This article examines how the death of Sinead O’Connor opens up discussions around digital intimacy, fandom and mental health, focussing on the affective attachments engendered by audio media platforms to produce potentially radical moments of dis/identification that disrupt neoliberal narratives of mental distress and recovery.
In digital fan spaces, the post-Trump era has witnessed a major reconsideration of what the journalist and podcaster Sarah Marshall names ‘the Maligned 90’s Woman’ –one who has survived the many depredations heaped on her by misogynist media culture, and has important wisdom to share for our own times (Docktermann 2022). Recent years have seen landmark developments in the re-assessment of 90’s celebrities, from the end of Britney Spears’ conservatorship to the emergence of Pamela Anderson as a powerful critic of the misogyny at stake in Gen X media cultures.
This popular feminist revisionist history project resonates with a wider shift in popular understandings of mental health and celebrity culture. Recent work on postdigital intimacies has focussed on how celebrity advocacy around ‘talking about’ mental distress both perpetuates the harms of neoliberalism (Scarff 2016, Orgad and Gill 2022) but also provides opportunities for fracture and resistance (Wood 2023, Thelandersson 2023). At the same time, those who, like O’Connor, are imagined as inherently raw, vulnerable, irredeemable and in need of psychiatric intervention are excluded and marginalised from this popular recovery discourse.
Drawing on close analysis of audio memoir, podcasts, fan videos and autoethnography, I consider how the intimate relations of listening afforded by postdigital media might enable new ways of affirming mad experience and creativity beyond the reductive tropes afforded by neoliberal recovery discourse (Beresford and Russo 2022, LeFrancois et al 2013). In ‘still listening’ to Sinead, the paper argues that it is possible to imagine a radical disruption of the structural and imaginative relations through which survivor experience is silenced.
