Demonic or Divine?: The Feminist Potential of Supernatural Representations of Women Onscreen

This thesis argues for the feminist potential of a range of films and television series in which the female protagonist possesses supernatural powers. Despite being mainstream, narrative texts, this collection offers to their imagined female audience moments of feminist enquiry and commentary. It is my contention that this politicised mode of address is able to exist within these mainstream texts, entirely through the employment of the supernatural as metaphor. I argue that the concept of the supernatural then becomes an inherently useful space in which to tell women’s stories.