Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture [Paperback]

Prof. Sherrie A. Inness (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2004 | ISBN-10: 1403963967 | ISBN-13: 978-1403963963 | Edition: First Edition

Xena, Buffy, Lara Croft, La Femme Nikita. The women of pop culture are center stage and tougher than ever. Action Chicks is a groundbreaking collection highlighting the heroines who fascinate us. What can they tell us about how popular culture depicts women? Do the characters escape traditional gender role expectations? Or do they adhere to sexual, racial, ethnic, and class stereotypes? The essays in Action Chicks provide a new look at these icons and their relationship to the popular media machine. This is a thought-provoking anthology that is bound to change how we think about gender and toughness.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Action Chicks is insightful, provocative, and fun to read. From action figures to video games, this book explains who the chicks are and what they mean. Trenchant and compelling analysis."--Robin Roberts, Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies, Louisiana State University author of Sexual Generations: Star Trek:The Next Generation and Ladies First: Women in Music Videos

"Lara Croft and Barb Wire: Role models or boy toys? Xena and Buffy: Why did they have to die? Action chicks are here--in movies and TV, in comics and video games--in our lives, and they're not going away, nor do we want them to go away. Aside from the obvious-- that if La Femme Nikita can be buffed and beautiful, kick butt and wear fabulous clothes, so can we--what message do these women have for us? In ten mind-opening chapters, Action Chicks, takes on the positive and the negative of tough babes from comic books to the World Wrestling Federation, and gave this Xena fan enough meaty subject matter to chew on that I didn't feel hungry after reading the book."--Trina Robbins, author of From Girls to Grrrlz and The Great Women Cartoonists

Book Description

Xena, Buffy, Lara Croft. WWF, The Sopranos, Witchblade, La Femme Nikita. The women of pop culture are center stage and as tough as ever. Action Chicks is a groundbreaking collection highlighting the heroines we've grown to worship. What can they tell us about women in 2003? What can they tell us about how popular culture depicts women? Do the characters escape traditional gender role expectations? Or do they adhere to sexual, racial, ethnic, and class stereotypes? The essays in Action Chicks provide fans with a new look at their favorite icons and their relationship to the popular media machine. A fascinating collection that's bound to stir up some excitement.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; First Edition edition (February 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1403963967
• ISBN-13: 978-1403963963
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #802,178 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A profoundly disappointing collection on an otherwise fascinating subject, June 6, 2006

By 

Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture (Paperback)

When Susan Faludi published BACKLASH in 1991, one of her chapters was devoted to the regressive representations of women in TV and film. There was even the hint of resignation that this was not a temporary blip, but perhaps a permanent or long term situation. Luckily and in part thanks to Faludi calling attention to the backlash, instead we saw in popular culture an explosion of images of strong women. In TV alone we have seen the emergence of such characters as Dana Scully, Xena, Buffy Summers, Aeryn Sun, Sydney Bristow, Max Guevera, Kathryn Janeway, and Veronica Mars, not to mention those Gilmore girls. Even shows not specifically centered on strong women have them as a matter of course, such as Kate Austen on LOST or Samantha Carter on STARGATE SG-1. Indeed, a chasm seems to separate our situation and Faludi's in 1991.

Given the richness of the subject, it is simply shocking how weak this collection of essays is. All anthologies are uneven, but this one contains a higher proportion of weak or simply awful essays than most. I don't have a confident explanation for why these essays are on the whole so weak, though they do share some common characteristics. Let me highlight a couple of these. I do want to add, however, that there are a couple of very good essays, in particular Renny Christopher's marvelously insightful essay on Aeryn Sun in FARSCAPE as well as the essay by the volume's editor on female action figures. But most of the essays are deeply flawed. Let me explain my problems with them.

