The Rise of the Action Heroine

Click HERE for part 1 of this series.

Partly as a result of this everywoman heroine trend, partly in order to be more inclusive in traditionally male dominated genres, partly in order to push back against stereotypes, partly in order to legitimate eye candy for male audiences, partly in response to powerful lobby groups behind the scenes, and perhaps mostly in order to increase sales, the last couple of decades have seen a meteoric rise in the number of action heroines—Xena, Buffy Summers, Trinity, Sydney Bristow, River Tam, Lara Croft, Kara Thrace, Katniss Everdeen, Michonne, Black Widow, Daisy Johnson, Peggy Carter, Imperator Furiosa, Jessica Jones, Rey, etc., etc. Women, we are assured, can fight just like men. These characters are highly confident characters who routinely outclass men in combat, despite their typically short, thin, and conventionally attractive frames (Brienne of Tarth is a marked exception here, who approaches somewhat closer to realism). Even the modern princess can be a martial artist who can prove her strength and equality to men through violence, whether physical or magical.

There is no shortage of well-rounded characters within this category, although others are lazy ‘Mary Sue’ tropes. What is perhaps most noteworthy about most of them is how much their supposed ‘strength’ and independence and their narrative importance often depends upon their capacity to match up to men in combat, requires the foil of male incompetence, villainy, and weakness, or involves the exhibition of traits and behaviors that are far more pronounced in men. Cathartic though it may be for many women to see such female characters demonstrating their equality of agency and personhood on their screens, the ways in which they typically have to do this reveal deep problems with prevailing egalitarian visions of female identity and of relations between the sexes. (more…)