Unlikeable Female Characters, Anna Bogutskaya
Unlikeable Female Characters, Anna Bogutskaya
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Unlikeable Female Characters
The Women Pop Culture Wants You to Hate

Author: Anna Bogutskaya, Terri White

Narrator: Raquel Beattie

Unabridged: 11 hr 22 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/11/2023

Synopsis

How bitches, trainwrecks, shrews, and crazy women have taken over pop culture and liberated women from having to be nice.

Female characters throughout history have been burdened by the moral trap that is likeability. Any woman who dares to reveal her messy side has been treated as a cautionary tale. Today, unlikeable female characters are everywhere in film, TV, and wider pop culture. For the first time ever, they are being accepted by audiences and even showered with industry awards. We are finally accepting that women are—gasp—fully fledged human beings. How did we get to this point?

Unlikeable Female Characters traces the evolution of highly memorable female characters, examining what exactly makes them popular, how audiences have reacted to them, and the ways in which pop culture is finally allowing us to celebrate the complexities of being a woman. Anna Bogutskaya, film programmer, broadcaster, and cofounder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls takes us on a journey through popular film, TV, and music, looking at the nuances of womanhood on and off-screen to reveal whether pop culture—and society—is finally ready to embrace complicated women.

About Anna Bogutskaya

Anna Bogutskaya is a London-based freelance film programmer, broadcaster, writer, and creative producer, connected in both the worlds of US and UK film. She is also cofounder of the horror film collective and podcast The Final Girls and festival director of Underwire Festival. Previously, Anna was the film and events programmer at the British Film Institute. In 2019, she was selected as one of Screen International's Future Leaders in curation and programming and was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and in 2020 was selected as a mentor at SXSW.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Meike on March 16, 2024

Okay, GoodReads crowd, think about this: How often have you read on this platform that reviewers criticize books for having no "relatable" or "likeable" characters? Such an argument (if you even want to call it that) does not only convey a reductive understanding of what literature is, no, it also r......more

Goodreads review by myo on November 07, 2023

4.5 stars as someone who LOVES pop culture and unlikable characters i feel like this book was perfect for me. i was very familiar with a lot of the references the author talked about but i also liked how she made it easy to understand if you didn’t get an actor or media she referenced. my favorite c......more

Goodreads review by kate✰ on March 19, 2024

devastated to report this book was ultimately a collection of lengthy plot summaries about movies and tv series featuring female characters who were either villainous or vilified, noticeably lacking what i typically consider the foundation of a book: something to say. if the purpose was simply to re......more

Goodreads review by Stitching on May 11, 2023

Easy to read and free of the somewhat prohibitive lingo of academic media analysis, Unlikable Female Characters provides a short and interesting history of female representation in American movie and television through the lense of the women we are meant to dislike. I wish more time was spent on cer......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on August 02, 2023

It wasn’t bad! I think it veered off course often and could’ve been deeper. Lots of plot explanation rather than analysis. Repetitive. I took an extra star off because she took 2 small paragraphs to SHIT on Lana Del Rey and her “fetishizing abuse” in her lyrics and for “fetishizing melancholy” fuck......more

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List