Television Antiheroines

Description

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.

Part I: Mafia Women

Buonanno, Villez, Akass and McCabe

 

Chapter 1: Godmothers in Italian Mafia Story: Or 'Something Else Besides a Mother'

Milly Buonanno

 

Chapter 2: Mafiosa, Monstruous Beauty: Power and Loneliness of a Female Mob Leader 

Barbara Villez

 

Chapter 3: Adieu Carmela Soprano! Lessons from the HBO Mobster Wife on TV Female Agency and Neo-Liberal (Narrative) Power 

Kim Akass and Janet McCabe

 

Part II: Drug Dealers and Aberrant Mothers 

Hermes, Giomi, Lotz and Rivero

 

Paying the Price: Penoza – Combining Motherhood anf a Career (in Crime) 

Joke Hermes

 

'Really Good At It': The Viral Charge of Nancy Botwin in Weeds (and Popular Culture's Anticorps)

Elisa Giomi

 

Really Bad Mothers: Manipulative Matriarchs in Sons of Anarchy and Justified 

Amanda D. Lotz

La reina del sur: Teresa Mendoza, a New Telenovela Protagonist

Yeidy M. Rivero

 

Part III: Women in Prison

Ball, Turnball and Walters

 

Chapter 8: Blurred Lines: The Queer World of Bad Girls

Vicky Ball

 

Chapter 9: Top Dogs and Other Freaks: Wentworth and the Re-imaging of Prisoner Cell Block H

Sue Turnball

 

Chapter 10: Lesbian Request Approved: Sex, Power and Desire in Orange is the New Black 

Suzanna Danuta Walters

 

Part IV: Villainesses and Anti-antiheroines

Joyce, La Pastina, Williams, Press and Redhead

 

Chapter 11: Women and Criminality in Brazilian Telenovelas: Salve Jorge and Human Trafficking 

Samantha Joyce and Antonio Las Pastina

 

'Your Turn, Girl': The (Im)Possibility of African American Antiheroines in The Wire

Bruce A. Williams and Andrea L. Press

 

Taming Pussytown: How Post-feminism Domesticated Underbelly: Razor

Leigh Redhead

Sujets

• Feminist Theory
• Social Science
• Popular Culture
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Organized crime
• Feminism
• Cultural Studies

