the notion of femininity as a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; an emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and self-discipline; a focus on individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a makeover paradigm; and a resurgence of ideas about natural sexual difference. (pp. 615–616)
These characteristics have only intensified as postfeminism has expanded and reified, to the point that Gill suggests postfeminism now acts as a “gendered neoliberalism” (p. 620). This has led to postfeminist representations of women who are sexually liberated, reject feminism, or occupy positions of power in “men’s” milieu, including sports and the military.
As feminists, we seek to illuminate the rhetorical work performed by contemporary representations of a specific type of postfeminist hero who has garnered a cache of cultural capital: the contemporary female-bodied action hero who is smart, capable, physically agile and fit, accomplished in her career, and proficient with weaponry and technology. We recognize that gender exists on a continuum, including nonbinary and trans experiences and expressions. Our use of the term “female-bodied” as well as “women” in our analyses is not to privilege a harmful and exclusionary biological definition of gender. Instead, our use of these terms is intended to reflect slippages between sex and gender in the popular imagination, and especially in the media construction of dangerous dames.
Fierce, frequently sexy, often feminine but sometimes androgynous, these heroes take no shit. Not only are their female bodies a focal point for their construction as strong and exceptional action heroes and women, but they are also frequently characterized by presumptions regarding biological “essences.” It is precisely this conflation of sex and gender that we seek to illuminate and problematize as we examine constructions of gender routed through sex stereotypes. We note that persons of all genders, sexes, and sexualities are affected by the subject positions proffered by these texts; the gendered exclusions within the rhetorical construction of the “female-bodied” warrior are thus at the heart of our analyses. Examining examples of these representations over the last quarter of a century and across media, we ask: what equipment ←5 | 6→and constraints emerge from these portrayals of dangerous dames with greater access to power? Do women exhibiting these powerful characteristics provide us with new or unique equipment for living and feminist ways of being? What complications or contradictions arise for meaningful feminist action via these mediated representations?
Why Study Representation?
We have briefly traced some of the challenges and gains made by women in the past 50 years. Why frame a study focused on media representations in this manner? Because representation can have life or death stakes. For example, would you be able to tell if someone were drowning? Retired U.S. Coast Guard Chief Warrant Officer 2 Vittone (2013) wryly notes, “Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life” (para. 2). If people only learn to recognize drowning from televisual misrepresentations, as a society we risk placing people in dire danger. Similarly, we do not equip non-experts to recognize the symptoms of a heart attack. Corliss (2017) explains, “People sometimes describe heart attack symptoms as chest discomfort or pressure, while others say they feel an intense, crushing sensation or a deep ache similar to a toothache” (para. 3). Real heart attacks may occur as depicted in fictional narratives—as dramatic pain radiating from the chest down the left arm—but many individuals do not share these symptoms. This limited representation has the potential to cost someone their life. Representations can be very serious indeed.
Representations also affect what people imagine as ideal. Pollan (1998) documents how McDonald’s aesthetic demands for picturesque, uniform French fries led them to purchase almost exclusively Russet Burbank potatoes. Unfortunately, these potatoes are prone to net necrosis. Pollan explains that to overcome this purely cosmetic defect, farmers “must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals in use” (para. 51). Farmers avoid their fields for days after spraying and must tent harvested potatoes to off-gas prior to shipment. The desire for a reproduction of the image of a perfect fry, long and golden without lines or spots, superseded concerns about consumers’ or suppliers’ health, environmental ramifications, or nutritional content (granted, this might be asking a lot of a fast food item). This image created real-world demand and grave effects. Representations of an ideal can supersede what it signifies.
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Representations may even be indistinguishable from that which they represent. Magritte’s wry, surreal paintings such as “The Treachery of Images” (“Ceci n’est pas une pipe”) and “Not to be Reproduced” emphasize the futility of reproductions and symbols to capture truth. He critiqued representation almost 100 years ago, but these paintings eerily presage the contemporary world. In digital spaces, for example, representation is the same as the real. How are the words from one’s lips more “real” than those one types into a phone? Indeed, sometimes the image or representation might be more “real” than the “real” thing. For example, take Barthes’s (1977) discussion of Italianicity. When U.S. American students are asked to depict “Italy,” they frequently and consistently draw from marketing imagery of marinara sauce, pasta, and pizza. Students who have travelled to Italy often disclose that they have been disappointed to find it is not “Italian” enough! In this manner, the image supplants the real.
Baudrillard (1994b) saw this implosion coming. Drawing on the ancient Epicureans’ concept of the simulacra, he theorized how the copy and the real implode in hyperreality, which typifies our contemporary symbolic landscape. When the sign/signifier are coterminous and inextricably intermingled, the representation and the real become indistinguishable. We recirculate symbols, images, and ideas. Signs do not refer only to signifiers; as Baudrillard (1994a) posits, they gesture, over and over, to other signs until their point of origin ceases to matter. Meaning emerges from the circulation and reproduction of ideas and images, such that the presentation and the representation are the same.
This collapse of the symbol and its referent animates much of our communication in contemporary contexts, and symbols and stories affect our understanding of the world and visions for the future. Rhetoric is energy. It has the capacity to move others, via purposeful persuasion, constitutive creation, or epistemological shifts of how people understand, navigate, and imagine the world. Thus, engaging with fictional and speculative narratives hardly can be divorced from analyzing the “real” world. It is the real world, and it helps us to think, to envision, and to act in new ways in fictional, digital, and material contexts. In other words, if symbols constitute reality and make possibilities and ideals legible, then to understand reality, now and for the future, we must study representations.
Our Approaches
Our approaches are grounded in our training as critical/cultural communication scholars specializing in rhetorical criticism and media studies. We view ←7 | 8→texts as created artifacts manifesting symbols that have consequences for audiences’ beliefs, values, imaginations, and actions. Although this may seem obvious, these aspects of media—their symbolic nature and their consequentiality—are unique contributions rhetorical