Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

July 1, 2019
A deep dive into misogyny in popular culture, from timeless myth to contemporary horror flicks. The second book by feminist commentator Doyle (Trainwreck: The Women We Love To Hate, Mock, and Fear...and Why, 2016) is wide-ranging but operates from a simple premise: Western culture tends to perceive women as unruly monsters who can't be trusted as girls, wives, or mothers. In exorcisms--and, by extension, the horror classic The Exorcist--Doyle observes a cultural urge to barricade girls from puberty and sexual independence. She draws a throughline from Celtic myth to Romantic poets to true-crime touchstones like the Laci Peterson case, showing how each represents a fear of women and urge to bring them to heel. In the case of serial killer Ed Gein (the inspiration for a host of horror tales, Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs most famously), Doyle notes how the blame for his actions often shifts to his mother, routinely portrayed as "fanatically religious, permanently enraged, a castrating, sexless, son-warping harpy." The author sometimes approaches her source material, particularly movies, with wit and humor: She revels in rooting for the momma T. Rex in Jurassic Park and roasts Ben Kingsley's turn in the terrible sci-fi film Species, as he "visibly chokes down every line of dialogue with a barely contained rage that says 'I played Gandhi, damn it.' " But Doyle recognizes how much of our misogynistic, transphobic cultural id is revealed in our trashiest cultural products, and she never loses sight of how the social norms they promote have led to feelings of fear and entrapment at best and countless deaths at worst. The author's accounting of the death of Anneliese Michel, the inspiration for The Exorcist, is especially chilling. A lengthy appendix serves as both a casebook of her sources and a recommendation list for further research both high (Julia Kristeva) and low (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Unflinching, hard-charging feminist criticism.

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July 26, 2019

From Circe and Cleopatra to the women of the TV series The Craft, female power has terrified men to the extent that it produces fears that lead men to kill women every day, argues Doyle (Trainwreck: The Women We Love To Hate, Mock, and Fear...and Why). Here, the author explores women's identities as daughters, wives, and mothers through a complex set of lenses--theoretical, historical, and cultural--and her prose moves seamlessly from feminist theory and pop culture analysis to damning real-life examples of the dangers women face because of the perceived threat of their sexuality. This much-needed work is as suitable for university courses on feminism, gender, and new media studies as it is for readers looking for an accessible analysis of the perils women encounter when society transforms them into monsters who need to be destroyed rather than seeing them as individuals whose power takes on important agency. VERDICT A vital read on femininity and sexuality that speaks to our past, present, and future.--Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2019
In her thrilling, high-speed feminist history, Trainwreck (2016), Doyle immortalized women who were famously skewered by the societies they lived in for their very woman-ness. She's no less cutting and composed in her second book, a study of the ways women throughout history have been depicted as monsters in order to cement their roles in a patriarchal society. In three parts, "Daughters," "Wives," and "Mothers," Doyle analyzes true stories of exorcisms, murder, and presumed fairy-possession alongside the ancient myths, popular movies, and classic literature made before they occurred and after. In so doing, she exposes both the self-sustaining cycle in which women, limited by patriarchy, are also held responsible for the misdeeds of men, as well as the possibility of harnessing the fear of female power as power itself. Doyle sometimes tempers the heaviness with well-placed humor, and explains at the outset, "This is a dark book, but sometimes things are clearer in the darkness." Her extensive, annotated source notes are a valuable resource for readers wanting to dive deeper into the powerfully monstrous, ever-female dark.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)