Antiheroines of Contemporary Media

This text offers a critical engagement with media and cultural theory to analyze how the antiheroine trope is employed to challenge the socio-political discourses scripted in contemporary narratives. Each chapter works to complicate our understandings of women characters and the intersections of identity, power, and culture that shape them.

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.

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 the Psychological Complexity of the Antiheroine in Contemporary Domestic Noir Fiction – Liz Evans

9.“Maybe She’s Not Such a Heinous Bitch After All”: Representations of the Antiheroine in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – Stephanie Salerno

10.The Antiheroine and the Representation of PTSD: The Case of Jessica Jones – Anja Meyer

11.“Small-breasted Psycho”: Debunking the Female Psychopath in Killing Eve – Siobhan Lyons

About the Editors and Contributors