The Woman Fantastic In Contemporary American Media Culture

Although the last three decades have offered a growing body of scholarship on images of fantastic women in popular culture, these studies either tend to focus on one particular variety of fantastic female (the action or sci-fi heroine), or on her role in a specific genre (villain, hero, temptress). This edited collection strives to define the "Woman Fantastic" more fully. The Woman Fantastic may appear in speculative or realist settings, but her presence is always recognizable. Through futuristic contexts, fantasy worlds, alternate histories, or the display of superpowers, these insuperable women challenge the laws of physics, chemistry, and/or biology. In chapters devoted to certain television programs, adult and young adult literature, and comics, contributors discuss feminist negotiation of today's economic and social realities. Senior scholars and rising academic stars offer compelling analyses of fantastic women from Wonder Woman and She-Hulk to Talia Al Ghul and Martha Washington; from Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Norville series to Cinda Williams Chima's The Seven Realms series; and from Battlestar Galactica's female Starbuck to Game of Thrones's Sansa and even Elaine Barrish Hammond of USA's Political Animals. This volume furnishes an important contribution to ongoing discussions of gender and feminism in popular culture.

Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, Shuri, and Black Widow. These four characters portray very different versions of women: the superheroine, the abuse victim, the fourth wave princess, and the spy, respectively. In this in-depth analysis of female characters in superhero media, the author begins by identifying ten eras of superhero media defined by the way they portray women. Following this, the various archetypes of superheroines are classified into four categories: boundary crossers, good girls, outcasts, and those that reclaim power. From Golden Age comics through today's hottest films, heroines have been surprisingly assertive, diverse, and remarkable in this celebration of all the archetypes.

The issues explored are: what mediated popular culture says about women and their roles in contemporary society; whether and how the mediated representation of women addresses real women's goals and potential; how the popular media negotiate the tension between cultural constraint and social changes within their portrayal of women; and whether women are still the victims of symbolic annihilation by the media."--BOOK JACKET.

Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany plays a host of the show's main characters, all clones of an illegal experiment. The mighty heroines save one another and destroy the patriarchy while subverting gender expectations. The feminist clones are Sarah, who clashes with her radical feminist foster-mother; Alison, the quintessential post-feminist housewife; Cosima, a second-wave feminist lesbian; Beth, a third-wave feminist bogged down by addiction; and M.K., a fourth-wave feminist who tackles the hardships of disability through the Internet. The book explores the women's war against corporate power and how it relates to the science and ethics surrounding cloning.

Examines how fannish and feminist modes of cultural consumption, production, and critique are converging and opening up informal spaces for young people to engage with feminism. Adopting an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and bringing together media and communications, feminist cultural studies, sociology, internet studies and fan studies, Hannell locates media fandom at the intersection of the multi-directional and co-constitutive relationship between popular feminisms, popular culture and participatory networked digital cultures. Feminist Fandom functions as an ethnographic account of how feminist identities are constructed, lived and felt through digital fannish spaces on the micro-blogging and social networking platform, Tumblr.

This collection merges representations of children and youth in various science fiction texts with childhood studies theories and debates. Set in the past, present, and future, science fiction landscapes and technologies sometimes constrain, but often expand, agentic expression, movement, and collaboration.

Wonder Woman was created in the early 1940s as a paragon of female empowerment and beauty and her near eighty-year history has included seismic socio-cultural changes. In this book, Joan Ormrod analyses key moments in the superheroine's career and views them through the prism of the female body. This book explores how Wonder Woman's body has changed over the years as her mission has shifted from being an ambassador for peace and love to the greatest warrior in the DC transmedia universe, as she's reflected increasing technological sophistication, globalisation and women's changing roles and ambitions. Wonder Woman's physical form, Ormrod argues, is both an articulation of female potential and attempts to constrain it. Her body has always been an amalgamation of the feminine ideal in popular culture and wider socio-cultural debate, from Betty Grable to the 1960s 'mod' girl, to the Iron Maiden of the 1980s.

NBC's Grimm is an understudied series full of compelling characters, including Monroe, the charmingly knowledgeable vegetarian who looks like a werewolf; Wu, the funny cop who beats his way to the truth; Adalind, the enjoyably vengeful, risk-taking witch; Trubel, the furious young loner accused of insanity; Kelly, a powerful older warrior-woman; Nick, a compassionate detective; Hank, Juliette, Rosalee and others. This book, which includes a chapter on each key figure, explores the fascinating world of characterization in television. The storyline, as well as the dialogue, acting, costumes, scenery, lighting and music, contribute to in-depth depictions that evolve over time. Grimm's figures confound our perceptions of race, age and gender. They demonstrate the ability of TV characters to build unforgettable, meaningful connections.