Antiheroines of Contemporary Media: Saints, Sinners, and Survivors

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

Focusing on the proliferation and variety of female antiheroines in contemporary media, Antiheroines of Contemporary Media offers an incredibly rich array of essays on the ways this new character has appeared in recent television and what it says about our current assumptions of women who deviate from traditional norms. With a sharp eye for detail and new ways of thinking about these characters, the essays in this volume together provide an excellent introduction as well about how creatives in the television industry have brought to life these women for their viewers and what it says about the diversity and increasing political impact of these new images in contemporary culture.

-- Margaret Tally, Author of The Rise of the Anti-Heroine in TV's Third Golden Age

A welcome addition to the flourishing body of scholarship on the television antiheroines, this collection brings together contributions that provide fresh insights and fine explorations into the emerging, in contemporary television storytelling, of female figures that defiantly stand against normative visions of womanhood. An interesting and recommendable reading, the book offers and stimulates analyses and reflections on changing television's politics of gender representation.

-- Milly Buonanno, Editor of Television Antiheroines: Women Behaving Badly on Crime and Prison Drama

Haas, Pierce, and Busls collection on antiheroines provides a fine contribution to the body of pop-culture scholarship concerned with women who resist, refuse, and rebel. The essays, primarily focused on contemporary TV series, are both up-to-the-minute and timeless. The shows themselves might disappear from the cultural scene, but the issues examined here of womens place and power, sexuality and survival, will continue to inspire reflection and change.

-- Mallory Young, Co-editor, Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film

Author Bio

Melanie Haas is chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Southeast Arkansas College and is completing her PhD in Rhetoric at Texas Womans University.

N.A. Pierce is completing her PhD in English Literature at Old Dominion University.

Gretchen Busl is associate professor and graduate program coordinator in the Department of English, Speech, and Foreign Languages at Texas Woman's University.