Presenter(s): Meg Rodgers − Media Studies
Faculty Mentor(s): Erin Hanna
Panel Session 1SW
Research Area: Media Studies & Television Studies
Funding: UROP Mini-grant, Humanities Undergraduate Research Fellowship
Television’s anti-heroes have long raked in high ratings and delivered audiences with devilishly corrupt but ultimately sympathetic viewpoints. Recent exemplars such as Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Dexter Morgan are rarely ethical and far from heroic, which has led to a wide breadth of scholarship about male characters who skirt the boundaries between regular life and outlaw culture. For example, Brett Martin’s Difficult Men and Amanda Lotz’ Cable Guys explore masculinity on television that is predicated on breaking societal norms. What the existing scholarship fails to fully address—and where my research project intervenes—is a thorough analysis of the anti-heroine, a television genre that has grown rapidly in recent years. My research launches from Kathleen Karlyn’s The Unruly Woman, an early examination of women in film and television who use humor to undermine patriarchal authority. Margaret Tally’s The Rise of the Anti-Heroine in TV’s Third Golden Age is the first text to explore the emergence of the anti-heroine. My project extends past Tally’s work to look specifically at how anti-heroines have become a dominate feature of quality television. Quality television is a category that loosely refers to series with narrative complexity, high production values, and characters with psychological depth. My three case studies, Sex and the City, Veep, and Girls, are Home Box Office (HBO) productions. I focus on HBO productions because the single network allows me to draw on consistent industry information, viewership demographics, and critical accolades. The anti-heroines from my case studies might be difficult or even unlikeable—but they do address and challenge traditional femininity (whereas anti-heroes reinforce hegemonic masculinity). Do anti-heroines have more agency over their personal and professional lives than other leading ladies? What underlies America’s fixation with immoral women? These are just a couple of the questions guiding my preliminary research.