From Bad Girl to Mad Girl: British

female celebrity, reality products, and the

pathologization of pop-feminism
Published: Aug. 1, 2008 By Emma Bell

http://www.colorado.edu/gendersarchive1998-2013/2008/08/01/bad-girl-mad-girl-
british-female-celebrity-reality-products-and-pathologization-pop

(part of a series in Special Issue #48: GOING CHEAP? Female Celebrity in Reality,
Tabloid and Scandal Genres Edited by DIANE NEGRA and SU HOLMES)

Hi everyone, Im Kerry.
You probably think you know everything about me already,
but dont believe all that crap you read in the papers. Ive got bipolar,
so I have my highs and I have my lows Watch the show.
You never know, you might even like me!

[1] 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. Her public
persona was of an 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.

[2] 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.

[3] Part of Katonas motivation for publishing the book was clearly to try to gain agency
and effect a rebranding of her negative media persona. Star agency is, as David
Marshall points out, increasingly reduced to such privatized, psychologized
representation of activity and transformation (cited in Williams, 118). Accordingly,
Katonas 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, hospitalization, bad
mothering, stays in rehab, custody battles and her scandalous past. Katonas career is
now comprised of a steady stream of what can be termed reality products
autobiographies, reality TV shows, docusoaps, a column in celebrity gossip
magazine OK, 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.

[4] Far from being unique, Katonas 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 recognizable 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. Such renunciations frequently take the form of using reality products to
make penitent apologies for bad girl behavior 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.

[5] 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 (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.

[6] Far from being empowered or radical, the bad girls apparent refusal to conform to
conventional femininity can be seen as making a virtue out of an inadequacy. Yet the
bad girls career is both tragic and transitory: she is, from the outset, fated to an
unhappy end. Greers invitation also begs the question of what female behaviors are
considered bad, and why the women who display these behaviors 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? Yet 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?

[7] 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,
pop-feminism 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
scandalizing female celebrities. The label ladette was both applied by the media and
embraced by the wolf-whistling-beer-drinking-independent-bad-girls epitomized by
actors such as Billie Piper, and TV and radio presenters such as Gail Porter, Denise Van
Outen, Zoe Ball and Sara Cox.

[8] It is the work of this essay to explore the ways in which many of these women have
more recently 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. I explore three consummate 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 personae became
surplus to popular culture their bad girl excesses were incompatible with the
postfeminist 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 and through
commitment to public service and charity, and by 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 Im not bad, Im mad!

[9] 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). 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% also citing newspapers, 75% magazines, and 51% friends and family
(Diefenbach and West, 181. See also: Wahl, 3). 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
Organization warned of a pandemic of mental health problems, 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.

[10] 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. This is because emotional and
psychological health is equated with material success: ones sense of self, and ones
ability to be a successful self, is a commodity that operates according to the market.
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. (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 of
celebrity product.

[11] 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 legitimated 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 Pelzers 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.

[12] 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?, Theres such as stigma when youre mentally
ill [so] Im 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 youre sectioned (Wax,
cit. Johnson)

These 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 therapeutic acts of self-fashioning, rather like
the constitution of McGees self-made man. They are seen as indicative of creativity
and courage and can function to re-consolidate and increase mens cultural power
(Harper, 316). Like McGees self-salvaged 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.

[13] 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 (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).

[14] 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. 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 (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 proccess of
feminization by which constant attention to individuals, and to emotionality,
domesticity, relationships, physical appearance, sickness, and trauma has overtaken the
masculine sphere about politics and social affairs.

[15] 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).
Pipers Growing Pains (2006), for example, reveals her struggle with anorexia,
Westbrooks The Other Side of Nowhere (2006) details her anorexia and the contours of
the very public cocaine addiction that famously destroyed her nose, and Prices 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.
[16] 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 Littlers 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
(112). Although they are produced in reaction to a relentlessly prying media, the
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.

[17] 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 (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.
According to Holmes and Redmond, In the modern world one is psychologically
damaged, whether it is an anomic fan or a lonely famous person (3).

