The action heroine as feminist figuration: Mapping the transgressive potential of Hollywood's post-woman women

This thesis is titled The Action Heroine as Feminist Figuration: Mapping the transgressive potential of Hollywood's post-Woman women, and positions the figure of the action heroine as a productive political fiction for feminism. This positioning of the action heroine as a potentially transgressive figure proceeds from two basic premises: firstly, that the appearance of recent movies which locate assertive, mobile and heroic female characters in the central spaces of hugely popular action-based genre films-positions which are usually reserved for men-marks a significant moment in popular culture in terms of new representations of and for women; secondly, that these ftlms are not 'inherently' transgressive but they can be usefully explored as maps which offer way(s) out of essentializing images of Woman towards alternative images of female subjectivity as desiring, productive and trans formative. This project amounts to a rejection of the logic of gender binary dualisms and the images and theories it supports in favour of images and theories which view subjectivity as open, multiple and dynamic and which celebrate the positivity of difference, especially sexual difference. In Chapter One I introduce the figure of the action heroine as a feminist figuration and map out the reading position which allows for their transgressive potential to be productively explored. Chapters Two and Three set up the theoretical framework that I will work with in order to highlight the transgressive potential of action heroines. I examine the limitations and consequences of analyzing action heroines from within binaristic frameworks such as psychoanalysis, and offer an alternative approach by drawing on recent feminist engagement with the non-dualistic, open and trans formative model of rhizomatics outlined by Gilles Deleuze (1987). Building on this model, Chapter Four applies the genealogical project of feminist transformation - a process of working through the old to create the new - to the significance of placing active female characters in the central spaces of masculine genre films which have traditionally marginalised, victimized and essentialised women. Chapter Fix [i.e. five] focuses on the sexually specific process I call 'becoming-action heroine' - a rejection of the limitations imposed on women in favour of the desire to act, think and live differently-and charts this line of flight by mapping it over the narrative trajectories of Bad Girls and Thelma and Louise. My project in Chapter Six is to examine, through The Long Kiss Goodnight, how the 'hardbody' of the action heroine and the 'hardware' she often connects with creates a complex notion of corporealism which cannot be satisfactorily reduced to discrete unities or essentialist frameworks of specifically male or female characteristics or identities. The difficulty of sustaining a process of becoming is the crucial issue I take up and expand on in Chapter Seven. I highlight the importance of thinking creatively and making strategic and mobile alliances in order to successfully negotiate both the freedoms and the dangers of this process through an exploration of action heroines from the Aliens series, Tank Girl and Cutthroat Island. I conclude by suggesting that the action heroine's desire to keep on transgressing boundaries offers a spectacular example of the methodological approach that I see as being vital in ensuring that feminist film theory will continue to 'become' rather than risk being stuck in dogma.