Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970–2006 (review)

All too seldom, in reading about film, I have the experience of picking up a book that proves to be a revelation. Super Bitches and Action Babes is precisely that—a groundbreaking work that not only sheds new light on a trend in films, but also provides a fresh theoretical framework in which to situate its argument.

Typical previous examinations of women in action roles have seen them as masquerading in male guise in a manner that ultimately is subsumed within white patriarchy. Only female stars of 1910s serials have been generally regarded as succeeding in transgressing male dominance, largely the result of a formative era in film when the audience was largely female. However, in Super Bitches and Action Babes, author Rikke Schubart peels away old standbys, especially “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey’s essay on woman as created by the object of the male gaze in cinema.

Instead, Schubart outlines a far more convincing case, which she describes as postfeminism. Here, filmmakers, audiences, and stars are able to construct a variety of possible readings of screen texts. “Feminine” and “masculine” traits are not cast in stone for each gender, but fluid. The result moves beyond traditional definitions of feminism to Schubart’s postfeminism, which allows for this polysemy. Postfeminism permits a greater fluidity and playfulness (as indicated by the title of the book itself) in gender roles, a willingness to mock expectations and use excess as well as the more pretentious modes more valorized by film critics. In this way, the “High Trash Heroines” (as Schubart labels them) of the Lara Croft Tomb Raider (2001, 2003) and Charlie’s Angels (2000, 2003) films are recouped from a limited reading, as simply adolescent fantasies, to also recognize their element of female dominance. Here is a vastly more convincing framework that acknowledges the multiplicity of contradictory readings and their viability.

Schubart combines history and theory, analyzing in various chapters certain star personas, fictional characters, and groups of similar films. Wisely, although few scholars actually practice this approach, she recognizes the interdependence of both movies and television, not just in the obvious sense of examples such as La Femme Nikita (1990; 1997–2001 [TV]), but in that trends in the one medium cannot be fully addressed without the other. Indeed, it is the richness of the author’s perspectives, the elegant writing, and the willingness to challenge orthodoxy that makes this such a rewarding book.

Super Bitches and Action Babes finds the development of a new female hero beginning in the 1970s with the blaxploitation films of Pam Grier. Schubart traces the trend beyond Hollywood, particularly in the Japanese films of Meiko Kaji, and the Hong Kong, and later international, vehicles of Michelle Yeoh. The book finds five distinct types of female action hero: the Amazon, the rape avenger, the daughter, the mother, and the dominatrix. This proves a useful typology, and Schubart convincingly reveals how films have utilized these archetypes, tracing their historical and cultural pre-cinema background. In this way, Schubart also demonstrates how such films as Kaji’s Scorpion series to Pamela Anderson in Barb Wire (1996), with both emanating from “comic books,” go beyond victimization or kitsch to reveal new layers of potential meaning. The final chapter, largely on Kill Bill (2003), reveals how Tarantino successfully combines these five forms, providing fresh light on even such a widely discussed film.

Her analysis of individual films and TV programs are so well conceived as to be clear even if the reader is not personally familiar with them. Schubart not only explicates narratives and character but also is equally adept at more purely visual aspects. For example, she expertly dissects the costume of the Amazon, whether for TV’s Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001) or for Barb Wire, showing how its fetishization of leather and corset fuel not only physical display but also the role reversal and female dominance of the dominatrix. The abundant illustrations are...