Description
This collection of essays focuses on the representations of a variety of “bad girls”—women who challenge, refuse, or transgress the patriarchal limits intended to circumscribe them—in television, popular fiction, and mainstream film from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Perhaps not surprisingly, the initial introduction of women into Western cultural narrative coincides with the introduction of transgressive women. From the beginning, for good or ill, women have been depicted as insubordinate. Today’s popular manifestations include such widely known figures as Lisbeth Salander (the “girl with the dragon tattoo”), The Walking Dead’s Michonne, and the queen bees of teen television series. While the existence and prominence of transgressive women has continued uninterrupted, however, attitudes towards them have varied considerably. It is those attitudes that are explored in this collection. At the same time, these essays place feminist/postfeminist analysis in a largercontext, entering into ongoing debates about power, equality, sexuality, and gender.
Table of Contents
1.Introduction - Mallory Young.- 2.“How do you like my darkness now?”: Women, Violence, and the Good ‘Bad Girl’ in Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Kaley A. Kramer.- 3. Hollywood’s Warrior Woman for the New Millennium - Kate Waites.- 4. Reading Kathleen Mallory: Trauma and Survival in the Detective Fiction of Carol O’Connell - Kathleen A. Kennedy.- 5. Vera Caspary’s Bedelia: Murder as a Domestic Art, or Lethal Home Economics - Kirsten T. Saxton.- 6. The Dirty Secret: Domestic Disarray in Chick Lit - Joanne Knowles.- 7. Good Teachers, Bad Teachers, and Comedic Performance in Popular American Cinema - Joel Gwynne.- 8. Mean Girls End Up Dead: The Dismal Fate of Teen Queen Bees in Popular Culture - Sara K. Day.- 9. Bad Girl, Bad Mother, Bad Queen: Catherine de’ Medici in Contemporary Fiction, Film, and History - William B. Robison.- 10. “Let Them Know That Men Did This”: Medusa, Rape, and Female Rivalry in ContemporaryFilm and Women’s Writing - Elizabeth Johnston.- 11. At the Crossroads: Carnival, Hybridity, Legendary Womanhood in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber - N.A. Pierce.- 12. Just Another Monster: Michonne’s Defiance in The Walking Dead - Samaa Abdurraqib.- 13. Bad Girls in Outer Space: Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga and the Graphic Representation of Subversive Femininity - Mihaela Precup and Dragoş Manea.
