘cure’ her of
post-partum deformities. Her weight has been the subject of much media derision as she
“failed” to return to her size 6 body after having four children. Rather than seeking the
impression of “authentic” physical beauty, or promoting diet and exercise regimes,
Katona invites her audience to witness her artificial transformation to “yummy-mummy”.
Yet her attempts to “keep it real” still attract vicious negativity as she is the public
scapegoat for moral panics about lone-mothers and “bad girls” to the extent that she was
still voted “Most Hated Woman in Britain 2008”.
During the show, Katona routinely intervenes in newspaper scandals, especially a story
sold to tabloids by her mother, Su Katona, whom she exposed in Too Much and Survive
as a drug-addicted and abusive prostitute whose negligence caused Katona’s mental
illness. As she was recovering, Su announced that she too has written a candid
autobiography about her own bipolar illness and addiction in order to negate Kerry’s
accusations of her as an ‘unfit mother’. During filming, Katona suffered another
breakdown and was again checked into The Priory clinic. Tabloids then responded
sympathetically, and a front page exclusive in The Sun condemned Su for “trading on her
daughter’s fame” (The Sun). (See also Cobb on celebrity mothers in this issue). Seeking
ancillary fame by selling stories about a mentally ill woman is, it seems, shallow,
exploitative and cruel. Kerry is a brave victim because Su is a madder and badder mother.
Conclusion
As Greer predicted, the ‘bad girl’ pop-feminists of the 1990s have not fared well after the
demise of “ladette” and “Girl Power” culture. It is not only that their cultural power was
diminished by shifts in pop culture, but that they are constructed within the pervasive
pathologization of female celebrity in postfeminist culture. In many ways, the 1990s
rhetoric of “girls on top” was fated to this end in that it promoted female rebellion as a
false identity that evaporates on maturity. Halliwell, Porter and Katona claim not to have
been the agents of their once personal pop-feminism, stating emphatically that that person
“wasn’t me”, and that this sense of identity confusion is a symptom of latent mental
problems. Theirs are stories of lost identities; the celebrities they reminisce about are
psychopathologized as a lack of self and agency. In a newly vulnerable - one might even
say remorsefully feminine - celebrity, the once vigorous power-girl and ladette culture is
pathologized by the very women who were once its pin-ups.
Halliwell, Porter, and Katona’s reality products raise important issues about authenticity
and idealized images of femininity. Reality and gossip products, as Littler points out,
foreground celebrities’ ‘emotional responses (and ‘real’) behaviour’ and ‘generate
interest in ‘other’ sides of their characters, to present us with new ways of getting
intimate with them’ (Littler, 20). Yet they demand public judgement and prompt outrage
and derision. To continually trade on the celebrity persona, reality and gossip media
demand access to and construct a “real me” that is anything but stable, but is – and has to
be to stay in the media - continually in flux and process. Mental illness and negative
constructs of “bad girl” femininity afford such ongoing and excessive emotionality,
drama, and psychological insecurity. As such, mental illness becomes an integral part of
postfeminist female celebrity culture. Psychologically (re)branding female celebrities
runs this risk of replicating and reinforcing the already pathologized image of female
celebrity in the tabloid and gossip media.
Mad Geri, Mad Gail, and Mad Kerry may have been empowered personally by, and have
profited financially from, their memoirs of mental ill health, and their reality products
have, in some ways successfully rebranded their personalities and career trajectories. But
at what cost? As they fight media derision, they pay a discounted price for a ‘cheapened’
celebrity persona, and their penitent tales of sin and regret very often end up in the
bookstore ‘bargain bin’.
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