STORE HOURS: Monday - Saturday: 10am - 8pm | Sunday: 10am - 8pm
"A fresh feminist appraisal of the pop culture canon." —Publishers Weekly
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 co-founder 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.
Praise for Unlikeable Female Characters:
"Fascinating, insightful, and kick-ass." —Emma Jane Unsworth, internationally bestselling author of Grown Ups and Animals
"Beautifully written." —Chelsea G. Summers, author of A Certain Hunger
"Part-cultural exposé, part-Taylor Swift album." —Clarisse Loughrey, Chief Film Critic at The Independent
"Brilliant masterpiece breaking down the tired tropes of TV and beyond." —Aparna Shewakramani, author of She's Unlikeable and star of Indian Matchmaking
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 the co-founder 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.
Unlikeable Female Characters is deeply researched, with fascinating behind-the-scenes details and insightful analysis. It is also wildly entertaining, categorizing characters as bitches, sluts, witches, mean girls, angry women, trainwrecks, crazy women, psychos, and shrews.
Good pop-culture writing is the literary equivalent of a nutritious Twinkie. Anna Bogutskaya's Unlikeable Female Characters is a nutrient-rich and delicious exploration of film and television's so-called unlikeable women... such dishy fun that it's almost possible to forget the problem that brought the book into being in the first place.
"Unlikeable Female Characters is a delightfully in-depth tour of whom we’ve loved to hate and whom we’ve been told to hate in the last hundred or so years of film." — Shondaland
""The book is a fresh look at pop culture and feminism that's empowering and a fantastic conversation starter. Bring it up if you want to rile up that one uncle who complains about not being able to say anything anymore after #MeToo."" — Newsweek Best Book of 2023
