Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer (1939- ) is an Australian feminist writer and broadcaster.

Career

Greer was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1939, growing up in the bayside suburb of Mentone. After attending a convent, Star of the Sea College, in Gardenvale, Melbourne, she won a teaching scholarship in 1956 and enrolled at the University of Melbourne. After graduation she moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push, a group of intellectual left-wing anarchists who practised non-monogamy. She later gained an M.A. in 1963 for a thesis on Byron. She received her Ph.D. in 1968 at the University of Cambridge for a thesis on Shakespeare's early comedies, and accepted a lectureship in English at the University of Warwick. In 1979 she accepted a post at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma as the director for the Center of the Study of Women's Literature. She is recently retired as professor of English literature at the University of Warwick in England.

Greer is author of several highly acclaimed books, including her ground-breaking The Female Eunuch (1970) which became an international bestseller. Her other books include The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (1979), Shakespeare (1986), Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility (1984), The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings (1985) and Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989).

The Boy

In 2003, she published The Boy (published as The Beautiful Boy in the United States), an art history book about the beauty of teenage boys, richly illustrated with 200 photographs of what The Guardian called "succulent teenage male beauty", alleging that Greer had reinvented herself as a "middle-aged pederast." [1] Greer described the book as an attempt to address women's apparent indifference to the teenage boy as a sexual object and to "advance women's reclamation of their capacity for, and right to, visual pleasure" (Greer 2003).

Reference

Germaine Greer, The Boy (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003)