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Unlikeable Female Characters
The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate
Foreword by
Terri White
$16.99
Published: May 2023
SKU: 9781728274744
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Overview
How bitches, trainwrecks, shrews, and crazy women have taken over pop culture and liberated women from having to be nice.
Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Any woman who dares to reveal her messy side has been treated as a cautionary tale. Today, unlikeable female characters are everywhere in film, TV, and wider pop culture. For the first time ever, they are being accepted by audiences and even showered with industry awards. We are finally accepting that women are—gasp—fully fledged human beings. How did we get to this point?
Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, from Samantha Jones as "The Slut" in Sex and the City to the iconic Mean Girl, Regina George, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman. Anna Bogutskaya, film programmer, broadcaster, and co-founder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls, takes us on a journey through popular film, TV, and music, looking at the nuances of womanhood on and off-screen to reveal whether pop culture—and society—is finally ready to embrace complicated women.
Product Details
- Paperback
- Case Count: 28
Good pop-culture writing is the literary equivalent of a nutritious Twinkie. Anna Bogutskaya's Unlikeable Female Characters is a nutrient-rich and delicious exploration of film and television's so-called unlikeable women... such dishy fun that it's almost possible to forget the problem that brought the book into being in the first place.
"A fresh feminist appraisal of the pop culture canon." — Publishers Weekly
""From Barbara Stanwyck to Lana Del Rey, Regina George to Amy Dunne, Unlikeable is an awesome reconsideration of the TV and film canon and its patriarchal gaze." — BuzzFeed News" — BuzzFeed News
""The book is a fresh look at pop culture and feminism that's empowering and a fantastic conversation starter. Bring it up if you want to rile up that one uncle who complains about not being able to say anything anymore after #MeToo."" — Newsweek Best Book of 2023
Unlikeable Female Characters is deeply researched, with fascinating behind-the-scenes details and insightful analysis. It is also wildly entertaining, categorizing characters as bitches, sluts, witches, mean girls, angry women, trainwrecks, crazy women, psychos, and shrews.
"Unlikeable Female Characters is a delightfully in-depth tour of whom we've loved to hate and whom we've been told to hate in the last hundred or so years of film." — Shondaland
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