Modern Giant: Amelia Earhart and the politics of celebrity feminism

My research takes a historical approach to explore and problematize the racial, class-specific, and nationalist public meanings that have accrued to American feminism by way of state-supported media celebrations that have saturated American public culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The legendary Amelia Earhart, as the quintessential example of an iconic American heroine invested with the capacity to represent the nation for the ways in which she appears to perform whiteness as well as modernity, serves as the centrifugal figure of my paper as well as of the larger cultural phenomenon I seek to explain. I track the vicissitudes of Earhart’s iconic status during her lifetime and since her death in the 1930s, up to the present day, to consider the political consequences of the longstanding promotion of Amelia Earhart among a small coterie of female figures presented as national heroines by popular media outlets and as customarily featured in state-sponsored educational venues and texts.  My purpose is to place Earhart’s legendary status as a feminist icon in the context of proliferating new media and changing standards of modern American womanhood.  Along the way, I interrogate the implications of her promotion as an epitomic figure by the state, and explicate the significance of class and whiteness in media’s representation of Earhart as the epitome of liberated American womanhood.