Critically Examine the Ways in Which Feminist Film Theorists Have Responded to the Representation of the Female Action Hero.

Introduction

Psychoanalytic theory is a collection of ideas concerning the human mind and the unconscious. In Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (VPNC), she applies a psychoanalytic framework to cinematic representations of women, building on the work of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud to inaugurate modern feminist film theory. Mulvey’s essay concerns the ‘relationship between the image of the woman on the screen and the “masculinisation” of the spectator position’ (Mulvey, 1981, p.12). She introduces concepts such as castration anxiety, the male gaze, and fetishistic scopophilia into discussions of screen and gender, placed into a binary opposition of the active male and the passive, eroticised female. Her essay ‘placed a feminist agenda at the heart of film-theoretical debates’ (Chaudhuri, 2006, p. 2), which critics such as Marc O’Day and Carol Clover built upon through their textual analysis of women in genre cinema utilising the same psychoanalytic framework. These critics negotiate cinematic representations of women while examining the figure of the female action hero who transgresses the gender binary presented by Mulvey’s psychoanalytical approach. Both active and eroticised, the figure of the ‘action babe’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 202) can be found in the 2002 live-action Scooby-Doo film, projecting these problematised depictions of female characters towards the family audience. It is difficult to situate the transgressive gender presentation of the modern female action hero within psychoanalytical frameworks which rely on binaristic theory.

Literature Review One: Visual pleasure and women on screen

While the first wave of feminism concerned gaining women the right to vote, the second wave focussed on the politicisation and exploitation of the female body, which ‘inevitably ... spilled over into the realm of representation’ (Chaudhuri, 2006, p. 7). Mulvey reiterates this, stating ‘women’s struggle to gain rights over their bodies could not be divorced from questions of [the] image’ (1989, p. vii). It is in this context that Mulvey writes the essay VPNC, utilising a psychoanalytic framework to analyse the role of women in popular cinema, drawing on the work of Lacan and Freud and their theories of castration, the mirror phase, and sexual difference. Mulvey uses psychoanalytic theory ‘as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form’ (Mulvey, 1975, p. 6). Her investigation involves an assertion that all mainstream narrative film functions through a male gaze and that women serve two roles, the first of these being to function as spectacle, connoting ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (Mulvey, 1975, p. 11, original emphasis). The second function of women is to represent the threatening lack of phallus, established by Freud, and women are thus objectified to disavow castration anxiety. Mulvey’s psychoanalytic approach to identification and ways of looking serve as the near universal approach to modern feminist film theory, often contested, debated, and restructured by theorists, while others disavow her psychoanalytic approach for its rigidity and use of Lacanian and Freudian theories which have faced ‘hostile rejection’ (Kaplan, 1983, p. 24) from feminist film theorists. Mulvey’s analysis of how unconscious patriarchal structures frame women in cinema with an objectifying male remain relevant to an analysis of representations of women on screen.

In VPNC, Mulvey discusses three types of looking in cinema: that of the audience, that of the camera, and that of the characters within the screen. With an ‘invisible’ camera and the darkened auditorium, the distance between spectator and character is diminished and possibly unified, creating narcissistic identification between spectators and screen image. According to Mulvey, in a patriarchal society spectators are positioned with the male hero as ‘ego ideals’ (1975, p. 10). This builds upon Lacan’s theory of the mirror phase in which an infant recognises a reflection of themselves as a separate entity, the misrecognition of a presented ‘ideal ego – perfect, complete, and in control’ (Chaudhuri, p. 34, original emphasis). Mulvey applies Lacan’s theory of the mirror phase to understandings of cinematic identification, stating that the unification of the camera and male hero forces all spectators to identify with the male hero. The spectator’s identification with the male hero in mainstream cinema suggests a male perspective, which Mulvey identifies as the ‘determining male gaze [that] projects phantasy on to the female figure’ (1975, p.11). Judith Mayne describes the gaze in relation to looking through a keyhole, separating gendered spaces and ways of looking, noting the penetrating nature of the male gaze (1981, p. 33). This builds upon Mulvey’s assertion that voyeuristic ways of seeing in cinema offer an ‘illusion of looking in on a private world’ (1975, p. 9). When the male hero and the spectator are unified by the objectifying male gaze, women function as ‘erotic object for [both] the characters within the screen story, and ... the spectator within the auditorium’ (Mulvey, 1975, p. 11). A seemingly inescapable, objectifying male gaze is the subject of much theoretical debate as in ‘gaze theory’ (Manlove, 2007, p.83). The male gaze is a cinematic reflection of the inequality between men and women in wider patriarchal society, described as ‘phallic power’.

