Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers

by Karlyn, Kathleen Rowe

• ISBN13: 9780292718333
• ISBN10: 0292718330
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-01-15
• Publisher: Univ of Texas Pr

Summary

Since the 1990s, whenReviving Opheliabecame a best seller and "Girl Power" a familiar anthem, girls have assumed new visibility in the culture. Yet in asserting their new power, young women have redefined femininity in ways that have often mystified their mothers. They have also largely disavowed feminism, even though their new influence is a likely legacy of feminism's Second Wave. At the same time, popular culture has persisted in idealizing, demonizing, or simply erasing mothers, rarely depicting them in strong and loving relationships with their daughters.Unruly Girls, Unrepentent Mothers, a companion to Kathleen Rowe Karlyn's groundbreaking work,The Unruly Woman, studies the ways popular culture and current debates within and about feminism inform each other. Surveying a range of films and television shows that have defined girls in the postfeminist era-fromTitanicandMy So-Called LifetoScreamandThe Devil Wears Prada, and fromLove and BasketballtoUgly Betty-Karlyn explores the ways class, race and generational conflicts have shaped both Girl Culture and feminism's Third Wave. Tying feminism's internal conflicts to negative attitudes toward mothers in the social world, she asks whether today's seemingly materialistic and apolitical girls, inspired by such real and fictional figures as theSpice GirlsandBuffy the Vampire Slayer, have turned their backs on the feminism of their mothers or are redefining unruliness for a new age.

Author Biography

Kathleen Rowe Karlyn is Professor of English and Director of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Oregon. Her publications include the award-winning The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter and articles in Screen, Cinema Journal, Genders, Feminist Media Studies, and other journals and anthologies. She has been interviewed by major media outlets, and her work, especially on comedy and the unruly woman, has been reprinted, cited, and taught worldwide.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Bad Mothers, Angry Girls	p. 1
Postfeminism and the Third Wave: Titanic	p. 25
Trouble in Paradise: American Beauty and the Incest Motif	p. 49
Girl World: Clueless, Mean Girls, and The Devil Wears Prada	p. 77
Final Girls and Epic Fantasies: Remaking the World	p. 99
How Reese Witherspoon Walks the Line	p. 127
Teen-Girl Melodramas: My So-Called Life and Thirteen	p. 161
Girls of Color: Beyond Girl World	p. 191
The Motherline and a Wicked Powerful Feminism: Antonia's Line	p. 227
Afterword	p. 255
Notes	p. 259
Works Cited	p. 279
Index	p. 297
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