The Mediated Body: Memory and Performativity in the Journalistic Biography of David Bowie

Abstract

This article examines how journalistic biography contributes to the construction of mediated public figures through an analysis of Wendy Leigh’s Bowie: The Biography (2014). Combining narrative analysis with close reading, the study investigates how memory, testimony and representations of the performative body interact in the narration of David Bowie’s life. Leigh’s account is read alongside selected works by Paul Trynka, Dylan Jones and James Rovira to identify how different source choices and narrative emphases produce distinct versions of Bowie and his cultural meaning. The analysis finds that Leigh’s biography constructs continuity retrospectively, arranging testimonies about childhood, family relations and embodied difference as early signs of Bowie’s later artistic practices. It also shows how his clothing, gestures, public statements about sexuality and visual self-presentation are narrativised within a largely celebratory account of cultural transgression. These representations do not recover an identity that precedes mediation. They produce a mediated body through the organisation of testimony, affective memory and public imagery. The article argues that journalistic biography should be understood as a form of cultural production that selects and reconfigures the past, establishes the terms through which embodied identity becomes intelligible, and participates in the posthumous construction of public memory.