In a patriarchal society, where men have social and economic power over women, they contain phallic power in association with their masculinity, where the phallus acts as a symbol of control (Gardiner, 2012, p. 620). Much of Lacan and Freud’s psychoanalytic approach to sexual difference concerns male castration anxiety presented by the female lack of both power and phallus, first touched upon in the 1908 article ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’ (Freud, 2014). Mulvey states that the male cinematic hero occupies the phallic power and the control of the ‘male gaze’ while women lack both phallic power and control of the gaze. Thus, male characters are active in the cinematic narrative while controlling ‘the active power of the erotic look’ (Mulvey, 1975, p. 12). Women, lacking phallic power, are reduced to eroticised objects by the active male gaze. Mulvey’s essay was predated by Berger’s suggestion that in western culture ‘men act and women appear’ (1972, p. 47). This is reiterated by Mulvey’s analysis of the passivity of women in cinema and Neale’s investigation of masculinity on screen, which states ‘women are investigated, men are tested’ (1993, p. 19). One of the main negotiations within feminist film theory concerns whether there are ‘phallic females’ (Gardiner, 2012, p. 606) that break down the active/passive binary opposition that Mulvey identifies. In VPNC, Mulvey mentions the figure of the showgirl as a character who is at once eroticised and active in terms of who holds the power of the look. This example of woman as spectacle allows for the gazes of the spectator and male characters to be ‘neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude’ (Mulvey, 1975, p.12). Women function as ‘objects of spectacle’ (Mayne, 1981, p. 28), where rooms become stages and onlookers become spectators. This idea of female spectacle is built upon in the works of O’Day and Clover in their analysis of action heroines of the 90s and 00s. For these eroticised images of women to be pleasurable, there must be a disavowal of the castration anxiety presented by the woman’s lack of phallus identified by Freud.

Taking a Freudian, phallocentric approach to sexual difference, one of the main psychoanalytic concepts Mulvey utilises in her essay VPNC is the male fear of the woman’s lack of phallic power, identified as castration anxiety. The woman ‘symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis ... she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it’ (Mulvey, 1975, p. 6-7). This problematizes ideas of men gaining pleasure through looking at the female through the unease she presents as she symbolises a castration of his phallic power. This is an interpretation of Lacan’s work on pleasure and repetition, in which, according to Manlove, Lacan ‘never figuratively or literally associates castration ... with women or the penis’ (1981, p. 90). In Mulvey’s construction, she identifies two ways in which castration anxiety is negated, either by demystifying the woman through ‘investigation [or by] turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous’ (1975, p. 14). The first of these is sadistic voyeurism and the second is fetishistic scopophilia, a ‘pleasure in looking’ (Freud, 1991, p. 23) that reduces the image of woman to a fetish object. Both voyeurism and fetishism use the look of the gaze to exact power over the image of the woman, by demystifying her or by objectifying her. Though, as Mayne notes, in women’s cinema, female filmmakers ‘have turned around the voyeuristic gaze in order to critique the conventions from within’ (1981, p. 34). This suggests that some ideas presented by Mulvey have been responded to by filmmakers, reshaping structures of looking in cinema. One example of the fetishistic male gaze diminishing the threat of castration anxiety is through the use of close-ups to fragment the female form.

