Dangerous Negotiations

Violent screen females appear as a ubiquitous, still elusive, staple of contemporary Hollywood cinema, a genre-transcending trope whose full interpretive potential is yet to be explored. The cinematic examples of violent women and consequently the types of violence drawn upon in Dangerous Negotiations are highly diverse, both in terms of the characters’ motives – which can be revenge, self-defense as well as rage or greed – and their actions’ intensity, with the violent acts of the serial-queen melodramas’ heroines, for instance, ranking on the lower end of a scale of fierceness and brutality from today’s perspective. Taking such a kaleidoscopic approach towards female screen violence, Dangerous Negotiations investigates the interpretative practices which feminist scholars have deployed in the assessment of a plethora of violent female characters in contemporary Hollywood cinema and thereby fleshes out genre-transcending reading patterns.