Contributions by Marleen S. Barr, Shiloh Carroll, Sarah Gray, Elyce Rae Helford, Michael R. Howard II, Ewan Kirkland, Nicola Mann, Megan McDonough, Alex Naylor, Rhonda Nicol, Joan Ormrod, J. Richard Stevens, Tosha Taylor, Katherine A. Wagner, and Rhonda V. Wilcox 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 Gallactica'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.

Contributions by Marleen S. Barr, Shiloh Carroll, Sarah Gray, Elyce Rae Helford, Michael R. Howard II, Ewan Kirkland, Nicola Mann, Megan McDonough, Alex Naylor, Rhonda Nicol, Joan Ormrod, J. Richard Stevens, Tosha Taylor, Katherine A. Wagner, and Rhonda V. Wilcox 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 Gallactica'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.

While much of the scholarship on superhero narratives has focused on the heroes themselves, Batman’s Villains and Villainesses: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Arkham’s Souls takes into view the depiction of the villains and their lives, arguing that they often function as proxies for larger societal and philosophical themes. Approaching Gotham’s villains from a number of disciplinary backgrounds, the essays in this collection highlight how the villains’ multifaceted backgrounds, experiences, motivations, and behaviors allow for in-depth character analysis across varying levels of social life. Through investigating their cultural and scholarly relevance across the humanities and social sciences, the volume encourages both thoughtful reflection on the relationship between individuals and their social contexts and the use of villains (inside and outside of Gotham) as subjects of pedagogical and scholarly inquiry.

"For the contemporary film audience, science fiction has become a key locus for displaying-and imaginatively addressing-its most pressing concerns. Those concerns increasingly surface not just as displaced subjects, injected into conventional sf narratives, but as inflections in the very nature of the genre. We might describe these issues that bulk so large in our everyday world as angling into the world of science and technology, becoming a kind of slant presence in the genre, and in the process altering the thrust of our sf films and other screen media, resulting in what seems like a proliferation of sub-genre labels that mark off a substantially "new" group of sf cinemas. These cinemas challenge us to view or "read" them differently, from perspectives that are just coming into focus. Through an introductory overview and series of articles on various of these contemporary "slants" and the theories that drive them, this volume offers a guide to both what the new sf cinemas are about and how we have come to think about or "read" them differently. In the process, it also links these fragments of the constantly growing sf supertext to our changing sense of how genres function as a process, marked by consistent growth and evolution, and discussed in ways that reflect contemporary culture's own constant changes"--

This collection presents diverse critical perspectives and discussion about the keeping or telling of children’s originstories as a part of contemporary mothering labor. The first two sections outline perspectives from mother authors about how they strategically craft complex origin stories for their child(ren), as well as how the telling and retelling of origin stories may be passed on as generational knowledge. The third section discusses mothering and origin stories from multiple perspectives: that of a father by adoption, of single mothers positioning stories of absent fathers, and a multi-perspective chapter that includes a mother by adoption, her adult child, and her child’s birthmother.

How the treatment of sexual consent in erotic fanfiction functions as a form of cultural activism. Sexual consent is--at best--a contested topic in Western societies and cultures. The #MeToo movement has brought public attention to issues of sexual consent, revealing the endemic nature of sexual violence. Feminist academic approaches to sexual violence and consent are diverse and multidisciplinary--and yet consent itself is significantly undertheorized. In Dubcon, Milena Popova points to a community that has been considering issues of sex, power, and consent for many years: writers and readers of fanfiction. Their nuanced engagement with sexual consent, Popova argues, can shed light on these issues in ways not available to either academia or journalism. Popova explains that the term "dubcon" (short for "dubious consent") was coined by the fanfiction community to make visible the gray areas between rape and consent--for example, in situations where the distribution of power may limit an individual's ability to give meaningful consent to sex. Popova offers a close reading of three fanfiction stories in the Omegaverse genre, examines the "arranged marriage" trope, and discusses the fanfiction community's response when a sports star who was a leading character in RPF (real person fiction) was accused of rape. Proposing that fanfiction offers a powerful discursive resistance on issues of rape and consent that challenges dominant discourses about gender, romance, sexuality, and consent, Popova shows that fanfiction functions as a form of cultural activism.

In the twenty-first century, American culture is experiencing a profound shift toward pluralism and secularization. In Fairy Tales in Contemporary American Culture: How We Hate to Love Them, Kate Koppy argues that the increasing popularity and presence of fairy tales within American culture is both indicative of and contributing to this shift. By analyzing contemporary fairy tale texts as both new versions in a particular tale type and as wholly new fairy-tale pastiches, Koppy shows that fairy tales have become a key part of American secular scripture, a corpus of shared stories that work to maintain a sense of community among diverse audiences in the United States, as much as biblical scripture and associated texts used to.

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.

On subjects from Superman to rock 'n' roll, from Donald Duck to the TV news, from soap operas and romance novels to the use of double speak in advertising, these lively essays offer students of contemporary media a comprehensive counterstatement to the conservatism that has been ascendant since the seventies in American politics and cultural criticism. Donald Lazere brings together selections from nearly forty of the most prominent Marxist, feminist, and other leftist critics of American mass culture-from a dozen academic disciplines and fields of media activism. The collection will appeal to a wide range of students, scholars, and general readers.

From Beatniks to Sputnik and from Princess Grace to Peyton Place, this book illuminates the female half of the U.S. population as they entered a "brave new world" that revolutionized women's lives. After World War II, the United States was the strongest, most powerful nation in the world. Life was safe and secure—but many women were unhappy with their lives. What was going on behind the closed doors of America's "picture-perfect" houses? This volume includes chapters on the domestic, economic, intellectual, material, political, recreational, and religious lives of the average American woman after World War II. Chapters examine topics such as the entertainment industry's evolving concept of womanhood; Supreme Court decisions; the shifting idea of women and careers; advertising; rural, urban, and suburban life; issues women of color faced; and child rearing and other domestic responsibilities. A timeline of important events and glossary help to round out the text, along with further readings and a bibliography to point readers to additional resources for their research. Ideal for students in high school and college, this volume provides an important look at the revolutionary transformation of women's lives in the decades following World War II.