When ‘woman as representation signifies castration’ (Mulvey 1975, p. 17), fetishistic scopophilia or sadistic voyeurism are used to circumvent her threatening lack of phallic power. Voyeurism can be seen as an investigation of the woman to demystify her to diminish her threat to spectators, while fetishism reduces the woman to an object that symbolise sexual pleasure rather than ‘unpleasure’ (Mulvey, 1975, p. 8). For Freud, ‘fetishism involves the male “disavowal” of the female’s lack of a penis ... out of fear of his own castration’ (Freeland, 1996, p. 136). This fetishism involves what Mulvey equates to ‘the female form itself ... turned into a fetish object’ (Carroll, 1990, p. 352) using the camera. Mulvey suggests that a fragmentation of the female body through close-ups of body parts makes the image of the body lack depth and thus negates its threat (Mulvey, 1975, p. 12). The fetishistic construction of these close ups ‘arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight’ (Mulvey, 1975, p. 10), identified as fetishistic scopophilia. This reading of sexual difference in screen space depends heavily on Mulvey’s phallocentric ‘account of the visual drive in psychoanalysis [that perhaps] overemphasizes the role of pleasure’ (Manlove, 2007, p.84). Castration anxiety is a contested theory that is largely at odds with the work of modern feminist theorists, as theories such as this ‘may be radically culture- and era-bound’ (Freeland, 1996, p. 200). Though some psychoanalytic approaches to pleasure and ways of seeing have been contested, fetishism and voyeurism remain useful tools for analysing films and their depictions of women in a patriarchal society.

Fetishistic scopophilia and sadistic voyeurism are ways of looking at women in narrative cinema according to Mulvey and her theories of the removal of castration anxiety through the look of the camera. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud identifies ‘scopophilia’ or ‘pleasure in looking’ (Freud, 1991, p. 70) which is central to Mulvey’s argument about the film camera objectifying women as objects for sexual stimulation through sight, ‘subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze’ (Mulvey, 1975, p. 8). In these ways, Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze is linked to multiple understandings of psychoanalysis. However, Mulvey’s theories are contested as she fails to discuss female spectators finding pleasure in images of women. When pleasure is defined in relation to castration anxiety, this presents rigid binaries that images on screen can transgress. Mulvey’s perspective on castration anxiety, a development of Lacanian psychoanalysis, takes a literal approach to sexual difference rather than a negotiated view presented by later academics. Steve Neale discusses phallic power in relation to two men on screen, where the ‘phallic’ and ‘lacking’ equate to active and passive for ‘depiction of relations between men’ (1993, p. 16). This negotiation of cinematic phallic power such as the male on screen representing a feminine ‘lack’ suggests a renegotiation of the rigid binaries of active male and passive, lacking female presented by Mulvey. In 1991, Doane was concerned with female identification according to Mulvey, where ‘the woman who identifies with a female character must adopt a ... masochistic position, while identification with the active hero necessarily entails ... “masculinization” of female spectatorship’ (1991, p. 24). While criticised for a narrow understanding of sexual difference, Mulvey’s notions of the pleasure and power associated with the look of the gaze are useful for analysing the cinematic representation of women and has been central to feminist film theory since the 1970s.

Critics cited three main issues with Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze: ‘gender positions in the gaze, heterosexuality of the gaze, and seeing the gaze as exclusively (male) pleasure in voyeurism’ (Manlove, 2007, p. 85). Mulvey positions her arguments within a series of binary oppositions mainly defined by the heterosexual powerful male and the weak heterosexual female. Negotiating her theories to reflect different cinemas and positions has been a way of enforcing a psychoanalytic lens onto studies of gender representations. In 1983 Neale argued that ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ and thus passivity in screen space can also be applied to masculinity on screen in both heterosexual and gay characters. Mulvey also ‘leaves unchallenged the notion that for the male subject pleasure involves mastery’ (Silverman, 1980, p. 2). Critics' attacks on Mulvey’s essays ‘began as a critique of the appropriateness of psychoanalytic theory for film study’ (Manlove, 1981, p. 87). She has been criticised for her ‘monolithic definition of both male and female positions’ (Mayne, 2002, p. 48) while other critics such as E. Ann Kaplan responded to the ‘neglected issues to do with race [and] gay/lesbian perspectives’ (1997, p. xi) of feminst theory in the 70s and 80s. The many flaws of her politically charged essay resulted in Mulvey’s expansion upon her psychoanalytic approach to representations of women in later work which addresses areas of concern within her assertion that ‘psychoanalysis can be used to reveal the way in which conventions of narrative cinema are tailored to dominant masculine desire’ (Mulvey, 1989, p. 122).

