The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation

of both the setting and the action’ (p. 194), which, among other things, confronts the invisibility of women who for various reasons ‘fall foul of the law’ (p. 196). In the chapter that concludes Part 3, Walters discusses Orange is the New Black (American television series) as a ‘multivalent ... text’ (p. 201), which is not, however, intended for a ‘voyeuristic male getting off on the shower scenes and nudity’ (p. 204). Part 4, ‘Villainesses and anti-antiheroines’, covers three accounts of fictional female figures that do not fit into the antiheroine category, which typically involves a female protagonist displaying moral oscillation that graces her character. Thus, the subject of Joyce’s and La Pastina’s essay is the Brazilian series Salve Jorge (‘Hail George’), with character Lívia Marine (Claudia Raia) who, ‘driven by power and money’ (p. 228) rather than, for example, revenge or vengeance commits horrific crimes against other women and does not display any potentially likeable feminine characteristics of an antiheroine. Another (American) television series that presents female criminals without inherent sympathetic portrayals is The Wire where, as Williams and Press claim, African American women of crime are unfairly denied the nuanced approach that typically connects the audience with the antihero or antiheroine in empathic identification. Redhead’s analysis of Underbelly: Razor concludes the conversation as the author claims that this Australian series is another example of a not so successful portrayal of a television antiheroine: as the narrative focuses on domestic and maternal themes rather than criminal action and public space, the transgressive potential of the story is significantly diluted. The contributors to the book successfully manage to ‘explore atypical portrayals of femininity’ (p. 4) from an international perspective, which is their joint goal as outlined in the Editor’s Introduction. Written for a wide contemporary readership, the book will be of practical use to students of communication and media studies and must not be overlooked by academic philosophers inasmuch as the authors’ discussions contribute to debates on the ontological and existential structures of human existence. Indeed, how do patriarchal gender norms – and attempts to disengage from them – influence our understanding of our own and other people’s selves? It is not easy to escape from these norms: a perceptive reader will note, for example, that the impetus that moves a woman to the position of leadership in organised crime is due to the absence of a man (caused, for example, by death or imprisonment) who would have assumed the leadership role if he was there. The situation where a woman takes on a leadership role when (and only when) a suitable man is not available is not new in human history and in some sense reinforces the patriarchal model of societal organisation.