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Television Antiheroines: Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama PDF

312 Pages·2017·5.427 MB·English
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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 Y Buonanno is helping me relocate my transnational sisterhood in B Women Behaving U support of anti-heroines. This O 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 O and kick-ass. Brava!’ Vicki Mayer Tulane University, New Orleans T 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 07602_FM_pi-xiii.indd 1 11/4/16 12:57 PM 07602_FM_pi-xiii.indd 2 11/4/16 12:57 PM Television Antiheroines Women Behaving Badly in Crime and Prison Drama Milly Buonanno, editor intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA 07602_FM_pi-xiii.indd 3 16/12/16 10:29 am 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. 07602_FM_pi-xiii.indd 4 11/4/16 12:57 PM 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 07602_FM_pi-xiii.indd 5 11/4/16 4:25 PM 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 07602_FM_pi-xiii.indd 6 11/4/16 12:57 PM 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. 07602_FM_pi-xiii.indd 7 11/4/16 12:57 PM 07602_FM_pi-xiii.indd 8 11/4/16 12:57 PM 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 07602_FM_pi-xiii.indd 9 11/4/16 12:57 PM

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