One very obvious problem with several of the essays is that they either misread the shows that they discuss or almost intentionally misrepresent their content. For instance, one essay guilty of this is Sharon Ross's essay about female friendship in BUFFY and XENA. Most of what she says is unquestionably true about XENA and if the essay had been merely about that show would have been one of the stronger additions to the collection. But it is a terrible reading of BUFFY. She reads BUFFY as largely concerned with the kind of discussion and reevaluation of matters that she views as uniquely true of female friendship. If you read the essay without having seen the show, you would imagine that Willow was nearly the co-lead character of the show, instead of a member of an ensemble cast. In point of fact, BUFFY is most decidedly not a show about female friendship. In fact, excluding Willow, Buffy is actually more heterosocial in her relationships. In fact, Willow aside, Buffy relates more easily to men than to women. Apart from Willow, all her closest friends and confidantes are men, including Giles, Xander, Angel, and Spike. Her relations with women are almost always uneasy and conflicted, including her mother, Faith, Dawn, Cordelia, and Anya. Moreover, even including Willow there is never a point in the series where she primarily or exclusively goes to Willow for advice instead of Xander or Giles. To read BUFFY as primarily as a show about female friendship is a travesty. Ross also states that the show is at its "most effective when" it "offer[s] stories of the primary female friends resisting men's attempts to keep them apart." She then cites several shows as examples, including "I Robot, You Jane," "The 'I' in Team," and "Yoko." These are not bad episodes, but they are far, far from the show at its most effective and none would make any reasonable list of, say, the top twenty-five or thirty episodes of the show's 144. In other words, only by distorting BUFFY to a remarkable and untenable degree can it be made to be a show about female friendship. There is no question that there is a strong female friendship as one of many major constituent parts of the show, but it is hardly privileged in the way that Ross states.

Another example is Sara Crosby's essay on three supposed instances of suicidal self-sacrifice among TV action heroines due to the forceful suppression of strong female heroes by structures of patriarchy: Max at the end of Season One of DARK ANGEL, Buffy at the end of Season Five of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, and Xena in her show's series finale. I won't argue with the Xena part, because that is fairly accurate, but the characterization of Max and Buffy's deaths is utterly baffling. First, Crosby characterizes Max's death as a suicide, which is absurd, unless being shot by one's clone, over which one maintains utterly no control and therefore no agency, counts as a suicide. Agency and not similar DNA (and the DNA is only similar and not exact, since one of the themes of the show in Season Two--and it would have been THE theme of Season Three had it not been canceled--was Max's genetic uniqueness, which would have enabled her to save the world from annihilation) is acknowledged in every day language as determinative of suicide. But Crosby barely hints at the radical departure from normal language use she is making. It also isn't clear what structures of patriarchy she is talking about in DARK ANGEL. In fact, Manticore, which is the entity that kills Max, is totalitarian, not patriarchal. Unless one can generate a convincing essentialist definition of totalitarian as patriarchal this is not at all the same thing. There is in fact a remarkable disregard for gender at Manticore and one of Max's more striking traits, despite being played by a very beautiful woman, is that she has never been feminized. We could debate the fact that Jessica Alba is beautiful, but the brute fact of prime time television is that we will never, ever have an unlovely young person playing a lead role in such a show. Similarly, in talking of Buffy's death at the end of Season Five, it is impossible to identify the structures of patriarchy. Interestingly she never mentions the fact that the Big Bad of Season Five is a goddess except in passing. Buffy sacrifices herself to close the hell portal to save her sister and her friends because of some supernatural rules. Are the rules patriarchal? If not, it is difficult to see how her death becomes gendered. In other words, the entire essay is a colossal stretch.

The fundamental problem with these two and several other essays is that the writers do not seem to understand the different from actual society and a television series. A TV series may reflect society in the way it is conceived, but it does not actually contain that society. In fact, most of the TV series of the past fifteen years with strong female leads actually imagine a society that is different from the actual one. In our real society, there truly are systems of patriarchy that repress women and attempt to relegate them in lessened roles. But that system may not be replicated in a TV series. In fact, there is a gender utopianism in many of these shows. If one watches BUFFY or FARSCAPE or VERONICA MARS one will be struck by how rarely the ability of these women to take care of themselves is questioned by the males around them. As Renny Christopher points out in her brilliant final essay of the volume on FARSCAPE (an essay that alone justifies the purchase price), FARSCAPE is a representation of a world in which patriarchy does not exist. The Peacekeepers may be ruthless and totalitarian and authoritarian, but he makes no distinctions based on gender. But what is true of FARSCAPE is largely true of these other shows. The writers try to make the shows about issues that are really excluded by the show. Now, one might argue with how realistic the shows are by excluding or minimizing patriarchal structures (they aren't realistic, but that is because they are utopian: they are trying to show us a world that ought to be, a world in which women are allowed to be as strong as men), but you can't escape the fact that they are fictional worlds. In BUFFY a man does not react with shock if Buffy kills a demon with her bare hands in front of a male as in "The Prom." I haven't rewatched all of BUFFY in a year, but the only moment I can recall when someone was shocked that she could do what she did despite being female was the beginning of "The Gift," when a boy she has saved from a vampire asks her how she "did that." "It's what I do," she replies. "But you're just a girl." But even here the point is that an unrealistic burden has been placed upon her, causing her to feel the weight of the world on her shoulders, leading her to answer, "That's what I keep telling myself." But this is the exception. Normally no one acts shocked if she clears the Bronze of vampires in "Welcome to the Hellmouth, Pt. 2" or overcomes a large gang of demons in "Anne."

