Seers, Witches and Psychics on Screen: An Analysis of Women Visionary Characters in Recent Television and Film

ISBN-13: 9780786433469 / Angielski / Miękka / 2008 / 219 str.

Karin Beeler

Opis

This book addresses the pervasive representation of women with unique visionary abilities in postfeminist television series and films from the 1990s to the present. Whether the female characters take the form of seer figures, witches, mediums, or women with the ability to see or know the future, these "women of vision" suggest unique ways of constructing female heroes as saviors in a postfeminist era. These women mediate between the living and the dead or between different worlds of experience, redefining what it means to be "normal" and challenging the traditional boundary between science and the inner world of visionary, mystical experience.

History and myth mention many female visionaries, but Cassandra and Joan of Arc stand above the rest as the most imitated icons for modern "women of vision" in popular culture. Fittingly, the first two sections of this book offer an examination of several television series or films which use these legendary women as key prototypes or point