In the decades following the publication and popularity of VPNC, Mulvey continued her work as a theorist and created responses to her original essay. Mulvey’s later works include ‘Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure’ (1981), ‘Visual and Other Pleasures’ (1989), and ‘Fetishism and Curiosity’ (1996), in which she revisits her arguments in light of critical response. As the name `Afterthoughts’ suggests, Mulvey declares ‘I still stand by my Visual Pleasure argument’ (1981, p. 12), providing supplementary material such as investigating the role of women in melodrama and addressing her use of singular masculine pronouns to refer to spectators. She focuses on the concept of female spectatorship and some of the flaws of her first essay ‘written in the polemical spirit that belongs properly to the early confrontational moment of a movement’ (Mulvey, 1989, p. 161). One idea introduced within this context is the idea of the ‘trans-sex identification’ (Mulvey, 1981, p. 13) that becomes second nature to women when the objective gaze of cinematic pleasure is a male perspective. The concept of trans-sex identification is a key element in the study of action heroines presented by critics such as O’Day and Clover.

Literature Review Two: Action heroines transgressing the gender binary

Action films from the 1980s were an ‘almost exclusively male space’ (Tasker 1993, p. 17) which ‘seemed to deny any blurring of gender boundaries’ (Brown, 1996, p. 52). These films portrayed active men while women occupied ‘the passive position described by Mulvey’ (Brown, 1996, p. 57); functioning as characters in need of rescue, a confirmation of the hero’s heterosexuality, women were ‘romantic figures that serve to distract and sometimes endanger the male hero’ (Waites, 2008, p. 210). The role of the female victim is a convention of action cinema where women act as an incentive for male heroes to seek revenge. Williams notes a phenomenon of the late 1980s and 1990s in which male action stars took on sensitive roles exhibiting nurturing and introspection. This coincided with female stars shifting in the opposite direction, ‘from more traditional roles into action’ (Williams, 2004, p. 170), occupying roles in action films seemingly at odds with their star image. O’Day recognises this shift in the 1990s as action cinema began to feature ‘attractive women stars as hugely capable heroines “kicking ass” in a range of fantasy-orientated screen worlds’ (2004, p. 201). What O’Day terms ‘action babe cinema’ (2004, p. 202) brought about new representations of women and new ways of utilising psychoanalysis to investigate these representations. The contemporary iteration of ‘the beautiful action heroine’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 202) relates to Hollywood figures of the past such as fantasy heroines, femme fatales, and the Final Girl – ‘who not only fight back but do so with ferocity and even kill’ (Clover, 1992, p. 37). Central examples of modern action heroines appear most frequently as characters borrowed from other media such as television, comics, and video games (O’Day, 2004, p. 202). The concept of an ‘action babe cinema’ challenges the gender binary presented by Mulvey as the action babe is a narrative focussed woman who functions the same as any man, capable of action and violence. When women no longer act as passive objects to be looked at by the male gaze, theorists have to negotiate the theories presented in VPNC. O’Day notes ‘three interrelated propositions reworked through the figure of the action babe heroine’ (2004, p. 202). The first of these is the gender binary, which the action-adventure genre has negotiated since the 1970s, in which gender became exaggerated and parodied to the point of ‘gender transactions and ... gender theft’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 203). While body-builder action heroes adopt sensitivity, ‘action heroines have traditionally been defined by their adoption or refusal of femininity’ (Sables, 2001, p. 20). Another negotion O’Day presents is Mulvey’s opposition of narrative and spectacle which contrasts with critics of action cinema who consider narrative and visual aspects both examples of spectacle when hero and heroine are both ‘(narrative) subject and (erotic) object’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 204). The third proposition is the fluid complexity of cinematic identification when both hero and heroine exhibit masculine and feminine traits and identification is ‘multiple and fractured, a sense of seeing the constituent parts of the spectator’s own psyche’ (Ellis, 1982, p. 43). This identification can be ‘sadistic and masochistic, cross-gendered, and moving through a range of alignments and allegiances’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 204, original emphasis). The ‘post-feminist aesthetic’ (Sables, 2001, p. 20) of action babe cinema presents a readjustment to interpretations of representations of women on screen from the psychoanalytic perspective originated by Mulvey.

