Goddesses and Monsters Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture [Paperback]

The essays inGoddesses and Monstersrecognize popular culture as a primary repository of ancient mythic energies, images, narratives, personalities, icons, and archetypes.  Together, they take on the patriarchal myth, where serial killers are heroes, where goddesses—in the form of great white sharks, femmes fatales, and aliens—are ritually slaughtered, and where pornography is the core story underlying militarism, environmental devastation, and racism.  They also point to an alternative imagination of female power that still can be found behind the cult devotion given to Princess Diana and animating all the goddesses disguised as popular monsters, queen bitches, mammies, vamps, cyborgs, and sex bombs.

Goddesses and Monstersis written by one of the leading scholars (and thinkers) about man-woman relationships in academia today. Neither shrill nor strident, Jane Caputi thoroughly examines the evidence and reads it—though to be sure from a feminist point of view. —Ray Browne