This insightful study places African American women's stardom in historical and industrial contexts by examining the star personae of five African American women: Dorothy Dandridge, Pam Grier, Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Halle Berry. Interpreting each woman's celebrity as predicated on a brand of charismatic authority, Mia Mask shows how these female stars have ultimately complicated the conventional discursive practices through which blackness and womanhood have been represented in commercial cinema, independent film, and network television. Mask examines the function of these stars in seminal yet underanalyzed films. She considers Dandridge's status as a sexual commodity in films such as Tamango, revealing the contradictory discourses regarding race and sexuality in segregation-era American culture. Grier's feminist-camp performances in sexploitation pictures Women in Cages and The Big Doll House and her subsequent blaxploitation vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown highlight a similar tension between representing African American women as both objectified stereotypes and powerful, self-defining icons. Mask reads Goldberg's transforming habits in Sister Act and The Associate as representative of her unruly comedic routines, while Winfrey's daily television performance as self-made, self-help guru echoes Horatio Alger narratives of success. Finally, Mask analyzes Berry's meteoric success by acknowledging the ways in which Dandridge's career made Berry's possible.

Hollywood Divas, Indie Queens, and TV Heroines offers an entertaining and critical look at the representation of women in recent movies. Written in a refreshingly accessible style, the book analyzes over thirty box-office hits. The authors explore the screen personae of top stars such as Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan, and Renée Zellweger, as well as independent movie queens like Parker Posey and TV heroines like Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A must-read book for all film buffs who are tired of the mixed gender messages of mainstream culture.

This book tells all about a lost, authentically legendary species: the divas. They were the first movie stars before Pickford and Garbo, there was Geraldine Farrar, Lina Cavalieri, and Mary Garden. They were the most stunning opera singers, their personalities perhaps even bigger than their voices. Their success and their lives filled the gossip columns. Their fans loved them, grand dukes covered them in jewels. They represented both the splendorous excesses of an era of elegance and luxury, and its swan's song. There is almost nothing that survives of them today. Thankfully, their image remains and reveals all. Along with unpublished pictures of the greatest divas of this century, rediscover their voices in the accompanying CD produced specially for this publication. 70 b/w & colour illustrations

Whether it was Lucy and Ethel (Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance) or Eve Arden as Miss Brooks, Gale Storm as her dad's "little" Margie, always interfering but with the best of intentions, or the more modern Bea Arthur as Maude, flaunting the conventions of how a woman was supposed to behave, we all have our favorite funny ladies who brought us laughter every week, and, for a half-hour at least, took us away from our daily problems. Classic TV expert Michael Karol, in a series of original essays, examines the roles these Sitcom Queens played on TV, and how they became the beloved TV icons of generation after generation of TV fans. With a sitcom timeline and a Top 10!

Illustrated with 440 rare movie scene shots, formal portraits, candid behind the scenes photos, film frame enlargements, trade magazine advertisements, lobby cards, stage photographs, artist's renderings and caricatures, and casting guide entries.

Professional wrestling's most beautiful Superstars share their innermost thoughts in their own words.

Editor Michael Montlack has assembled an anthology of a hundred gay poets--award winners and fresh voices--in thrall with female icons throughout the ages ranging from Gloria Swanson to Mary J, Blige, from Edith Piaf to Joni Mitchell, Bette Midler to Lady Gaga. These are not merely appreciations of the gorgeous and daring but poems that are confessional to bittersweet to witty.