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.

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.

Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, Shuri, and Black Widow. These four characters portray very different versions of women: the superheroine, the abuse victim, the fourth wave princess, and the spy, respectively. In this in-depth analysis of female characters in superhero media, the author begins by identifying ten eras of superhero media defined by the way they portray women. Following this, the various archetypes of superheroines are classified into four categories: boundary crossers, good girls, outcasts, and those that reclaim power. From Golden Age comics through today's hottest films, heroines have been surprisingly assertive, diverse, and remarkable in this celebration of all the archetypes.

Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany plays a host of the show's main characters, all clones of an illegal experiment. The mighty heroines save one another and destroy the patriarchy while subverting gender expectations. The feminist clones are Sarah, who clashes with her radical feminist foster-mother; Alison, the quintessential post-feminist housewife; Cosima, a second-wave feminist lesbian; Beth, a third-wave feminist bogged down by addiction; and M.K., a fourth-wave feminist who tackles the hardships of disability through the Internet. The book explores the women's war against corporate power and how it relates to the science and ethics surrounding cloning.

Examines how fannish and feminist modes of cultural consumption, production, and critique are converging and opening up informal spaces for young people to engage with feminism. Adopting an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and bringing together media and communications, feminist cultural studies, sociology, internet studies and fan studies, Hannell locates media fandom at the intersection of the multi-directional and co-constitutive relationship between popular feminisms, popular culture and participatory networked digital cultures. Feminist Fandom functions as an ethnographic account of how feminist identities are constructed, lived and felt through digital fannish spaces on the micro-blogging and social networking platform, Tumblr.

Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction: Travel, Technology, Time intersects considerations about children’s and youth’s agency with the popular culture genre of science fiction. As scholars in childhood studies and beyond seek to expand understandings of agency in children’s lives, this collection places science fiction at the heart of this endeavor. Retellings of the past, narratives of the present, and new landscapes of the future, each explored in science fiction, allow for creative reimaginings of the capabilities, movements, and agency of youth. Core themes of generation, embodiment, family, identity, belonging, gender, and friendship traverse across the chapters and inform the contributors’ readings of various film, literature, television, and virtual media sources. Here, children and youth are heterogeneous, and agency as a central analytical concept is interrogated through interdisciplinary, intersectional, intergenerational, and posthuman analyses. The contributors argue that there is vast power in science fiction representations of children’s agency to challenge accepted notions of neoliberal agency, enhance understandings of agency in childhood studies, and further contextualize agency in the lives, voices, and cultures of youth.

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.

NBC's Grimm is an understudied series full of compelling characters, including Monroe, the charmingly knowledgeable vegetarian who looks like a werewolf; Wu, the funny cop who beats his way to the truth; Adalind, the enjoyably vengeful, risk-taking witch; Trubel, the furious young loner accused of insanity; Kelly, a powerful older warrior-woman; Nick, a compassionate detective; Hank, Juliette, Rosalee and others. This book, which includes a chapter on each key figure, explores the fascinating world of characterization in television. The storyline, as well as the dialogue, acting, costumes, scenery, lighting and music, contribute to in-depth depictions that evolve over time. Grimm's figures confound our perceptions of race, age and gender. They demonstrate the ability of TV characters to build unforgettable, meaningful connections.

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.