Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women : the Female Trickster in American Culture

My secondary source: Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: the Female Trickster in American Culture, was found using DiscoverE. I tried a bunch of search terms, with “feminism and con artists”, “feminism and 1970’s”, “power and women”, etc. I finally found this secondary source by using the search terms “conning and women”. I choose this article because it focuses on American culture, con artist, and women, which gives context to American Hustle and allows me to explore gender theory in regards to key elements of the movie. This source connected all the different information I was searching for seemlessly.

Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women is the first study to explore the cultural work performed by female tricksters in the “new country” of American mass consumer culture. The book explores up to the twentieth-century fiction, film, radio, and television, Lori Landay looks at how popular heroines use craft and deceit to circumvent the limitations of femininity. Landay explores the connections between these texts and advertisements selling products that encourage female deception and trickery. This source gives me a new perspective about females in the media and will allow me to explore the film as part of this mass consumer culture in and of itself, as well as the plot and how the characters personify female societal structures of the 1970’s .

Landay, Lori. Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 1998. Print.