Published in 2020
368 pages
Cristelle Maury is Associate Professor at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France.
David Roche is Professor of Film Studies at Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France and President of SERCIA.
Angela Smith is Professor of Language and Culture at the University of Sunderland, UK. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on media discourses, gender, the portrayal of immigrants and the representation of politicians.
Claire Nally is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English Literature, Linguistics and Creative Writing at Northumbria University, UK. She is the author of Steampunk: Gender, Subculture and the Neo-Victorian (2019), co-editor or Bloomsbury Library of Gender and Popular Culture and Deputy Editor (including reviews) of the open access journal C21 Literature.
What is this book about?
Women Who Kill explores several lines of inquiry: the female murderer as a figure that destabilizes order; the tension between criminal and victim; the relationship between crime and expression (or the lack thereof); and the paradox whereby a crime can be both an act of destruction and a creative assertion of agency. In doing so, the contributors assess the influence of feminist, queer and gender studies on mainstream television and cinema, notably in the genres (film noir, horror, melodrama) that have received the most critical attention from this perspective. They also analyse the politics of representation by considering these works of fiction in their contexts and addressing some of the ambiguities raised by postfeminism.
The book is structured in three parts: Neo-femmes Fatales; Action Babes and Monstrous Women. Films and series examined include White Men Are Cracking Up (1994); Hit & Miss (2012); Gone Girl (2014); Terminator (1984); The Walking Dead (2010); Mad Max: Fury Road (2015); Contagion (2011) and Ex Machina (2015) among others.
