Full Description
With a foreword by Diane Negra and Jorie Lagerway
As television has finally started to create more leading roles for women, the female antiheroine has emerged as a compelling and dynamic character type. Television Antiheroines looks closely at this recent development, exploring the emergence of women characters in roles typically reserved for men, particularly in the male-dominated genre of the crime and prison drama.
The essays collected in Television Antiheroines are divided into four sections or types of characters: mafia women, drug dealers and aberrant mothers, women in prison, and villainesses. Looking specifically at shows such as Gomorrah, Mafiosa, The Wire, The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy, Orange is the New Black, and Antimafia Squad, the contributors explore the role of race and sexuality and focus on how many of the characters transgress traditional ideas about femininity and female identity, such as motherhood. They examine the ways in which bad women are portrayed and how these characters undermine gender expectations and reveal the current challenges by women to social and economic norms. Television Antiheroines will be essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in crime and prison drama and the rising prominence of women in nontraditional roles.
Contents
Part I: Mafia Women
Buonanno, Villez, Akass and McCabe
Chapter 1: Godmothers in Italian Mafia Story: Or 'Something Else Besides a Mother'
Milly Buonanno
Chapter 2: Mafiosa, Monstruous Beauty: Power and Loneliness of a Female Mob Leader
Barbara Villez
Chapter 3: Adieu Carmela Soprano! Lessons from the HBO Mobster Wife on TV Female Agency and Neo-Liberal (Narrative) Power
Kim Akass and Janet McCabe
Part II: Drug Dealers and Aberrant Mothers
Hermes, Giomi, Lotz and Rivero
Paying the Price: Penoza - Combining Motherhood anf a Career (in Crime)
Joke Hermes
'Really Good At It': The Viral Charge of Nancy Botwin in Weeds (and Popular Culture's Anticorps)
Elisa Giomi
Really Bad Mothers: Manipulative Matriarchs in Sons of Anarchy and Justified
Amanda D. Lotz
La reina del sur: Teresa Mendoza, a New Telenovela Protagonist
Yeidy M. Rivero
Part III: Women in Prison
Ball, Turnball and Walters
Chapter 8: Blurred Lines: The Queer World of Bad Girls
Vicky Ball
Chapter 9: Top Dogs and Other Freaks: Wentworth and the Re-imaging of Prisoner Cell Block H
Sue Turnball
Chapter 10: Lesbian Request Approved: Sex, Power and Desire in Orange is the New Black
Suzanna Danuta Walters
Part IV: Villainesses and Anti-antiheroines
Joyce, La Pastina, Williams, Press and Redhead
Chapter 11: Women and Criminality in Brazilian Telenovelas: Salve Jorge and Human Trafficking
Samantha Joyce and Antonio Las Pastina
'Your Turn, Girl': The (Im)Possibility of African American Antiheroines in The Wire
Bruce A. Williams and Andrea L. Press
Taming Pussytown: How Post-feminism Domesticated Underbelly: Razor
Leigh Redhead
