New Female Antihero: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First-Century Us Television

"The last ten years have presented television viewers with a host of female characters the likes of which we've never seen before. Selfish, vengeful, and often deeply unlikeable, they fly in the face of our expectations for women. In The New Female Antihero, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman probe the stories of female protagonists who eschew aspirations for a career, marriage, and children, swerving instead toward utter apathy, at one end of the spectrum, or unadulterated power at the other. From the bloodthirsty queens of Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, and Homeland to the shrugging failures of Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF, female antiheroes register a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism in contemporary America.As Hagelin and Silverman show, their narratives of ruthlessness, insanity, hedonism, and precarity call into question both the possibility and the desirability of the "good life" their forebears achieved through entitlement, pluck, and leaning in"--
The New Female Antihero examines the hard-edged spies, ruthless queens, and entitled slackers of twenty-first-century television. The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female characters, the new female antihero is often selfish and deeply unlikeable. In this entertaining and insightful study, Hagelin and Silverman explore the meanings of this profound change in the role of women characters. In the dramas of the new millennium, they show, the female antihero is ambitious, conniving, even murderous; in comedies, she is self-centered, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Across genres, these female protagonists eschew the part of good girl or role model. In their rejection of social responsibility, female antiheroes thus represent a more profound threat to the status quo than do their male counterparts. From the devious schemers of Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, and Homeland, to the joyful failures of Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF, female antiheroes register a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism. They push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all”—and in so doing, they give us new ways of imagining women’s lives in contemporary America.