The Unruly Woman
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Kathleen Rowe Karlyn
About this book
Unruly women have been making a spectacle of themselves in film and on television from Mae West to Roseanne Arnold. In this groundbreaking work, Kathleen Rowe explores how the unruly woman—often a voluptuous, noisy, joke-making rebel or "woman on top"—uses humor and excess to undermine patriarchal norms and authority.
At the heart of the book are detailed analyses of two highly successful unruly women—the comedian Roseanne Arnold and the Muppet Miss Piggy. Putting these two figures in a deeper cultural perspective, Rowe also examines the evolution of romantic film comedy from the classical Hollywood period to the present, showing how the comedic roles of actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, and Marilyn Monroe offered an alternative, empowered image of women that differed sharply from the "suffering heroine" portrayed in classical melodramas.
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Topics
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Frontmatter
I -
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Contents
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Acknowledgments
IX -
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Introduction: Feminist Film Theory and the Question of Laughter
1 - Part One: The Unruly Woman
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1. Pig Ladies, Big Ladies, and Ladies with Big Mouths: Feminism and the Carnivalesque
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2. Roseanne: The Unruly Woman as Domestic Goddess
50 - Part Two: Female Unruliness in Narrative Cinema
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3. Narrative, Comedy, and Melodrama
95 -
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4. Romantic Comedy and the Unruly Virgin in Classical Hollywood Cinema
116 -
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5. Professor-Heroes and Brides on Top
145 -
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6. Dumb Blondes
169 -
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7. Masculinity and Melodrama in Postclassical Romantic Comedy
191 -
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Afterword: Shape-Shifting
213 -
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Notes
221 -
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Works Cited
247 -
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Index
261
