ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses especially on five films Pam Grier released during a two-year period when her stardom had an intensity rivalling that of Blaxploitation’s iconic male performers, such as Ron O’Neal, Richard Roundtree and Fred Williamson: Coffy, Foxy Brown, The Arena, Friday Foster and Sheba, Baby. Scenes of Grier suffering and avenging can thus supply an updated “cinema of attractions”, without thereby foreclosing on possibilities of political instruction and mobilization Such female investment in targeted violence is not merely reproduced in Grier’s Blaxploitation films, but hyperbolized. Mythical violence “is lawmaking”, as Benjamin writes; it operates as “bloody power over mere life for its own sake”. And yet, for Slavoj Zizek, divine violence possesses the revolutionary potential ascribed to it by Benjamin, for it is “the sign of the injustice of the world, of the world being ethically ‘out of joint’”.
