"Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (review)

Fueled largely by momentum from vital political movements of the late 1960s, early 1970s low-budget blaxploitation action films generated significant popularity and attention. Debates erupted over the paradoxical nature of the films: many black moviegoers delighted in seeing, for the first time on the big screen, heroes who looked like them, who "kicked ass" and still won in the end, providing a fantastic, larger-than-life display of the potential of black power. At the same time, however, these mainly Hollywood studiosupported films posed no material threat to the dominant white patriarchal ruling structure and, instead, contributed to maintaining its racist economic and social hierarchies, exploiting elements of black culture for financial gain and disseminating often negative images of blackness. From these films, for example, emerges the enduringly provocative image of "hypermasculine machismo" that remains profoundly resonant in contemporary hip-hop culture, illustrated by artists like Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and others. Additionally, the overly sexualized images of women, and black women in particular, that these films display can still be seen in the exploitative positions many women hold, often quite literally, in the countless lyrics and videos produced by today's hip-hop music industry.

From this backdrop enters Stephane Dunn's "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films. Dunn picks up where these prior claims leave off, arguing that the particular ways these racial, gender, and sexual politics play out through the "differently inscribed bodies" of women, and again black women especially, demand more critical and nuanced attention (xiii). Dunn focuses predominantly on five different films of the era: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Cleopatra Jones, Coffy, and Foxy Brown. She shows the ways in which these final three films offer images of "baad bitches" and "sassy supermamas" that reverse the typically subordinate role of women in nearly all black action films of the time, offering heroines capable of impressive toughness in their own right. While acknowledging the troubling hypersexualization of these lead women's bodies and roles, Dunn expresses the need to push beyond an oversimplified notion of the films as purely sexist and exploitative, calling for more intense feminist scrutiny of the power and complexity such images wield.

Before turning to her specific analyses of the films, Dunn begins to examine and articulate just how complex the cultural significance of these cinematic images can be, especially for black female viewers. Through surveys of and conversations with a wide array of black female spectators, Dunn illustrates the complex way many women process the representations they see of "themselves" on the big screen. Drawing on Manthia Diawara's notion of "resisting spectatorship," Dunn underscores the necessity of black women's methods of resistance to stereotypical representations of their sexuality if an empowering "critical black female spectatorship" is to emerge (p. 18). Using the examples of contemporary hip-hop artists Lil' Kim and Foxy Brown, Dunn shows both the allure and limitation of overly sexualized notions of black female power and independence, while also revealing the nuance with which many female fans negotiate this paradox. There is an important and necessary "pleasure in looking" at images intended to resemble oneself, Dunn argues, even as those representations "provoke an uneasy mix of admiration, tension, and concern" (p. 34).

Chapters 2 and 3 take a closer look at the political movements, and particularly the dynamics of the Black Power movement, that informed and inspired this wave of early 1970s blaxploitation films. Providing a historical look at the roles many women played in the Black Power movement, Dunn highlights the oft-occurring tensions between united racial struggle and patriarchal dominance. Furthermore, she examines the ways in which these notions of black political struggle and uprising are represented in the films, along with patriarchal assumptions about women's subordinate roles. She turns to a close analysis of the racial, gender, and sexual politics present in both Sweetback and The Spook, ultimately demonstrating how "black power became apoliticized...