When gender acts as spectacle in action cinema where there is cross-gender identification, the concept of visual pleasure is negotiated. Mulvey views the woman as an ‘indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film ... to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation’ (1975, p. 11), a concept at odds with modern action heroines who are ‘both the erotic object of visual spectacle and the action subject of narrative spectacle’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 205). The eroticised, active body of the female action hero exhibits both masculine and feminine traits, existing on the ‘have me/be me axes of desire’ (O’Day, 2004, p.204). In psychoanalytic terms, she appeals to various spectators through both narcissistic identification and fetishistic scopophilia. Being both subject and object, the action babe borders the psychoanalytic gender divide, defying gender codes such as ‘men as violent, women as having violence done to them’ (Brown, 1996, p. 53). The action heroine who matches the skill and violence of men ‘confuses the boundaries and is seen ... as a gender transvestite’ (Brown, 1996, p. 53). The development of action heroines that transgress the gender binary apparent in VPNC is an opportunity for critics to negotiate ideas such as phallic power and fetishistic scopophilia.

When the characters on screen control the action, they are acting within the paradigm of masculinity as stated by Mulvey in ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema’; the man moves the action, while the woman is the object of the male gaze. In the phallocentric Hollywood system, men hold phallic power over women and each other, with violence and wounds signifying castration anxiety when there are only men on screen (Neale, 1993, p. 15). When female characters are active and thus bordering gender binaries, it is possible to think of them as phallic females acting as the ‘male surrogate’ (Clover, 1992, p. 53) as discussed in Clover’s investigation of the Final Girl in slasher films. The slasher usually utilises a female protagonist who acts as action heroine, the only one left alive by the end of film. Spectators are positioned to identify with the Final Girl as ‘no male character of any stature lives to tell the tale’ (Clover, 1992, p. 44). This positions male spectators within cross-gender identification with the Final Girl rather than the emasculated villain. In her symbolic castration of the villain, the Final Girl takes on the phallic power when she defies the gender binary. Her ‘compromised’ gender and her ‘active investigative gaze’ characterise the Final Girl as a gender thief, culminating in masculine aggression and violence committed with weapons that act as ‘phallic symbols’ (Clover, 1992, p. 48). This resolves the castration anxiety presented by a powerful woman by questioning her gender presentation, ‘the suspicion that the action heroine is just a sheep in wolf’s clothing, rather than a legitimate role for women’ (Brown, 1996, p. 53). The transgressive gender presentation of the slasher film’s Final Girl parallels the action babe’s trangression of the gender binary representations suggested by Mulvey, and they can both be considered as masculine female characters, though their body remains an erotic spectacle and ‘female masculinity is an elusive, inherently paradoxical concept’ (Gardiner, 2012, p. 597).

As Clover ‘argues that castration anxiety is resolved by regarding the heroine as masculine’ (Hills, 1999, p. 43), Brown notes how ‘the figure of the tough heroine in early 1990s action films crosses variable gender boundaries’ (1996, p. 52). Rather than passive, the action babe is active, an agent of change who embodies masculine power. Her use of phallic weapons characterise her as masculine, yet she is still an object of erotic contemplation. The role of the symbolic gender transvestite signifies a different sexuality in cinema that allows the woman ‘a mastery over the image’ (Doane, 1991, p.24), meaning that masculine women are able to control the male gaze. The action babe appears as a combination of the female ‘soft’ body and the male ‘hard’ body (O’Day, 2004, p. 205). This combination culminates in a new kind of representation of women on screen who renegotiate the gender binary through their ‘soft-hard’ bodies, ‘flaunting a soft-hard combination of exaggerated curves and no-shit hardware’ (Sables, 2001, p. 20). An action heroine who defies the gender binary cannot be explained by a narrow set of binary understandings of gender presentation and power such as in VPNC.

The transgressive action babe who functions as both active and erotic spectacle as she ‘combines elements of the “soft body” of “woman” and the “hard body” of “man”’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 205) was preceded by the hard-bodied action heroine of the 1980s. These masculine women who utilise technology to go beyond the figure of woman have been defined by theorists as figuratively male. This hard body was replaced by the ultrafeminine, ‘post-feminist aesthetic’ (Sables, 2001, p. 20) of the ‘kick-ass’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 201) action babe. The action babe’s hard-soft combination does not equate her to male heroes as her image is undermined, while ‘their power is never mitigated and their sexuality does not weaken them’ (Waites, 2008, p. 210). While Brown discusses how the male gaze ‘codes the heroine’s body in the same way that it does the muscular male hero’s, as both object and subject’ (1996, p. 56), the female hero is a symbol of sexuality who must seduce to survive. Using ‘her sexuality as a weapon’ (Waites, 2008, p. 210) pauses the action of the film in erotic contemplation. Her seduction represents the action babe’s balance between her role as bearer of the gaze and erotic spectacle, ‘stressing the heroine’s sexuality and availability’ (O’Day, 2004: 203). Her hard-soft body both positions her as active and masculine while her curvy, feminine body ‘emphatically code her as female’ (Sables, 2001, p. 20). The transgressive action heroine who defies gender constructs and uses sexuality as a weapon positions the action babe as dominatrix-like, further diminishing the concept of equal representations of action heroes and heroines.