[18] 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 pop-
feminism is intertwined with revelations of mental illness and contemporary reality
genre. In Halliwells 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; inToo Much,
Too Soon (2007) and the docusoap Crazy (2008), Katonadiscloses 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.

[19] Halliwell, Porter, and Katonas 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 which manifests itself in eating
disorders, self harm, sexual promiscuity and post-partum depression. In essence,
Halliwell, Porter, and Katonas 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 behavior as symptomatic of mental illness
caused by trauma, explain fame as a pathological lack of sense of self and fame-seeking
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 behaviors they once proudly promoted as feminist.

Ginger to Geri: Mind and Body Makeover

[20] One of the 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. Halliwells 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 she asserted (Halliwell, Just, 93).

[21] 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
Blairs Babes 120 new female MPs elected in 1997, the largest amount of women
ever to sit in the House of Commons. Girl Power complemented 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 (129)

[22] 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 (cited in Greer, 310). 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 (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. Its very unglamorous.
Id like to see it rebranded. We need to see a celebration of our femininity and softness
(Halliwell, cited in. Moorehead, 14).

[23] As Ginger, Halliwell enjoyed media affection for her provocative behavior. 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
clichd adolescent rebellion. Rapidly, Halliwells kudos diminished with the transition
from post-feminist Girl Power to girlie culture.

[24] When Halliwell left the Spice Girls in 1998, media speculation was rife and her
first autobiography, Ifwas 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 Geris departure (Spice Girls).
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, Just 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 low-self 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 (105),
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 significantly structuring 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 couldnt give people a one-dimensional
character any more because thats not what they wanted. The public want to see you,
feel you, and touch you enough to know that you are real. Thats exactly what they got!
(105)

[25] Halliwell 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 (Just, 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 faade: 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)
Figure 1

[26] Halliwells 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 behavior, claiming that Girl Power didnt
work for her because it was a displacement of depression: it was like putting on a
uniform. You dont have to think, you dont have to deal with being a human being, and
that was perfect for a vulnerable young woman who didnt want to feel anything (Ibid,
94). She goes on to reject Gingers pop-feminism and laddishness as symptoms of such
mental instability and self-alienation. (See figure 1).

[27] Halliwells book promotes her dramatic physical, as well as psychological,

makeover. Over 50% of Justcomprises 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 size-zero waist. The image constructs her body as evidence of her
psychological stability and authenticity, while hinting at the candid revelations she will
make. After the star was photographed leaving an Overeaters Anonymous meeting,
Halliwells 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 fathers 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.
[28] In her book Halliwell asserts that the real Geri is authentically petite, yet
conflicting media reporting both rhapsodized over her amazing new body and
insinuated that she was really anorexic. Geris mind-body-spirit yoga DVDs were
one of her most lucrative products in that they were produced in reaction to positive
speculation about how everyday women could get Geris 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. Halliwells 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 persona and in terms of emotional wellbeing and value.

[29] 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,
Posh denies). However, in a high profile interview on the primetimeParkinson TV
show just months later, she intimated that she had an eating problem, but that it was
related to pregnancy (Ibid).

[30] 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, representing 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, Posh admits).
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
that she suffered from 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

[31] 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
feminization of society in order to reclaim an essential, unreconstructed and shared
masculinity. Laddism found its primary expression not through specific celebrities but
through male-oriented magazines such as GQ,Loaded, and FHM, which trade on soft-
porn images of women and celebrations of the wilful immaturity and compulsory
hedonism. First coined in 1995 by advertising agency Collett Dickenson, the term
ladette referred to a growing number of young women and female celebrities engaged
in similarly male oriented activities including drinking and sport, and whose behavior
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.

[32] Gail Porter was a darling of both the lad and ladette scenes, known for
numerous scandals centering on her hedonism, her willingness to appear naked in
lads 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 childrens 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
childrens presenter. Porter created scandals by appearing naked in soft-core shoots
for FHM, GQ, and Loaded at the same time as Halliwells photos appeared
in Teazer and Playboy.

