Representations of Violent Women in Popular Culture and World Politics: The Mothers, Monsters, Whores, and Penitents of Young Adult Fantasy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As young adult fiction has surged in popularity over the past decade, a popular new sub-genre has emerged. These novels feature high-fantasy stories with young female heroines who are fighters, assassins, spies, and rebel leaders. In this paper, I argue that representations of women’s violence in these stories have implications for global politics. Although these young-adult heroines are intended to serve as examples of female empowerment, the characters reflect dominant social, academic, and political narratives that depict violent women as either mothers, monsters, or whores (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). Into this conversation I introduce a fourth narrative, that of penitent, which portrays women's political violence as an unnatural, transitional state to be ultimately rejected. This paper explores how three bestselling young adult fantasy series engage with these narratives and argues that—despite their feminist intentions—these novels reflect, reinforce and strengthen gender subordinating narratives that undermine the agency of violent women.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".