The doctoral candidate Andrea Ruthven, researcher at the Centre Dona i Literatura - Gènere, sexualitats, crítica de la cultura, will defend her doctoral thesis, directed by Helena González Fernández (Centre Dona i Literatura) and Belén Martín Lucas (Universidade de Vigo), entitled "Representing Heroic Figures and/of Resistance: Reading Women's Bodies of Violence in Contemporary Dystopic Literatures". This thesis considers heroic women in contemporary popular culture, specifically in dystopic literatures. Through the application of feminist theory in the analysis of the texts, a clear distinction is drawn between postfeminist discourse and Third Wave feminist intervention. The thesis focuses on the heroines in the novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009), Jane Slayre (2010), The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century (1990-2007), and The Hunger Games (2008-2010) trilogy to consider women's violence and heroism as well as posthumanism.
