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Television Antiheroines

Television Antiheroines

Milly Buonanno

(2017)

Abstract

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.

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Cover Cover
Half Title i
Title iii
Copyright iv
Contents v
Acknowledgements vii
Foreword ix
Editor’s Introduction 1
Part I: Mafia Women 25
Chapter 1: Godmothers in Italian Mafia Story: Or ‘Something Else Besides a Mother’ 27
Chapter 2: Mafiosa, Monstruous Beauty: Power and Loneliness of a Female Mob Leader 49
Chapter 3: Adieu Carmela Soprano! Lessons from the HBO Mobster Wife on TV Female Agency and Neo-liberal (Narrative) Power 65
Part II: Drug Dealers and Aberrant Mothers 83
Chapter 4: Paying the Price: Penoza – Combining Motherhood and a Career (in Crime) 85
Chapter 5: ‘Really Good At It’: The Viral Charge of Nancy Botwin in Weeds (and Popular Culture’s Anticorps) 105
Chapter 6: Really Bad Mothers: Manipulative Matriarchs in Sons of Anarchy and Justified 125
Chapter 7: La reina del sur: Teresa Mendoza, a New Telenovela Protagonist 141
Part III: Women in Prison 159
Chapter 8: Blurred Lines: The Queer World of Bad Girls 161
Chapter 9: Top Dogs and Other Freaks: Wentworth and the Re-imaging of Prisoner Cell Block H 181
Chapter 10: Lesbian Request Approved: Sex, Power and Desire in Orange is the New Black 199
Part IV: Villainesses and Anti-antiheroines 217
Chapter 11: Women and Criminality in Brazilian Telenovelas: Salve Jorge and Human Trafficking 219
Chapter 12: ‘Your Turn, Girl’: The (Im)Possibility of African American Antiheroines in The Wire 237
Chapter 13: Taming Pussytown: How Post-feminism Domesticated Underbelly: Razor 255
Contributors 279
Index 283
Back Cover Back Cover