Action Heroines in the Twenty-First Century: Sisters in Arms
Editors: Van Raalte, C. and Pheasant-Kelly, F.
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Place of Publication: Edinburgh
Abstract:The book aims to present a twenty-first century trend in representations of women in action-led genres, namely, one in which groups of women dominate the narrative. The trend towards women action heroines began to emerge well before the new millennium, with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis leading in Thelma and Louise (1991), Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Ripley in the Alien series, and Sarah Connor’s action heroine of Terminator 2 (1991). With a couple of notable exceptions, however, the female action hero has typically been presented as a single, isolated woman amid a cast of men. As such she is weighed down by a burden of representation that does not afflict her male counterparts, and haunted by the spectre of the fetish which, as Claire Johnston argued at the dawn of feminist film theory, does not represent woman at all but a ‘lack’ that functions to define the male. Her very exceptionality, moreover, serves to contain any revolutionary threat she might pose to gendered norms, rendering her ‘the exception that proves the rule’. This volume argues that over the last two decades we have seen an increasing number of films and television series whose narratives draw on the agency of groups of heroines, cutting across this narrative logic and offering audiences a richer range of representations and opening up new lines of theoretical enquiry for feminist and post-feminist scholars. The scope of the book is wide-ranging in terms of global reach, with chapters centred on South Korean, Indian, Chinese, American, British and Icelandic-Ukrainian cinema and television Essays involve both qualitative textual analysis and quantitative content analysis of a range of twenty-first century film and television, engaging with scholarship on aspects such as ageing, violence, gender, and race, and underpinned through post-feminist and queer theory. The book fits into subject areas such as film and television studies, particularly as these relate to gender, action, genre and national cinemas. It is structured around some of the productive tensions that inform feminist analysis of mainstream media: collectively and agency; (post-) feminisms and femininity; resistance and recuperation; and the representational tensions at work within intersectionality. Each chapter utilises case studies to enable detailed analysis of specific films or television series whilst referring to a more extensive range of illustrative examples. Genres addressed are diverse including action-comedy, superheroine and adventure films, police procedurals, heist films, science fiction, thrillers and the Western.
Source: Manual