[33] Firmly established as a ladette, by 1998 Porter transitioned from childrens

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 unconcernedly to how her image was used, expressing delight at 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
theres been all this stuff about sisters doin it for themselves, challenging men at
their own game [but] Ive 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 behavior: 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).

[34] Porters 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 misbehavior, going so far as to ask did she deserve it? (See
Hogan)

[35] 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 womens 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, 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
fame-seeking. 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 shed 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. Im so bored of all
these girls who have written about 20 books by the time theyre 25. I didnt 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 Im 36 now and Ive 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). Theres 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).

[36] 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 as less a cynical
attempt to stay in the public eye, than a bid to provide some form of public service. In
this way, her book is sold in an informative tone, classified 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 (314).

[37] Yet, as I have sought to establish in this article, while Porters transition to heroic
survivor and someone just like you is crafted to demonstrate renewed value and
purpose, her altruism is habitually undermined and pathologized by the media as the
attention-seeking behavior 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 seen as using her illness to pursue authenticity. Appearing
without her hair, for example, she makes a seemingly defiant refusal to conceal her
unrecovered self.

[38] 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 womens mental
illness nor the postfeminist culture in which celebrities like Porter are constructed; he is
pathologizing Porters willingness to speak about her experiences in the public sphere,
and her daring to be seen with no hair. Reaction 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 Porters public appearance at this time with
reaction to Britney Spears shaving off all of her hair as a sign of her mental instability.
In Porters 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 that 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 inter-country adoption
Im 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 Gails gone
mad! Everyone wants to feel sorry for you, but Im fine, Im great (cit. Hogan, ibid)

[39] Porter regularly appears in public to raise awareness of mental illness, global
poverty and womens 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 womens 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 Guardiannewspaper entitled Were all for Girl Power, we just dont want this
girl to have any, feminist Marina Hyde comments acerbically on Halliwells 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? (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

[40] By the late 1990s, pop-feminism had become synonymous with the notion that
liberated, independent, and progressive females participate in, consume and exploit
sexualized 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 Coxs case, it led to her
presenting Channel Fours Girl PowerGirlie Show (1996-97) 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 (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.

[41] For fans of the power girls and ladettes such as Katona, selling the female
body became not a barrier to, but a 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 inThe Sunbecause 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.

[42] Katonas 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 didnt pretend to be anything more than we were (150). Yet the band also imitated
their big-sister power girls, and were sold as the new-Spice Girls (179). With striking
similarity to the trajectory of Halliwells 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 wasnt being myself (120).

[43] Katonas celebrity has always been intensely inconsistent. She is widely considered
to be a brave survivor of a brutal childhood and transcendent of a white trash
background, 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 behavior 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 to present a daytime magazine show
calledLoose 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 Youre a Star and Stars in Their Eyes,and was interviewed regularly in
magazines and on television. Her second big breakthrough came when she gained the
nations affection in 2004 by winning Im 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 regarded as a national
treasure celebrated in newspaper headlines as Our Kerry and Queen of the
Jungle and hundreds of fans turned up outside her house to welcome her home. Yet
tabloid stories about her 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.

[44] 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. It was intended as a light-hearted process of
behavioral correction demonstrating to the public that Katona 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 chastized, tamed and trained in traditionally
ladylike skills. Although highly sensationalist in tone, the program was sold as a
quasi-public service intervention into Britains out of control female youth culture,
drawing on discourses of psychological therapy and behavioral correction to cure a
recognizably bad girl working class pathology. According to the opening voice-over
of the show, it would transform some of Britains most extreme binge-drinking,
sexually shameless, anti-social rebels into respectable young ladies. Viewers are
invited to see if the women will change or stay stuck in their vicious cycles forever.

[45] During the filming of My Fair Kerry, Katona became mentally unwell and
increasingly uncertain of her own identity. She felt humiliated by the program 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 wasnt good enough when I felt so low was horrible (Katona, Too, 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.