The action heroine poses a threat to men through her alluring sexuality, which makes her dangerous in a way male characters cannot be. While ‘both genders can fight, shoot, and blow things up ... only women can combine these tough skills with the threat of seduction’ (Brown, 2004, p. 66). The action babe exhibits masculinity while also enacting the role of a dominatrix through her exaggerated femininity and overt sexuality. For film theorists, the dominatrix symbolises a combination of both masculine power and overt femininity. Both the action heroine and the dominatrix mock masculinity while acting out cross-gender performance. The ‘figuratively male’ (Hills, 1999, p. 40) reading of the action heroine is reinforced through her gendered traits of control, capability, and violence, while the reading of her as dominatrix is complicated by these traits, marking her gender presentation as transgressive. The dominatrix and the action heroine both ‘combine disparate signs: male and female, subject and object, powerful and powerless’ (Brown, 2004, p. 69). Like the dominatrix, the action heroine ‘refuses the terms of the social contract of sexual difference’ (Morgan, 1989, p. 125). Her cross-gender performance of enacting both masculinity and femininity illustrates that ‘gender is primarily a performance of culturally determined traits and conventions’ (Brown, 2004: 69). This notion of gender as performance was expanded upon by a number of theorists outside of film theory, such as Judith Butler and Joan Riviere.

Mary Ann Doane utilises Riviere’s psychoanalytic analysis of ‘womanliness as masquerade’ (1929, p. 303) to demonstrate the constructed nature of femininity. This suggests that the female spectator does not engage in transvestism, but rather that gendered identity ‘is a mask which can be worn or removed’ (Doane, 1982, p. 81). According to Butler, there is no true gendered self under this mask, only learned behaviour and conventions, ‘gender is a performance ... a construction that regularly conceals its genesis’ (1990, p. 178). The action heroine, as a parallel to the dominatrix, uses gender performance and femininity similarly to the femme fatale, who must rely on ‘the predominantly masculine structures of the look’ (Bovenschen and Weckmueller, 1977, p. 129). The action heroine challenges the psychoanalytic gender binary as she creates new structures to perform ‘womanliness’ in non-traditional ways. Judith Butler’s concept of gender as learned characteristics is central to modern gender studies. The action babe is defined by her transgressive performance of gender such as strength and hyperfemininity, which usually extends to supplementary material in which the star is marketed as erotic object, further setting her apart from her male contemporaries.

When action heroines are objectified by the male gaze, the circulation of behind- the-scenes content perpetuates the role of the star’s soft-hard body through ‘erotic contemplation’ (Mulvey, 1975, p. 11). As O’Day states, ‘the gendered body of both the star and the action babe heroine are processed through the twin lens of eroticisation and active strength’ (2004, p. 205). There is also supplementary material exhibiting their rigorous training routine that produced their ‘fit’ body (O’Day, 2004, p. 205). The believability of these female stars as the heroes they portray, or their capability of strength, is central to their role as vehicles of cinematic pleasure. While the villains in these post-feminism action films exhibit exaggerated patriarchal masculinity, the female heroes are marketed as young, fit, pin up models, or ‘Barbies’ (Sables, 2001, p. 20). The action babe and star’s ‘physical beauty and alluring sexuality ... embody traditional, patriarchally defined qualities of femininity’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 205). Rather than exhibiting the passivity typified by Mulvey’s description of women as ‘connoting to-be- looked-at-ness’ (1975, p. 11, original emphasis), these women are also ‘a source of active feminine strength, ... by which heterosexual men in particular (including male spectators) are all too easily seduced’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 205). When female action stars are symbols of seduction and their characters act as symbolic mirrors to the dominatrix, the concept of the action heroine in children’s cinema is problematised.

