Gender, Sexuality, and Toughness: The Bad Girls of Action Film and Comic Books

Abstract

Gear magazine’s review of the film The Transporter (2002), opens with the declaration that “director, writer and producer Luc Besson knows better than most how to make a beautiful woman even more beautiful: arm her to the teeth.” 1 This peculiar observation about a filmmaker best known for putting big guns in the hands of wide-eyed waifs in movies such as La Femme Nikita (1990), The Professional (1994), and The Fifth Element (1997) elucidates the problematic reception of tough women in action movies. When women are portrayed as tough in contemporary film, are they being allowed access to a position of empowerment, or are they merely being further fetishized as dangerous sex objects? Even within feminist film theory the modern action heroine has emerged as an extremely fruitful but difficult character to interpret. On the one hand, she represents a potentially transgressive figure capable of expanding the popular perception of women’s roles and abilities; on the other, she runs the risk of reinscribing strict gender binaries and of being nothing more than sexist window-dressing for the predominantly male audience. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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