I guess what I'm objecting to is an overall intellectual clumsiness in these essays. As a grad student I read countless bad essays along the lines of the ones here and I think at least many of them are a result of the "publish or perish" mentality dominating American higher education. And there is a push if you are in gender studies to take some of the central assumptions and apply them to a wide range of subject matter. It is as if they strive to understand their discipline first, and then only half-heartedly study that towards which they apply it. One example of intellectual sloppiness can be found throughout the first essay in the collection, Claudia Herbst's essay on Lara Croft. Throughout she makes one generalization after another about the actual mental or psychological states of gamers that could only actually be validated by statistical analyses of actual gamers. A large number of her "proofs" are actually anecdotes from postings on boards on the Internet. A good example can be found in this passage: Writing of Lara she says, "Men may interpret her toughness and her tiny waist as sexy. Many women find her figure disturbing and respond negatively to the nature-defying design of her body. Perhaps what women are responding to . . . " (p. 35). These are incredibly loose hinges upon which... Read more ›

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The challenge to patriarchal power, February 15, 2006

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Malvin (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture (Paperback)

"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.

Part II is on the topic of "New Images of Toughness". Dawn Heinecken's "Gender, Transgression and the World Wrestling Federation's Chyna" is a fascinating study of how Chyna's muscularity heightened anxieties about homoeroticism and male privilege in the highly sexualized culture of the WWF. Marilyn Yaquinto's "Mamas, Molls and Mob Wives" surveys the gangster film genre and demonstrates how contemporary TV shows such as 'The Sopranos' have turned assumptions about the genre around by depicting women who in many ways are stronger than their male counterparts. Sharon Ross' "Female Friendship and Heroism in 'Xena' and 'Buffy'" contrasts the heroine's embrace of empathy and community with the traditional loner male hero to explain why Xena and Buffy can provide positive examples to young women. Renny Christopher's "'Farscape's' Inverted Sexual Dynamics" finds that the post-patriarchal world depicted in the TV show 'Farscape' suggests a possible "queer" universe wherein heterosexual and homosexual dynamics might mix freely to create a new and potentially liberatory world.

I highly recommend this exceptionally fun, provocative and enlightening book to everyone.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A very weak book, January 27, 2007

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wwgrl "Staci" (ALABAMA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture (Paperback)

Personally I really didn't care for this book. To me it focused on the downside of the most popular, strong women charactrs such as Lara Croft, Wonder Woman, etc.
In Chapter 1 it talks about the character Lara Croft. Yes we know the character was designed by men and primarily for men but I bet more females started playing video games when they had such a strong kickass woman character. I know I did. Yes she has a thin waist, big boobs and she's pretty. I won't even get into the white arguement. I don't think her character would be so popular w/ men and women alike if she was 200 pounds, no boobs, and she wasn't pretty. Sexy thin women sell that's all there is to it! It might not be right but it's reality in this day and age.Men play for an entirely different reason than women.
Chapter 2 pretty much stays in th same vein now this time it's the character Barbwire, comic book character Lady Rawhide and Wonder Woman.
They must be Domanitrixs cause they dress in black leather or carry a whip or lasso. Give me a break.
Chapter 3 does have some merits it talks about girl action figures. How they started becoming more visible.
Chapter 6 made a good point why exactly did Max from Dark Angel, Buffy, & Xena all die around a two month period.
Chapter 9 about female friendhip in Xena and Buffy.
All in all I was expecting better!!!Just go to your local library if you still want to read it. Don't waste your money on this one.