| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lori Landay. Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture. (Feminist Cultural Studies, the Media, and Political Culture.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1998. Pp. xi, 258. Cloth $45.00, paper $22.50.

Folklorists and anthropologists have described tricksters as cultural figures whose attributes of liminality, duality, and irony challenge and often subvert the boundaries of social regulation. As Lori Landay argues, however, scholars have presumed the trickster to be a male figure, or, at best, a genderless figure. Although tricksters are known for switching genders, implicit in these definitions are "the criterion of masculinity and the privilege of autonomy and mobility with which masculinity is synonymous" (p. 2). Landay's book fills a gap in trickster studies that has ignored the role of women in cultural acts of duplicity and subversion. This study examines how women characters in American popular culture from 1850 to the present had used trickery, deception, and disguise to articulate and subvert hegemonic expectations of femininity. . . .

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