21st century
A01=Gillian Silverman
A01=Sarah Hagelin
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american literature
antiheroes
archetype
Author_Gillian Silverman
Author_Sarah Hagelin
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Broad City
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=APT
Category=ATJ
Category=JBCT
Category=JBSF1
Category=JFD
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characters
COP=United States
creation
culture
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domesticity
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
failure
Game of Thrones
gender studies
Girls
Homeland
Insecure
Language_English
liberal feminism
literary study
marriage
media
narratives
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persona
Price_€20 to €50
programming
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queens
race
racial identity
rejection
relationships
representation
Scandal
slackers
SMILF
social responsibility
softlaunch
spies
storytelling
television
The Americans
united states
whiteness
women
Product details
- ISBN 9780226816401
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 21 Jan 2022
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female characters, the new female antihero is often selfish and deeply unlikeable.
In this entertaining and insightful study, Hagelin and Silverman explore the meanings of this profound change in the role of women characters. In the dramas of the new millennium, they show, the female antihero is ambitious, conniving, even murderous; in comedies, she is self-centered, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Across genres, these female protagonists eschew the part of good girl or role model. In their rejection of social responsibility, female antiheroes thus represent a more profound threat to the status quo than do their male counterparts. From the devious schemers of Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, and Homeland, to the joyful failures of Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF, female antiheroes register a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism. They push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all”—and in so doing, they give us new ways of imagining women’s lives in contemporary America.
Sarah Hagelin is associate professor of English and director of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the author of Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television. Gillian Silverman is associate professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the author of Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America.
