Full Description
Gender Warriors: Reading Contemporary Urban Fantasy offers classroom-ready original essays outlining contemporary debates about sexual objectification and gender norms in urban fantasy and examining how those cultural categories are reinforced and unraveled. The essays explore the foundations and evolutions of urban fantasy and presentations of gendered identities in a wide variety of sources, focusing not only on popular examples, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Underworld, but also on less studied works, for instance Penny Dreadful and Anita Blake.
The authors address the sociocultural institutions that bind gender to the body and shape our views of gendered norms, inviting students of all experience levels to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about both theoretical and embodied constructions of gender and the production of genre and generic conventions. The text unpacks cultural norms of gender and addresses issues of identity construction within an endlessly evolving genre. This collection demonstrates the way that representations of gender and the kick-ass female urban fantasy warrior have upended and reinforced a broad range of expectations and tropes, making it a fascinating text for any course, such as first-year studies, literature, film, gender studies, sociology, cultural studies, history, and more.
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: What Is Urban Fantasy?
Amanda Jo Hobson and U. Melissa Anyiwo
2. Creating the Urban Fantasy Heroine: Gender Displacement in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series
Candace Benefiel
3. Empowering or Fetishizing: Wonder Woman Takes the Bechdel Test
Sarah A. Smith
4. The Vampiric Nature of Transmedia Storytelling in the Buffyverse
Jenna Guitar
5. Bewitching Bodies: Sex, Violence, and Magic in Urban Fantasy
Amanda Jo Hobson
6. Fighting and Feminist Expression: The Argent Family and the Limits of Female Agency in Teen Wolf
Lauren Rocha
7. Tough Women, Patriarchal Violence, and the Problem of Non-Intersectional Feminism in Les Wiseman's Underworld Series
Ana G. Gal
8. The Problematic Fan-Girl: Cassandra Clare's Gendered Revisions in the Mortal Instruments Series
Cait Coker
9. A Monstrous Narrative: Unraveling Gender and Ethnic Archetypes in Showtime's Penny Dreadful
U. Melissa Anyiwo
10. The Urban Fantasy Classroom
U. Melissa Anyiwo and Amanda Jo Hobson
11. The Urban Fantasy Universe: Or What to Read or Watch Next
U. Melissa Anyiwo and Amanda Jo Hobson
Notes on Contributors
