Description

This volume of essays provides a critical foray into the methods used to construct narratives which foreground antiheroines, a trope which has become increasingly popular within literary media, film, and television. Antiheroine characters engage constructions of motherhood, womanhood, femininity, and selfhood as mediated by the structures that socially prescribe boundaries of gender, sex, and sexuality. Within this collection, scholars of literary, cultural, media, and gender studies address the complications of representing agency, autonomy, and self-determination within narrative texts complicated by age, class, race, sexuality, and a spectrum of privilege that reflects the complexities of scripting women on and off screen, within and beyond the page. This collection offers perspectives on the alternate narratives engendered through the motivations, actions, and agendas of the antiheroine, while engaging with the discourses of how such narratives are employed both as potentially feminist interventions and critiques of access, hierarchy, and power.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: Making a Mess of Motherhood

1. From “Basic Bitch” to “Boss Bitch”: Morality & Motherhood in NBC's Good Girls – Henriette-Juliane Seeliger and Tiara Sukhan

2. Challenging Cultural Attitudes to Maternal Ambivalence through Antiheroines in The Americans and Homeland – Brenda Boudreau

3. Tracking the Relationships between Post-feminism, Representations of Ageing Women, and the Rise of Popular Misogyny as Portrayed in FX's Sons of Anarchy (2008-2014) – Lucinda Rasmussen

4. “As Bad as Him”: Reframing Skyler White as the Overlooked Antiheroine – Melanie Piper

Part II: Women to Watch (Out For)

5. The Other's Hero: The Importance of Annalise Keating and Olivia Pope as Black Antiheroines – Melanie Haas

6. Where the Streets Have No Shame: Queen Cersei Lannister's Journey to Alternative Patriarchy – Louise Coopey

7. Killing Eve and the Necessity of the Female Villain du Jour – Kathleen Waites

Part III: Crazy is a Sexist Word

8. Rewriting the Psycho Bitch: Exploring

Product details

Published 02 Dec 2020
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 232
ISBN 9781793624567
Imprint Lexington Books
Dimensions 239 x 163 mm
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Melanie Haas

Anthology Editor

N. A. Pierce

Anthology Editor

Gretchen Busl

Contributor

Melanie Haas

Contributor

Tiara Sukhan

Contributor

Brenda Boudreau

Contributor

Melanie Piper

Contributor

Louise Coopey

Contributor

Kathleen Waites

Contributor

Liz Evans

Contributor

Anja Meyer

Contributor

Siobhan Lyons

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