Abstract
In December 2014, the 68-year-old former Tory MP and Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie was the sixth celebrity to be voted out of the jungle in the UK version of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! (ITV, 2004–). When asked in her exit interview whether she had enjoyed her time in the competition and whether it had been what she expected, part of her response noted in passing that she had been ‘prepared to do it… for the extension… and [having] older women on TV and all that sort of stuff (tx, 2014, author emphasis). On one level, her comment seemed to point to the fact that in recent years, a cultural discourse recognising the invisibility and inequity endured by older women in the media has been widely adopted, even ‘mainstreamed’ (see Jermyn, 2013). At the same time, the way in which Currie expressed this recognition so fleetingly and knowingly before moving on with her answer might have been said to have implied a certain wry disdain, as if she was paying lip service to an already tired or ‘PC’ presumption. Currie can long have been said to hold a contradictory relationship with feminism; rising in the 1980s to become one of the most visible women in British politics at a time when such women were even rarer on the ground than they are now — and thus seeming to reap the rewards of feminism’s second-wave activism — she has nevertheless insisted in quite aggressively dismissive terms that she has never been a feminist herself (e.g., Currie, 2009).
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Women, Celebrity and Cultures of Ageing |
Subtitle of host publication | Freeze Frame |
Editors | Deborah Jermyn, Su Holmes |
Place of Publication | Basingstoke |
Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Pages | 11-24 |
Number of pages | 14 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 978-1-137-49512-9 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1-349-58090-3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2015 |
Keywords
- Celebrity Studies
- Ageing
- Women