Case Study: Daphne, the eroticised ‘action babe’ in children’s cinema

In the live-action adaptation of an animated cartoon from the 1960s, Scooby Doo (2002) displays Daphne/Sarah Michelle Geller as an eroticised, girl-power action babe within children’s cinema. Explicitly reluctant to play the role of the damsel in distress, Daphne manages to rebrand herself from a twee romantic figure to a martial arts expert in the two year narrative gap at the start of the film in which the Scooby gang separated. Daphne is an independent action heroine coded as hyperfeminine through her signature purple colour palette, low-cut dresses, and accessories such as handbags and high-heeled platforms, which fits the ‘girlier, post-feminist aesthetic’ (Sables, 2001, p. 20) of the action babe cinema. Her role as ‘action babe’ is most evident in a sequence in which she defeats a muscled, shirtless Mexican wrestler who is emasculated both through his defeat and through the dialogue, in which he accepts her assertion that he is now the ‘damsel in distress’ (1:35:37), an act which ultimately saves the day. She is a ‘kick-ass’ girl, but she is still a girl, so the narrative culminates with a kiss between her and Fred/Freddie Prince Jr., which she coyly chides him for (1:37:21). The concept of Daphne as the transgressive action babe who embodies both masculine and feminine qualities is further complicated by a sequence in which the ‘souls’ of male characters possess her body, and vice versa. Here she is explicitly ogled by men who are keen to objectify her body without her consent (1:19:24). This combines the gaze of the male character and camera in what exemplifies the male gaze, if not for her masculine voice and personality. In this way, the modern action babe further transgresses the fluidity of the gender binary. The rebranded martial arts expert Daphne fits within the parameters of ‘professionals doing their job, who have to be competitive and violent in order to survive and win’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 216). She is a competitive and violent woman who saves the day while also displaying a heightened performance of femininity culminating in heterosexual romance.

Concluding Argument

As the universal approach to feminist film theory depends upon VPNC, Mulvey’s psychoanalytic framework is central to any in-depth analysis of gendered performances in cinema. Though contested and revised, her theories such as the fetishising, investigative male gaze of the camera act as useful tools for investigating representations of women. However, the problematised image of the ‘hugely capable heroines’ (O’Day, 2004, p. 201) of the action genre require negotiated perspectives of Mulvey’s psychoanalytic analysis of sexual difference that favours binary oppositions between active and passive, male and female, and violent and victim. Though the male gaze seems inescapable, it may be possible to see this as a reflection of the deep rooted patriarchal structures in Hollywood cinema.

When gender is performance, men are eroticised by the camera, and women are active, the binary, psychoanalytic structures of gendered looking seems to hold less weight than it once did. With the evolution of the action genre from depiction of women as ‘secondary, romantic figures’ (Waites, 2008, p. 210) to the action babes of the early 2000s, action cinema displays an evolution of representations of women in narrative cinema that first subscribes to and then subverts Mulvey’s psychoanalytic perspective of sexual difference. Moving away from the phallocentric, Freudian theoretical models of identification and visual pleasure presented in VPNC allows for feminist film theorists to discuss gender as performance and spectatorship as a fluid set of identifications. There is no way to dismiss psychoanalytic approaches entirely, as they form the basis of modern theoretical approaches, but as theory adapts to the ever changing landscape of contemporary narrative cinema, the rigidity of these structures of looking seem less relevant to contemporary debates, signified by the methodological crisis posed by the active action heroine.

Conclusion

As Brown notes, ‘the development of the hardbody, hardware, hard-as-nails heroine ... indicates a growing acceptance of nontraditional roles for women and an awareness of the arbitrariness of gender traits’ (1996, p. 52). Different approaches to female action heroes are needed to conceptualise transgressive female characters when an active role in the narrative codes them as phallic. The transgressive female action heroine, typified by the live-action rebranding of Daphne, cannot be wholly understood through the theoretical model of psychoanalysis, so a new mode of understanding needs to be developed for these characters. A psychoanalytic approach defines the female lack and passivity as normative, disavowing the power of action heroines as transgressive characters. When representations of women can be conceptualised as transformative figures, the female body can be seen outside of psychoanalytic binary notions of passive, lacking, and other. Thus, the action heroine acts as a representation of an experimental figure that could help to produce different analytical frameworks in the future.

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