The New Female Antihero examines the hard-edged spies, ruthless queens, and entitled slackers of twenty-first-century television.
 
The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female characters, the new female antihero is often selfish and deeply unlikeable.
 
In this entertaining and insightful study, Hagelin and Silverman explore the meanings of this profound change in the role of women characters. In the dramas of the new millennium, they show, the female antihero is ambitious, conniving, even murderous; in comedies, she is self-centered, self-sabotaging, and anti-aspirational. Across genres, these female protagonists eschew the part of good girl or role model. In their rejection of social responsibility, female antiheroes thus represent a more profound threat to the status quo than do their male counterparts. From the devious schemers of Game of Thrones, The Americans, Scandal, and Homeland, to the joyful failures of Girls, Broad City, Insecure, and SMILF, female antiheroes register a deep ambivalence about the promises of liberal feminism. They push back against the myth of the modern-day super-woman—she who “has it all”—and in so doing, they give us new ways of imagining women’s lives in contemporary America.

Sarah Hagelin is associate professor of English and director of women’s and gender studies at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the author of Reel Vulnerability: Power, Pain, and Gender in Contemporary American Film and Television. Gillian Silverman is associate professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the author of Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America.

Prologue
Introduction: The New Female Antihero—The What, the Why, the How

Part 1: Ambition TV

1. The Limits of the Female Antihero in Game of Thrones
2. The Impossibility of the Marriage Plot in The Americans
3. Scandal and the Failure of Postracial Fantasy
4. Homeland and the Rejection of the Domestic Plot

Part 2: Shame TV

5. Feminist Anti-Aspirationalism in Girls
6. Liberation and Whiteness in Broad City
7. The Difference That Race Makes in Insecure
8. Working-Class Identity and Matriarchal Community in SMILF
Epilogue

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index