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Keynote: 'Raw, Vulnerable and Fearless?' Sinead O'Connor and Digital Narratives of Bipolar Celebrity

Activity: Talk or presentation typesInvited talk

13/12/2023

Recent years have seen a reframing of mental health as ‘everyone’s concern’, alongside an overarching narrative of crisis Such a reframing of mental wellness has been important in calling attention to the material socioeconomic and political structures underlying the current moment of mental health crisis but – as survivor-academics have highlighted – risks further marginalising actual service users and rendering invisible the intellectual and creative labour of those most harmed within those structures.
This paper focusses on the making of the female ‘bipolar celebrity’ (Voronka 2007) to examine how celebrity culture both reproduces and challenges dominant cultural understandings of mental illness and recovery through notions of trust, vulnerability and care. Celebrity culture – with its established focus on notions of authenticity, public/private dichotomies, and emotional labour – is, I argue, rich field for understanding how notions of mental illness surface and are consolidated and resisted within popular culture.
In particular, the paper examines the cultural legacy of Sinead O’Connor. As a celebrity figure, I argue, figure whose activist work, creative output and social media presence represent a rich cultural archive that continually fractured and challenged dominant notions of celebrity, femininity and recovery alike. However, her posthumous misreading as inherently ‘vulnerable’ and ‘tragic’ echoes the marginalisation of survivor voices and threatens to silence the more radical framing of mental illness and survival at stake in her work.

External organisation (Academic)

NameUniversity of Birmingham
CityEdgbaston, Birmingham
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom