The 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"--