Female heroes of the 21st century. New bodies, new feminities: the case of Gina Carano/Mallory Kane in Haywire (Soderbergh, 2011)

• Autores: Cristina Alonso Villa
• Localización: Visiones multidisciplinares sobre la cultura popular: actas del 5.º Congreso Internacional de SELICUP / coord. por Eduardo de Gregorio Godeo, María del Mar Ramón Torrijos, 2014, ISBN 978-84-617-0400-2, págs. 214-228
• Idioma: español
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Far from being just entertainment, action cinema of the 80s and 90s reflects the changes produced in society regarding sexual, racial and gender identities, as well as the influence of the new technologies and media (Tasker, 1993). These changes also favoured new ways of perceiving and representing the body, both female and male. Nowadays, in the 21st century, action cinema reflects social transformations, that have allowed women to take full prominence in many aspects of public life, but also a yearning for a time past, when gender roles where rigid and secured, and nobody doubted what to be a woman or a man entailed.

    Thus, now we can find female heroes who are just as capable of violence and aggression as their male equivalents, and whose bodies combine traits traditionally associated both with femininity and masculinity, which makes these representations ambivalent signs and that can potentially trigger women empowerment and emancipation. In order to understand the implications of these new female figures, we will analyse the evolution of the female hero through the lens of feminist film theory, and we will then stop to analyse the specific case of Mallory Kane, a female hero from the last film by Steven Soderbergh, and who is, in many ways, an exception to almost all the rules that have constrained female heroes until now