Dangerous Dames. Heather Hundley
male gaze. We write because of slut shaming. We write because discrimination and misogyny are still rampant. We write because legislators seek to roll back hard-won protections that save women’s lives. We write because more than half of the women who are murdered in the United States are killed by their intimate partners (Petrosky, Blair et al., 2017).
We write because the United States elected a president who disclosed in 2005, “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”4 We write because millions of people, donning pink pussy hats or not, participated in a worldwide protest January 21, 2017 advocating human rights and denouncing President Trump’s election.5 We write because the June 21, 2018 announcement that New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, who was the first elected world leader to give birth while in office since Pakistan’s Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1990, made international news because a woman had chosen to have a family and a career.
We write because the 2017 Time magazine “Person of the Year” was “The Silence Breakers.” We find the celebration of those who stood up “with individual acts of courage” (Felsenthal, 2017, p. 32) risking their livelihoods, personal safety, and reputations to speak out against sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, to be culturally significant. We are encouraged by the fact that “the women and men who have broken their silence span all races, all income classes, all occupations and virtually all corners of the globe” (Felsenthal, 2017, p. 37). As the #MeToo movement gains momentum, it overshadows those who spoke up and opposed sexual harassment and did not gain support prior to social media, and the embodied outcomes that will emerge from this mediated activism are not yet clear. We write because despite frequent media claims that “things are different” in the #MeToo era, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony regarding her sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh failed to prevent his Supreme Court confirmation. We write because on the day of Ford’s ←14 | 15→much publicized testimony, calls to the National Suicide Prevention hotline doubled the normal volume (Sacks, 2018). We write because women’s voices continue to be silenced, dismissed, and unheard.
We write because feminists have work yet to do. We write because we hear the concerns from the Mothership (Owen, Stein, & Vande Berg, 2007), the voices of our feminist mentors, the critiques from women of color, and our internal dialogue questioning the intersection of second wave, third wave, and postfeminist concepts. We write because we experience the daily paradox between what we see in the media and what we live on the streets.
Finally, we write because representations matter. Symbols create realities and futures, and in a world where image and reality have collapsed into one another, we cannot become that which we cannot imagine. Burke (1973) notes that literature serves as “equipment for living” (p. 293). We can expand that to encompass all narratives, including those in the texts we investigate and the speculative narrative our inquiry itself offers. Exploration yields new scripts, new possibilities, and new ideas. Although we might extrapolate that texts serve as blueprints, based on this, they need not detail every action and outcome. Indeed, Jameson (2005) suggests the rhetorical function of utopian narratives—namely, hope—affords their primary force. The vision, whether its hopeful nature alone or the specifics depicted, provides new equipment, new ways of being and doing. We write because we are hopeful, and because rhetoric expands the boundaries of imagination.
Preview of Chapters
The book contains six content chapters, this introduction, and a conclusion. They proceed from intersectional analyses of ideological production, spectacular power, and gender and race performativity in a set of films to posthuman analyses of cyborgs and the cognisphere in science fiction television and video games. Our analyses focus on female-bodied protagonists and characters who exhibit signs of strength and power.6 Throughout, we attend to the complexities of these representations of women’s empowerment in postfeminist media.
Chapter 1, “Superficial Postfeminist and Postmodern Portrayals: Hegemonic and Hypermasculine Ideologies in Kill Bill, Volumes 1 & 2,” analyzes identities among the female-bodied characters in Tarantino’s 2003 and 2004 films. We attend to the lead, Beatrix Kiddo, as well as the ensemble of dangerous dames depicted in the films, in order to unpack how they are constructed rhetorically ←15 | 16→as professionally successful and strong, as women to be feared and revered. Although these messages are potentially empowering, the films’ postfeminist messages and postmodern aesthetics mask the hypermasculine and patriarchal messages imbedded within the films’ narrative.
Chapter 2, “Appropriating Feminism: The Naturalization of Patriarchal Power Structures in The Hunger Games,” continues the ideological analysis begun in Chapter 1. The films depict the protagonist Katniss Everdeen as a postfeminist hero connected with the natural environment. The antagonist is a totalitarian government associated with hypercivilization. By juxtaposing the two, with nature prevailing over hypercivilization, patriarchal narratives, including the reaffirmation of traditional gender roles, the espousal of heteronormativity, and promotion of biological determinism, are naturalized. In doing so, the films appropriate feminism, granting credence to these traditional and limiting ideologies.
Building upon the first part of the book, Chapter 3, “Ass-Kicking Women and the Fight for Justice: Constructing a (White) Feminine/ist Icon in Wonder Woman,” analyzes how Wonder Woman’s 2017 big-screen iteration draws from her storied comic-book past and illuminates contradictions inherent in her representation as a feminist icon. Although the movie at times resists the male gaze and offers feminist critiques, Wonder Woman’s portrayal repeats many of the elisions that have characterized liberal (white) feminism, including the embrace of Republican Motherhood, heteronormative structures, and gendered rhetorics of heroism that uphold racist, nationalist, and imperialist endeavors.
Chapter 4, “Visualizing Violent Femininity: Race, Sex and Femmes Fatales in Atomic Blonde and Proud Mary,” turns to the sexualization and fetishization of women’s strong bodies in the representation of two 21st century fighting femme protagonists. These female heroes embody many “masculine” characteristics in their on-screen enactments of violence, but both are configured within the tradition of the femme fatale popularized by mid-20th century film noir. By interrogating intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in the media construction of dangerous dames, this chapter illustrates how performative scripts combine to construct, and delimit, pop culture portrayals of women’s strength.
In the final part of the book, we turn our attention to contemporary science fiction television and video games. Chapter 5, “Hybridizing and Networking Beyond Boundaries: Cyborgs and Cognispheres in the Bionic Woman and Dark Matter,” considers dangerous dames who have had mechanical manipulations ←16 | 17→imposed upon them without their consent, turning them into cyborgs and intertwining them with the cognisphere. Employing a posthuman approach, the chapter explores how two Enlightenment binaries (mind/body and human/machine) are revivified and revised by the strong women in these two science fiction television series.