This collection of essays focuses on the representations of a variety of "bad girls"-women who challenge, refuse, or transgress the patriarchal limits intended to circumscribe them-in television, popular fiction, and mainstream film from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Perhaps not surprisingly, the initial introduction of women into Western cultural narrative coincides with the introduction of transgressive women. From the beginning, for good or ill, women have been depicted as insubordinate. Today's popular manifestations include such widely known figures as Lisbeth Salander (the "girl with the dragon tattoo"), The Walking Dead's Michonne, and the queen bees of teen television series. While the existence and prominence of transgressive women has continued uninterrupted, however, attitudes towards them have varied considerably. It is those attitudes that are explored in this collection. At the same time, these essays place feminist/postfeminist analysis in a larger context, entering into ongoing debates about power, equality, sexuality, and gender.

Julie A. Chappell is Professor of English at Tarleton State University, USA. Her writing has focused primarily on women's lives and texts from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. She is author or co-editor of many books of scholarship as well as original poetry, including the monograph Perilous Passages: The Book of Margery Kempe, 1534-1934.

Mallory Young
, Professor of English at Tarleton State University, USA, has published work on a wide variety of subjects, including European women's films and popular representations of Marie Antoinette. She is co-editor of 
Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction 
and 
Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies
.

1.Introduction - Mallory Young

Part I. Crime and Punishment

2."How do you like my darkness now?": Women, Violence, and the Good 'Bad Girl' in Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Kaley A. Kramer

3. Hollywood's Warrior Woman for the New Millennium - Kate Waites

4. Reading Kathleen Mallory: Trauma and Survival in the Detective Fiction of Carol O'Connell - Kathleen A. Kennedy

Part II. Domestic Arts

5. Vera Caspary's Bedelia: Murder as a Domestic Art, or Lethal Home Economics - Kirsten T. Saxton

6. The Dirty Secret: Domestic Disarray in Chick Lit - Joanne Knowles

Part III. Academic Performance

7. Good Teachers, Bad Teachers, and Comedic Performance in Popular American Cinema - Joel Gwynne

8. Mean Girls End Up Dead: The Dismal Fate of Teen Queen Bees in Popular Culture - Sara K. Day

Part IV. Revisionist Perspectives

9. Bad Girl, Bad Mother, Bad Queen: Catherine de' Medici in Contemporary Fiction, Film, and History - William B. Robison

10. "Let Them Know That Men Did This": Medusa, Rape, and Female Rivalry in Contemporary Film and Women's Writing - Elizabeth Johnston

Part V. Alternate Realities

11. At the Crossroads: Carnival, Hybridity, Legendary Womanhood in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber - N.A. Pierce

12. Just Another Monster: Michonne's Defiance in The Walking Dead - Samaa Abdurraqib

13. Bad Girls in Outer Space: Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples' Saga and the Graphic Representation of Subversive Femininity - Mihaela Precup and Dragos Manea