From 'figurative males' to action heroines: further thoughts on active women in the cinema

This now famous quote neatly captures the confusion and uncertainty surrounding the transgressive character of the action heroine.' Smarter, tougher and better equipped than both the traditional heroines of the action genre and many of their contemporary male counterparts, action heroines are a new breed of arse-kicking female protagonists in action genre films Aggressive, heroic and transformative characters such as Ripley from the Alien series, Sarah Connor from Terminator 2Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991), Rebecca from Tank Girl (Rachel Talalay, 1995), Morgan Adams from Cutthroat Island (Renny Harlan, 1995), both Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) all of the Bad Girls (Jonathan Kaplan, 1994) and, more recently, Samantha/Charlie from The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlan, 1996) transgress both cinematic genre codes and cultural gender codes which position female characters as the passive, immobile and peripheral characters of Hollywood action cinema. Although these powerfully transgressive characters open up interesting questions about the fluidity of gendered identities and changing popular cinematic representations of women, action heroines are often described within feminist film theory as 'pseudo males' or as being not 'really' women