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783207626
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Emily Dann
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Production manager: Tim Mitchell and Mareike Wehner
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
ISBN: 978-1-78320-760-2
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-761-9
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-762-6
Printed and bound by CPI, UK
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Diane Negra and Jorie Lagerwey
Editor’s Introduction
Milly Buonanno
Part I: Mafia Women
Chapter 1: Godmothers in Italian Mafia Story: Or ‘Something Else Besides a Mother’
Milly Buonanno
Chapter 2: Mafiosa , Monstruous Beauty: Power and Loneliness of a Female Mob Leader
Barbara Villez
Chapter 3: Adieu Carmela Soprano! Lessons from the HBO Mobster Wife on TV Female Agency and Neo-liberal (Narrative) Power
Kim Akass and Janet McCabe
Part II: Drug Dealers and Aberrant Mothers
Chapter 4: Paying the Price: Penoza – Combining Motherhood and a Career (in Crime)
Joke Hermes
Chapter 5: ‘Really Good At It’: The Viral Charge of Nancy Botwin in Weeds (and Popular Culture’s Anticorps)
Elisa Giomi
Chapter 6: Really Bad Mothers: Manipulative Matriarchs in Sons of Anarchy and Justified
Amanda D. Lotz
Chapter 7: La reina del sur : Teresa Mendoza, a New Telenovela Protagonist
Yeidy M. Rivero
Part III: Women in Prison
Chapter 8: Blurred Lines: The Queer World of Bad Girls
Vicky Ball
Chapter 9: Top Dogs and Other Freaks: Wentworth and the Re-imaging of P risoner Cell Block H
Sue Turnbull
Chapter 10: Lesbian Request Approved: Sex, Power and Desire in Orange is the New Black
Suzanna Danuta Walters
Part IV: Villainesses and Anti-antiheroines
Chapter 11: Women and Criminality in Brazilian Telenovelas: Salve Jorge and Human Trafficking
Samantha Joyce and Antonio La Pastina
Chapter 12: ‘Your Turn, Girl’: The (Im)Possibility of African American Antiheroines in The Wire
Bruce A. Williams and Andrea L. Press
Chapter 13: Taming Pussytown: How Post-feminism Domesticated Underbelly: Razor
Leigh Redhead
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
Although, as I say in the introduction, the idea of this book began to dwell in my mind in the early 2010s, the seeds of my interest in real and fictional characters of ‘women behaving badly’ were planted many decades ago, during my childhood. A southern Italian on my mother’s side, during infancy I used to spend summer holidays at my grandparents’ house in a coastal town of Calabria. The days were hot, and in the evening children were allowed to linger in the courtyard to enjoy the sea breeze, while listening to the stories steeped in local folklore that made up the narrative repertoire of my grandmother. Ghosts and fairytales were seldom narrated, as she had a special preference for stories about female brigands: those women who, challenging patriarchal gender norms, had embraced the outlaw life in the context of the historical phenomenon of the brigandage in nineteenth-century southern Italy. Some of them, who had achieved equality and even pre-eminence in bravery and leadership vis-à-vis their male companions, had made a name for themselves as intimidating, merciless, yet admirable and respected brigandesses. Folktales had built and disseminated the legend of those female icons of the brigantage, whose transgressive lives and murderous deeds my grandmother – in adamant disregard of grandfather’s disapproval over bloody stories, unsuitable for children – was fond of narrating. I owe her the first seminal encounter with the character of the antiheroine.
It may sound clichéd to say that a book is always a collective endeavor, but it is the pure truth when the book is a collection. I’m grateful to all the wonderful contributors for their generosity in joining the project to claim attention to television antiheroines, at a time in which television antiheroes seemed to monopolize consideration and appreciation. I would also like to thank Tim Mitchell and Mareike Wehner for providing excellent editorial assistance along all the steps of the publishing process.
Finally, my life partner Giovanni has been unconditionally supportive of my work, no matter how much time this stole away from more shareable activities and conversations. My interest may well be captivated by fictional antiheroines: He remains my real life all-time hero.
Foreword
Diane Negra and Jorie Lagerwey
As this book goes to print, it is clear that the subject of women’s relation to the television medium is having a bit of a moment. In 2015 and 2016, the gender pay gap in Hollywood filmmaking had come under intense criticism from white celebrity feminists like actresses Jennifer Lawrence, who wrote about being paid less than her male co-stars, and Patricia Arquette, who used her Oscar acceptance speech in 2015 to call out gender-biased unequal pay (Lawrence, n.d., Arquette 2015). Recent years have also seen the film industry harshly criticized for a lack of roles for people of colour in front of and behind the camera. The #OscarsSoWhite protest hashtag, African American actress Jada Pinkett-Smith’s (unsuccessful) boycott of the 2016 Oscars and black female producer Effie Brown’s on-screen conflict with Matt Damon in the HBO documentary series Project Greenlight (2001–2005, 2015) are just a few prominent examples of the incidents through which the controversy has coalesced (‘Do You Want to Direct This Movie?’ 2006). 1
In the face of an apparently hostile film industry, television is increasingly held up as a welcoming sanctuary for women – and not just the dominant norm of young, white, straight and beautiful women, but also for actresses, writers and producers of colour, older women, lesbian and trans women in front of and behind the camera. Numerous articles in print and digital form, blog posts and various other modes of commentary attest to a dramatic discursive shift that might be roughly plotted as moving from consternation to celebration in regard to women’s television roles (e.g. Lyons 2013; Stewart 2015). Seeking to track ‘the changing representational politics of femininity in contemporary international television’, this volume is part of the environment of acclaim for TV’s women, collecting critical analyses of these notably complex, diverse women from around the globe as they appear in the medium across Europe, Latin America, Australia and the United States.
This current celebration of multifaceted women making and performing television was far from inevitable, though. Historically, the medium was understood by marketers and theorists alike as a feminized, domestic one (Spigel 1992). The patterns of women’s unpaid household work were embedded in the very structures of prominent genres like soap operas (Modleski 1982). Similarly, women solely as mothers, caretakers and voices of reason were encoded in the blueprints for traditional family sitcoms (Butsch 2005). Indeed even outside those limited roles in certain traditional genres, and despite an enormous increase in recent decades in programming targeted at female viewers (see for example Lotz 2006), contemporary TV women were still all too often understood as wives, mothers, assistants, crime victims, sexual objects or plot devices rather than fully developed characters. (Even celebrated millennial era series such as Sex and the City (HBO 1998–2004) and Gilmore Girls (WB, CW 2000–2007; Netflix 2016) that seemed to devise ways to push past such limited typologies preserved, for some viewers, an unhelpful emphasis on ‘quirky femininity’ and aspirational and luxury lifestyling.) Thus, until quite recently, media coverage of the restricted number and nature of female roles on television predominated popular discourse. Typical in this regard is the opening of a 2012 Huffington Post piece entitled ‘Women in the media: Female TV and film characters still sidelined and sexualized, study finds’: ‘For every Carrie Mathison, the brilliant, complicated spy played by Claire Danes on Homeland , there are six “Real Housewives” – in other words, the way women are represented on television and in film is pretty dismal’. But lately, heightened attention to the under-representation of women in media has been succeeded by favourable notice of an emergent cluster of female showrunners, writers, producers and performers like Shonda Rhimes, Jenji Kohan, Mindy Kaling, Michelle King and Lena Dunham behind the camera, and all of the women discussed in this book in front of the camera.
As the sheer number of complex, narratively central female characters on television has increased, there would seem to be an accompanying emerging cultural consensus that female-centred television is achieving an exceptional verisimilitude. The February 2016 issue of Elle magazine, for example, prefaces its lengthy set of features devoted to ‘Women in TV’ with the following characterization ‘With TV more women-rich, women-run and women-relatable than ever before, we don’t just watch television anymore, we live it’ (129). The essays collected in Television Antiheroines valuably expand that lived experience far beyond Hollywood’s white celebrity feminists noted earlier. Authors here explore multiple female subjectivities across lines of race (as in Bruce Williams and Andrea Press’s analysis of The Wire ’s [HBO 2002–2008] female characters) and sexuality (as in Williams and Press’s essay as well as Vicky Ball and Suzanna Danuta Walters’ analyses of ITV’s Bad Girls [1999–2006]