Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-feminist Era

Description

Within the fields of film and television studies, feminist critics and scholars of the 1980s and 1990s have extensively analyzed the figures of women murderers in classical film genres like film noir and melodrama, as well as in less savoury genres like the horror films of the 1970s and 1980s. This collected volume explores several lines of inquiry: the female murderer as a figure that destabilizes order; the tension between criminal and victim; the relationship between crime and expression (or the lack thereof); and the paradox whereby a crime can be both an act of destruction and a creative assertion of agency. It also aims at assessing the influence of feminist, queer and gender studies on mainstream television and cinema, notably in the genres (film noir, horror, melodrama) that have received the most critical attention from this perspective, but more importantly perhaps, at analyzing the politics of representation by considering these works of fiction in their contexts and addressing some of the ambiguities raised by postfeminism Title Copyright Contents Series Editors’ Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction Part One: Neo-Femmes Fatales Chapter 1: The Femme Fatale of the 1990s Erotic Thriller Sex, Money, Murder Watching a Soft-Porn Kill The Lesbian Killer Conclusion Notes Chapter 2: The African Femme Fatale The Black Femme Fatale as a (Post)feminist Icon? Maisie Blue as a Fantasy Figure The Aesthetics of Revenge Conclusion Notes Chapter 3: Transwoman Who Kills An Extreme Proposal Improbable Syntheses Interruption and Conclusion Notes Chapter 4: Genre and Gender in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, 2014) Sin City 2: Comics, Adaptation, and Gender Constructs “Come on Dwight, You’re No Fun At All”: Sin City 2 as Parody Conclusion Notes Chapter 5: Textbook Femme Fatale, De-eroticized Neo-noir Heroine or Postfeminist Woman Who Kills? The Classical Film Noir Femme Fatale Revisited From Neo-noir Femme Fatale to Mere De-eroticized Woman Who Kills A Postfeminist Woman Who Kills Notes Part Two: Action Babes Chapter 6: From Sarah Connor 2.0 to Sarah Connor 3.0 Rejecting Second-Wave Feminism Two Models of Killer Women in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Postfeminism Wins the Day Conclusion Notes Chapter 7: Girls against Women Contrasting Liminalities Unnatural Born Killers Making Sense of Ritual Executions Conclusion Notes Chapter 8: Motherhood, Domesticity, and Nurture in the Postapocalyptic World The Female Heroine and Motivations to Kill Female Heroines in The Walking Dead Carol: From Survivor to Warrior Maggie: From Having-it-All to Pregnant Widow Michonne: From Lonely Angry Warrior to Partner and Mother Conclusion Notes Chapter 9: An Audience Studies Approach to Tarantino’s Violent Heroines in Kill Bill (2003–04) and Death Proof (2007) Methodology Terms and Academic Discourse Findings Conclusion Notes Chapter 10: Licensed to Kill? Mainstream and Feminist Reception of Mad Max: Fury Road Malaise in the Manosphere Furious about Furiosa Disarming Feminism in Spy Conclusion Notes Part Three: Monstrous Women Chapter 11: The Women Who Killed Too Many The Female Carrier in The Killer that Stalked New York and Rabid The Postfeminist Super-Spreader in Contagion Conclusion Notes Chapter 12: “Always Take Care of Ganja” Rewriting Ganja’s Intersectional Monologue: Discussing the Enduring Woman “If You Ladies Excuse Me . . .”/“I’ll Have Some Womanly Companionship”: Ganja’s Homoerotic Murder Conclusion Notes Chapter 13: Monstrous Feminists? Seduction, Sexualization, and the Femme Fatale Racial Tensions within Feminism The Vagina Dentata and the Undermining of Patriarchy Overcoming Postfeminist Individualism Conclusion Notes Chapter 14: Furies and Female Empowerment Revisiting Early and Victorian Gothic Conventions: Transitory Female Subjugation From Gothic Villainesses to Warrior Women Female Righters of Wrongs, Writers of Women’s Rights Conclusion Notes Chapter 15: Masculine Cultures of Technology and the Robotic Female Avenger in Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015) Masculine Cultures of Technology Fabricated Gender and the Female Machine Ex Machina and the Avenging Female Robot Conclusion Notes Chapter 16: “You’re a Dangerous Girl” Plastic Bodies Beauty, Affect, and Pleasure Conclusion Notes Chapter 17: Evidence of Cruel Optimism Documentary Evidence A Multiplicity of Texts Feminist Studies of Wuornos Cruel Optimism Notes Afterword: Women Who Kill After #MeToo Contributors Index