Women Who Kill: Gender and Sexuality in Film and Series of the Post-feminist Era

Within the fields of film and television studies, feminist critics and scholars of the 1980s and 1990s have extensively analyzed the figures of women murderers in classical film genres like film noir and melodrama, as well as in less savoury genres like the horror films of the 1970s and 1980s.
This collected volume explores several lines of inquiry: the female murderer as a figure that destabilizes order; the tension between criminal and victim; the relationship between crime and expression (or the lack thereof); and the paradox whereby a crime can be both an act of destruction and a creative assertion of agency. It also aims at assessing the influence of feminist, queer and gender studies on mainstream television and cinema, notably in the genres (film noir, horror, melodrama) that have received the most critical attention from this perspective, but more importantly perhaps, at analyzing the politics of representation by considering these works of fiction in their contexts and addressing some of the ambiguities raised by postfeminism