The essays in "Goddesses and Monsters" recognize popular culture as a primary repository of ancient mythic energies, images, narratives, personalities, icons, and archetypes. Together, they take on the patriarchal myth, where serial killers are heroes, where goddesses--in the form of great white sharks, femmes fatales, and aliens--are ritually slaughtered, and where pornography is the core story underlying militarism, environmental devastation, and racism. They also point to an alternative imagination of female power that still can be found behind the cult devotion given to Princess Diana and animating all the goddesses disguised as popular monsters, queen bitches, mammies, vamps, cyborgs, and sex bombs.

Jane Caputi is professor of women's studies and communication at Florida Atlantic University and author of The Age of the Sex Crime and Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth. She also collaborated with Mary Daly on Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language.