Overview

The New Female Antihero examines the hard-edged spies, ruthless queens, and entitled slackers of twenty-first-century television.   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.

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9780226816401

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Reviews

"""Hagelin and Silverman adeptly analyze a set of highly regarded, well-watched, and much talked about television series, setting a high standard of originality, soundness, and rigor throughout. It is difficult to write about television as clearly, effectively and efficiently as they do here.""-- ""Diane Negra, University College Dublin"" ""If you love television's bad women more than you should, you'll love The New Female Antihero, which opens up this topic in exciting and original ways. Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman rethink this edgy character through race as well as gender, upping the stakes on why television's transgressive women are important. By including the hit comedies Broad City and Girls alongside series about killers and assassins, Hagelin and Silverman reveal the larger implications of these unruly women as threats to traditional femininity. You'll never watch TV's difficult women in quite the same way again.""-- ""Linda Mizejewski, Ohio State University"""

Hagelin and Silverman adeptly analyze a set of highly regarded, well-watched, and much talked about television series, setting a high standard of originality, soundness, and rigor throughout. It is difficult to write about television as clearly, effectively and efficiently as they do here. -- Diane Negra, University College Dublin If you love television's bad women more than you should, you'll love The New Female Antihero, which opens up this topic in exciting and original ways. Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman rethink this edgy character through race as well as gender, upping the stakes on why television's transgressive women are important. By including the hit comedies Broad City and Girls alongside series about killers and assassins, Hagelin and Silverman reveal the larger implications of these unruly women as threats to traditional femininity. You'll never watch TV's difficult women in quite the same way again. -- Linda Mizejewski, Ohio State University

Author Information

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.

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