‘Little Girl Blue’? The Mediation of the Posthumous Careers of Female Singers

This thesis explores how female singers who faced a degree of condemnation in public discourse during their career have found ‘redemption’ through death and asks what ideological functions the posthumous narratives woven around them serve. Frequently, mediated retrospectives reframe the musician as a victim of their own success, of the people around them, or of fame and the dangers that come with it. These framings often remove agency by suggesting that the singers were not in in control of their actions and in doing so recast them as inherently vulnerable, regardless of their public persona during their lifetime. The thesis argues that the meanings constructed around these posthumous careers serve a redemptive impulse in cases where a female artist dies through misadventure. It draws primarily on newspaper articles to explore the mediation of the careers and posthumous reputations of five high-profile female singers who had well-known struggles with substance abuse and died of either related complications or overdose: Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Karen Carpenter, Amy Winehouse, and Whitney Houston. Running throughout the narratives created around these artists, and vital to the redemptive impulse, is the media ascription of authenticity, both in terms of the artists’ music and public personae and their personal lives. In short, commentators seem particularly concerned with finding the ‘true’ self of the artist, and these constructions rationalise self-destructive actions, frequently working to present the singers as lacking in autonomy. I argue that the redemptive impulse works to control ‘transgressive’ femininity; a ‘deviant’ woman is perceived to pose less of a threat if she is not seen to have complete agency over her actions.