ABSTRACT
It would be possible to see the centrality of action heroines in recent Hollywood film as posing a challenge to women’s social role, and to her representation within the cinema’s symbolic order. This is the terrain over which a developing debate is currently being conducted, within feminist film criticism, as to the significance of the action heroine. Cinematic images of women who wield guns, and who take control of cars, computers and the other technologies that have symbolised both power and freedom within Hollywood’s world, mobilise a symbolically transgressive iconography. At the most fundamental level, images of the active heroine disrupt the conventional notion — often significantly present as an assumption within feminist film criticism — that women either are, or should be, represented exclusively through the codes of femininity. The critical suggestion that the action heroine is ‘really a man’, a suggestion that is addressed further below, stems from this assumption and represents an attempt to secure the logic of a gendered binary in which the terms ‘male’ and ‘masculine’, ‘female’ and ‘feminine’ are locked together. As the earlier discussion of action heroines of the 1970s indicates, the female protagonists of contemporary action films emerge from a long cinematic and literary tradition. However, the action heroine has also, in the last twenty years, undergone a significant redefinition in western films. Thus, although she is not a product solely of the 1980s, there is a specificity to the appearance of recent action heroines. I characterised this in Chapter 1, in terms of the heroine’s move from her position as a subsidiary character within the action narrative, to the central role of action heroine, a figure who commands the narrative. A more specific phenomenon associated with recent cinema is the appearance of a muscular action heroine, a figure who is discussed below in relation to the growth in women’s involvement in bodybuilding as a sport and what this means for the development of shifting, ‘masculine’ identities for women.