[46] 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, Katonas 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: Its so much worse when youre famous. I want
people to say If she can do it, so can I' (Katona, Survive 15).

[47] There is reason to believe that the genre of celebrity memoirs and other reality
products about mental ill health have reached saturation point and that as such, they are
now released into an increasingly cynical market. As amazon.co.uk reviewer D. J. Read
complains:

this is something like Katonas 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).

Read 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 appear morereal than she is.

Bad Girl to Good Woman: Redemption through

Motherhood
[48] For the ex-bad-girl, the transition to good womanhood seems largely to depend on
her fitness as a mother, or better still, on 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 (33). In this way, the work of being a commodifiable
self, 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 have
conspicuously challenged their bad girl images by appealing to a virtuous, genuine,
and material maternalism. Yet this role is precarious in that the women have to appear
to incarnate a very particular kind of maternalism, in the form of the redeemed good
mother (see also Cobb in this issue).

[49] The mummy role is acceptably feminine and also appeals to the generational
nostalgia and life changes of a once-teen fan base now in their 30s. Halliwells next
career step, for example, was to produce a childrens book series organized around the
young female character of Eugenia Lavender promoted as the re-launch of Girl
Power' for the young female audience of today. Yet promotional interviews in the June
2008 edition of Glamour magazine for example do not promote the books so much as
assess Halliwells 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). In The Guardian,
Marina Hyde dismisses Halliwells maternalism as insincere and as contrived as Girl
Power: Geri has totally bought into this version of herself. And dont forget shes
about to start on your daughter with her forthcoming range of empowering childrens
books about a thinly disguised Geri Halliwell character called Eugenia Lavender'
(Hyde). While stereotypes can be used to rebrand celebrities, neither the bad girl nor the
mother are seen as acceptably authentic to the media.

[50] Porter is also involved with numerous childrens 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 Im good at them. Im much happier now than Ive ever been
(cited in 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
womens maternalism may dissipate the perceived threat of pop-feminism, neither is
stance accepted as real.

[51] Katonas vacillating status in the affections of the media can be charted through the
UKs 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: Mums gone to Iceland! Since 2006, Iceland has
sponsored the Im a Celebrity reality show that Katona won in 2004. In the role of
regular working class mum, Katona was chosen to reflect the companys mostly low-
income, female, celebrity fixated consumer base.

[52] When she joined the campaign, the tagline changed to Thats why mums go to
Iceland!, framing Katonas 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 become more positive.

[53] Katonas background is still said to appeal to Icelands 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 Icelands 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
menPerhaps the former Atomic Kittens antics as played out in the tabloids help to
raise [Icelands] profile along with hers (Barrett, 10).

Figure 2

Katonas popularity depends on her ability to promote herself as a good, sane, (still)
working class mother despite her circumstances. In the 2008 show Crazy, Katona
expresses her belief that that being frank about her illness and letting the public get
intimate with her as a mother could help her reclaim public affection. In the advertising
campaign, she tells the viewer Im pregnant, as you can see, very pregnant, and Im
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. (See figure 2)

[54] Ad campaigns for Crazy attempt an integration of Katonas 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 Kerrys straitjacket! Katonas attempts to establish herself as a
survivor are thus undermined because her mental health and fitness to mother are
subject to parody. 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 a 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 becomes 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.

[55] 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
Katonas 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 her
daughters accusations that she was 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 daughters 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 gains status as a brave victim when Su is
positioned as a madder and badder mother.

Conclusion
[56] 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 has been 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 of their prior incarnationas that that person wasnt me, and that this
sense of identity confusion is a symptom of latent mental illness. The stories of these
women are of lost identities; the celebrities they reminisce about are
psychopathologized as manifestations of 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.

[57] Halliwell, Porter, and Katonas 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) behavior and
generate interest in other sides of their characters, to present us with new ways of
getting intimate with them (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.

[58] 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 their cheapened celebrity personae, and their penitent tales of sin and regret very
often end up in the bookstore bargain bin.

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