Television Antiheroines: Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama

312 Pages·2017·5.427 MB·English

by  Milly Buonanno (editor)

TELEVISION ‘As someone who rooted for M
Alexis and Sue Ellen as a girl of IL
ANTIHEROINES the 1980s, I am thrilled that Milly L
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Buonanno is helping me relocate

my transnational sisterhood in B
Women Behaving U
support of anti-heroines. This
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Badly in Crime volume embraces the not-so-guilty N
pleasures of watching women A
and Prison Drama characters who are complicated, N
multi-layered, transgressive, N
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and kick-ass. Brava!’
Vicki Mayer
Tulane University, New Orleans
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As television has finally started
to create more leading roles for E
women, the female antiheroine ‘At last, the antiheroine, in all her
has emerged as a compelling flawed ambiguity, takes the limelight L T E L E V I S I O N
in this impressive collection and E
and dynamic character type.
challenges the male dominance of
Television Antiheroines looks V
contemporary television drama.
closely at this recent development,
Driven by feminist curiosity, I
exploring the emergence of women respected television scholar Milly S A N T I H E R O I N E S
characters in roles typically Buonanno has put together a
reserved for men, particularly genuinely international team to I
O
in the male-dominated genre explore the global phenomenon of
of the crime and prison drama. female characters heading up crime N
TV genres with roles as criminal
EDITED BY MILLY BUONANNO
The essays collected in Television bosses and prison top dogs.
Essential and enjoyable reading.’ A
Antiheroines are divided into four
sections or types of characters: Christine Geraghty N
mafia women, drug dealers and University of Glasgow
T
aberrant mothers, women in
prison and villainesses. Looking I
H
specifically at shows such as
'Television Antiheroines is a
Gomorrah, Mafiosa, The Wire, E
landmark text. It covers a long but
The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy,
rarely highlighted story to be told of R
Orange is the New Black and
female characters who counter the
Antimafia Squad, the contributors norms of conventional femininity. O
explore the role of race and This generously international volume Women Behaving
I
sexuality and focus on how many provides both geographical and
N
of the characters transgress historical contours that will enrich
Badly in Crime
traditional ideas about femininity the study of television.’ E
and female identity. They examine Toby Miller S
the ways in which bad women University of Cardiff; and Prison Drama

are portrayed and how these Murdoch University, Perth
characters undermine gender
expectations and reveal the
current challenges by women
to social and economic norms.
EDITED BY MILLY BUONANNO
intellect | www.intellectbooks.com
Television Antiheroines
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Television Antiheroines
Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama
Milly Buonanno, editor
intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA
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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.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Foreword ix
Diane Negra and Jorie Lagerwey
Editor’s Introduction 1
Milly Buonanno
Part I: Mafia Women 25
Chapter 1: Godmothers in Italian Mafia Story: Or ‘Something Else Besides a Mother’ 27
Milly Buonanno
Chapter 2: Mafiosa, Monstruous Beauty: Power and Loneliness of a Female
Mob Leader 49
Barbara Villez
Chapter 3: Adieu Carmela Soprano! Lessons from the HBO Mobster Wife on
TV Female Agency and Neo-liberal (Narrative) Power 65
Kim Akass and Janet McCabe
Part II: Drug Dealers and Aberrant Mothers 83
Chapter 4: Paying the Price: Penoza – Combining Motherhood and a Career
(in Crime) 85
Joke Hermes
Chapter 5: ‘Really Good At It’: The Viral Charge of Nancy Botwin in Weeds (and
Popular Culture’s Anticorps) 105
Elisa Giomi
Chapter 6: Really Bad Mothers: Manipulative Matriarchs in Sons of Anarchy and
Justified 125
Amanda D. Lotz
Chapter 7: La reina del sur: Teresa Mendoza, a New Telenovela Protagonist 141
Yeidy M. Rivero
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Television Antiheroines
Part III: Women in Prison 159
Chapter 8: Blurred Lines: The Queer World of Bad Girls 161
Vicky Ball
Chapter 9: Top Dogs and Other Freaks: Wentworth and the Re-imaging of
Prisoner Cell Block H 181
Sue Turnbull
Chapter 10: Lesbian Request Approved: Sex, Power and Desire in Orange is the
New Black 199
Suzanna Danuta Walters
Part IV: Villainesses and Anti-antiheroines 217
Chapter 11: Women and Criminality in Brazilian Telenovelas: Salve Jorge and
Human Trafficking 219
Samantha Joyce and Antonio La Pastina
Chapter 12: ‘Your Turn, Girl’: The (Im)Possibility of African American Antiheroines
in The Wire 237
Bruce A. Williams and Andrea L. Press
Chapter 13: Taming Pussytown: How Post-feminism Domesticated Underbelly:
Razor 255
Leigh Redhead
Contributors 279
Index 283
vi
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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.
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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
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