“Stunningly original. Swoon reads like a novel, a pop culture history and a feminist manifesto rolled into one. Like Greil Marcus – but sexier.”
--Graham Coxon, Blur guitarist and author of Verse, Chorus, Monster!

“A groundbreaking study of female love – and lust – from Byron to the Beatles. Right from the first page, Bea Martinez-Gatell hooks you in with sensational stories of scandal but then unfolds a serious message. The policing of women’s desire, Swoon argues, says so much more about us, the society we live in and our fears of feminine sexuality than it does about the individuals involved. What a pleasure it is to read something that takes women’s pleasure seriously!”
--Dr Kirsty Sedgman, cultural studies expert and author of On Being Unreasonable

“With wit, precision and empathy, Bea Martinez-Gatell fever-charts the evolution of passionate female fandom – the swoon – and playfully (but wisely!) breaches the facades of the objects of desire who provoked and stoked it.”
--James Kaplan, author of Frank: The Voice and Sinatra: The Chairman

“Swoon won’t just sweep you off your feet – it will make you think and laugh, too. Finally, a book that takes fangirls as seriously as we deserve!”
--Zan Romanoff, author of Big Fan

“Though the fangirl has been derided and dismissed by the male press and mainstream culture for 200 years, her passion and persistence created the brightest stars in the celebrity galaxy. Bea Martinez-Gatell’s Swoon is a fascinating cultural history of fangirls and their enormous yet overlooked impact on pop culture and beyond.”
--Dr Candy Leonard, author of Beatleness: How the Beatles and Their Fans Remade the World

“An enthralling and revisionist history of modern celebrity, shifting our attention from the usual cast of culture heroes to their female fans. Bold in its transatlantic and transhistorical reach and written with real passion and authority, Swoon shows how these frequently disparaged women and girls have challenged expectations around gender and art and pushed for social change. From Byromania to Lisztomania to Beatlemania, these are voices and stories that continue to resonate.”
--Dr James Grande, literary scholar and editor of The Keats-Shelley Review

“Tender, hilarious and profoundly moving, Swoon reveals the fascinating and often complex relationship between artists and audiences through the ages. This is a page-turning history of love, lust, fandom and cultural change that reminds us of what it means to be human.”
--Cristina Cordero, Cuarteto Casals violist

★The Work by writer and pop culture historian Bea Martinez-Gatell!
★Fans are everywhere these days, and their cultural and economic power is undeniable. But before social media, in the earliest days of celebrity and pop culture, what defining moments shaped this phenomenon?
★From Byron to the Beatles, this book uncovers how generations of young women have turned poets into legends,actors into icons and musicians into messiahs -rewriting history in the process
★Through six pivotal moments of fan frenzy in literature, film, and music—each coinciding with seismic shifts in gender norms and social structures—the book showcases how stigmatized “Fangirls” shattered the shackles of their time through screams and emotional outbursts, which may well have been the precursors to gender revolution.

From Frank Sinatra in the 1940s to Harry Styles in the 2020s, many of the biggest male stars in the world built their early careers on their romantic appeal to young women. The lovestruck teenager gazing at pictures of her idol in magazines or screaming in hordes at a concert is a stock character in the textbooks of fame. And yet no history book has, until now, told her story from the start.

Swoon revisits six defining moments in book, film and music history to uncover the story of how the fangirl became the most enduring yet disdained icon of pop culture. From the Byromaniacs of Regency London to the screamers of Beatlemania, these women were tastemakers, visionaries and cultural disruptors. Their obsessions shaped literary canons, built Hollywood icons and turned musicians into messiahs long before social media came along. But with power came panic. Fandom became a moral and cultural battleground. What was at stake was women’s right to want things they weren’t supposed to want, feel things they weren’t supposed to feel and express these things loudly, shamelessly and in public.

Part cultural history, part joyful reclamation, Swoon returns the silly, swooning, screaming girl to her rightful place in feminist history – because behind every sigh and every squeal, the seeds of a revolution were stirring.

Bea Martinez-Gatell is a writer and pop culture historian. Her work explores the relationship between media, celebrity and the emotional lives of women and girls. She studied film and literature at the University of Warwick and for an MA in the history of film and visual media at Birkbeck, University of London, where her research centred on teen girl audiences and Hollywood cinema. When she isn’t writing books, she studies how people form emotional connections with technology as an experience researcher. You can most often find her in either London or Barcelona.

Preface ix
Prologue: The Heroine xv
1. imagination, london, 1812 1
Bad Romance
2. ecstasy, berlin, 1842 41
In Love With a Feeling
3. desire, hollywood, 1926 89
The Lure of the Flesh
4. romance, new york city, 1944 141
It’s Always You
5. sex, memphis, 1954 191
Sacred and Profane
6. revolution, liverpool, 1963 241
From Me to You
Afterword: Thank You Girl 295
Acknowledgements 307
Bibliography 313
Notes 327
Index 341
Swoon