“Women’s Celebrity in Canada: Contexts and Memoirs, 1908-2011” is equal parts cultural history and literary analysis. It examines the cultural contexts and conditions that shaped the emergence and development of modern celebrity in English Canada, focusing in particular on the role of mass media and bureaucratic policy in the production, dissemination, and consumption of celebrity by Canadians across the twentieth century. Reading celebrity as a function or mode of being and moving in the public sphere, this project historicizes women’s access to that sphere: it examines how ideological constructions of gender and fame have shaped how women in Canada have been able to access and use the tools and technologies of celebrity, and it argues that these conditions have had an impact on how women represent themselves in public life-writing texts. These celebrity autobiographies, this project demonstrates, not only narrate gendered experiences of celebrity but, in their rhetorical strategies and publication conditions, reveal the cultural climate of being and speaking as a famous woman at different historical junctures. In tracing the trends, tactics, and experiments in self-representation over the century, this project is able to uncover and examine the ideological and cultural pressures exerted on public women to perform particular identities and how these women attempted to manage, contest, and negotiate these conditions. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / "Women's Celebrity in Canada: Contexts and Memoirs, 1908-2011" examines the autobiographies produced by famous Canadian women across the twentieth century. It contextualizes the production of these texts by documenting the conditions under which women cultivated fame in Canada. The autobiographies of these women are read as tools for managing celebrity and their form and content is examined for what they can tell us about the condition of being and speaking as a famous woman at different historical junctures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/16531 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Lee, Katja |
| Contributors | York, Lorraine, English and Cultural Studies |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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