ABSTRACT
After introducing stunt journalism, this chapter analyses Elizabeth Cochrane’s first stunt story for the World, ‘Behind Asylum Bars’, which initiated the stunt genre in New York. I argue that Cochrane became an ‘entrepreneur of [her]self’, in Michel Foucault’s terms, creating both a sustained public persona, Nellie Bly, and a series of surrogate characters. Questioning the role of ‘complete’ technological reproduction in mediatisation, I contend that Cochrane’s stunt stories disrupted liveness. I examine how her techniques intersected with cultures of reform and celebrity, suggesting that cross-ethnic and cross-class embodiments were constitutive of emerging, middle-class, professional female identities, and also had parallels in working-class women’s cultures.
I examine stunt stories’ explorations of women’s work, arguing that stunt journalists adopted a novel technique of spectacularising reproductive labour, making it productive. I frame this technique as stunt journalists producing themselves as image and investigate the problematics of this approach by the mid-1890s, when many stunt journalists wrote anonymously under composite pseudonyms. While some became famous personalities, others were rendered replaceable surrogates, who spectacularised the dangers of life in New York. The configuration of identity in these later stunt stories anticipated cinematic stunts in the early twentieth century.
