Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film

1. Introduction: Bad Girls in Popular Culture
Mallory Young

Part I. Crime and Punishment

2. “How Do You Like My Darkness Now?”: Women, Violence, and the Good “Bad Girl” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Kaley Kramer

3. Hollywood’s Warrior Woman for the New Millennium
Kate Waites

4. Reading Kathleen Mallory: Trauma and Survival in the Detective Fiction of Carol O’Connell
Kathleen Kennedy

Part II. Domestic Arts

5. Vera Caspary’s Bedelia: Murder as a Domestic Art, or Lethal Home Economics
Kirsten T. Saxton

6. The Dirty Secret: Domestic Disarray in Chick Lit
Joanne Knowles

Part III. Academic Performance

7. Good Teachers, Bad Teachers, and Transgressive Comedic Performance in Popular American Cinema
Joel Gwynne

8. Mean Girls End Up Dead: The Dismal Fate of Teen Queen Bees in Popular Culture
Sara K. Day

Part IV. Revisionist Perspectives

9. Bad Girl, Bad Mother, Bad Queen: Catherine de’ Medici in Contemporary Fiction, Film, and History
William B. Robison

10. “Let Them Know That Men Did This”: Medusa, Rape, and Female Rivalry in Contemporary Film and Women’s Writing
Elizabeth Johnston

Part V. Alternate Realities

11. At the Crossroads: Carnival, Hybridity, and Legendary Womanhood in Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber

N. A. Pierce

12. “Just Another Monster”: Michonne and the Trope of the Angry Black Woman
Samaa Abdurraqib

13. Bad Girls in Outer Space: Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga and the Graphic Representation of Subversive Femininity
Mihaela Precup, Dragoş Manea

Keywords: Cultural and Media Studies, Culture and Gender, Popular Culture, American Culture, American Cinema, Contemporary Literature