ladies in arms: women, guns, and feminisms in contemporary popular culture

In contemporary popular culture, armed women take center stage - but how can they be read from a feminist perspective? How do films, comics, and TV series depict the newly fashionable gunwomen between objectification and feminist empowerment? The contributions to this volume ask this question from different vantage points in cultural and literary studies, film and visual culture studies, history, and art history. They examine military and civic gun cultures, the rediscovery of historical armed women and revolutionaries, cultural phenomena such as gangsta rap, narcocultura and US politics, Bollywood and French cinema, and distinct genres such as the graphic novel, the romance novel, or the German police procedural Tatort.

Teresa Hiergeist works at the Department of Romance Studies at the Universität Wien, where she is responsible for French and Spanish literature and culture. She has done research about representations of societies, alternative and parallel communities, human-animal studies as well as queer and gender studies.
Stefanie Schäfer is a scholar of North American studies, gender studies and popular culture and currently professor of American cultural studies at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Her ongoing research focuses on Cowgirls and First Ladies.