ABSTRACT

 

Title: ‘The Action/Active Heroine: Blurring the Boundaries of Gender to Construct the Empowered Female’.

   By Dr. Jacqui Miller

 

SThis talk examines the construction of female identity in contemporary Hollywood cinema, and will explore the ways in which characters may serve as role models for female audiences. Since Laura Mulvey’s trailblazing article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) it has been a given that women in Hollywood cinema are the helpless victims of the (presumably heterosexual) male gaze, connoting passivity and ‘to be looked-ness’. This has been challenged by subsequent scholars, such as Yvonne Tasker, through her articulation of the ‘active heroine’. Using case studies of Erin Brokovitch (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011) the analysis will examine the ways in which female characters use the tropes of ‘femininity’, such as costume, hair styling, make-up, and their bodies, as a form of masquerade, with which to achieve forms of behaviour and achievement stereotypically connoted as ‘masculine’. The talk will conclude that gendered identities are slippery and fluid cultural categories. In this light, far from being a blandly escapist cinema, Hollywood serves as an arena for gender politics.