Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture

"Action Chicks" by Sherrie A. Inness (editor) is an outstanding collection of essays about depictions of tough women in popular culture. The ten contributors are drawn from the ranks of academia and write with considerable skill, originality and insight. The consistently high-quality analyses succeed in helping the reader gain a greater understanding of the myriad ways by which strong women are represented and evaluated in the media within the context of real-world social change. The articles are presented in a sophisticated yet entertaining manner, making for superb reading for anyone interested in an intelligent examination of pop culture and gender. Ms. Inness' Introduction, "New Images of Tough Women" discusses how strong women have always existed within American culture but have proliferated in recent years in tandem with second-wave feminism and greater career opportunities for women. The action heroine's muscular body signifies the real-life challenge posed to patriarchal power structures; perhaps not surprisingly, female aggressiveness has subsequently been perceived by audiences as both a desirable and threatening development. For these reasons, Ms. Inness contends that the representation of the action heroine as a leading cultural symbol marks her as a subject who is worthy of serious study and reflection. The book is divided into two sections. Part I is about the "Changing Images of the Female Action Hero". Claudia Herbst's "Lara's Lethal and Loaded Mission" discusses the eroticized violence embodied by Lara Croft and the video game 'Tomb Raider' to contend that her obedience to male fantasy and control ultimately cannot serve to empower women. Jeffrey A. Brown's "The Bad Girls of Action Film and Comic Books" explores depictions of gender role trangressions in well-known movies such as "G.I. Jane". Ms. Inness' "Tough Female Action Figues in the Toy Store" discovers that toymakers' relatively conservative representations of strong women as expressed through female action figures has lagged behind the progress women have made in the real world. Charlene Tung's "Gender, Race and Sexuality in 'La Femme Nikita'" finds that while Nikita rebuts notions of female passivity and asserts her own independence, Nikita's "Westernized and white heteronormative superiority" serves to reinforce the TV show's restrictive notion of white female privilege and Western imperialism. David Greven's "Defiant Women, Decadent Men, Objects of Power and 'Witchblade'" discusses how Sarah's constrained aggression and opposition to homosexual and lesbian power ironically positions her as a Terminator-like figure in service to patriarchy. Sara Crosby's "Female Heroes Snapped into Sacrificial Heroines" suggests that strong female characters such as Xena the Warrior Princess have traditionally been self-actualized and then destroyed by their media creators in order to reclaim the liberatory political powers that otherwise might threaten the prevailing social order.