Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture (Anniversary Collection) - Hardcover

Inness, Sherrie A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812234669 ISBN 13: 9780812234664

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection, 1998

Synopsis

Tough girls are everywhere these days. Whether it is Ripley battling a swarm of monsters in the Aliens trilogy or Captain Janeway piloting the starship Voyager through space in the continuing Star Trek saga, women strong in both body and mind have become increasingly popular in the films, television series, advertisements, and comic books of recent decades.

In Tough Girls, Sherrie A. Inness explores the changing representations of women in all forms of popular media and what those representations suggest about shifting social mores. She begins her examination of tough women in American popular culture with three popular television shows of the 1960s and '70s—The Avengers, Charlie's Angels, and The Bionic Woman—and continues through such contemporary pieces as a recent ad for Calvin Klein jeans and current television series such as The X-files and Xena: Warrior Princess. Although all these portrayals show women who can take care of themselves in ways that have historically been seen as uniquely male, they also variously undercut women's toughness. She argues that even some of the strongest depictions of women have perpetuated women's subordinate status, using toughness in complicated ways to break or bend gender stereotypes while simultaneously affirming them.

Also of interest—
Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture
Lori Landay

About this title

Review:

A quick stroll through the toy aisles in any American superstore splits gender as neatly as Moses did the Red Sea. On your left, the pink and purple ghetto reserved for girls intent on dolls and their endless accoutrements; to the right, the swaggering, bare-chested superheroes with bulging plastic muscles doled out to boys. Once out of the toy store, a gazillion more real and imaginary "tough guys" like Bruce Lee and Sylvester Stallone, Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and James M. Cain and Ernest Hemingway lope across the social radar. It's only in the last few decades that a battalion of "tough girls" hailing from toy stores, comic books, films, TV, and video games have carved out their own clearly lucrative niche. "In a culture where women are often considered the natural victims of men, tough women rewrite the script," says Sherrie Inness, author of Tough Girls. Whether you like them or loathe them, she adds, these cartoonish femme icons flexing muscle and attitude expand the acceptable scope of gender roles in the public consciousness. Deftly exploring how images of toughness and femininity play out in pop culture, politics, the military, and business, Inness also pays heed to how and why women's punches get pulled. --Francesca Coltrera

About the Author:

Sherrie A. Inness is Distinguished Laura C. Harris Chair of Women's Studies at Denison University. She is the editor of Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race and Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0812234669
• ISBN 13: 9780812234664
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240