A challenging but illuminating critique of female action heroes.
Debut author Fussfeld Cohen examines the rise of the female action hero in the digital age in this work of film criticism.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, video games and Hollywood movies began offering viewers something that they had not often seen before: female action heroes who behaved a lot like their male counterparts. (Think: Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, and Kill Bill.) Fussfeld Cohen argues that the primary reason for this trend was the newly available digital technology that allowed female characters to suddenly perform outside the physical constraints of the actresses portraying them. “By avoiding material limitations,” writes Fussfeld Cohen in the book’s preface, “the digital woman embodies a postgender reflection and articulates a new potential for a cultural change in a cybersociety that embraces digital technologies as a central means of expression.” By tracing the evolution of female heroes from the 1970s exploitation era (Foxy Brown, Charlie’s Angels) to contemporary depictions in works like The Hunger Games, Westworld, and Mass Effect, Fussfeld Cohen explores the various ways that female action protagonists have eroded, undermined, and upheld traditional understandings of womanhood. What’s more, Fussfeld Cohen uses these female characters as a lens to analyze the ways that digital technology has affected Western culture and the narratives we consume. The book is an outgrowth of Fussfeld Cohen’s doctoral research, and it reads as such, reflecting the specialized language of academic theory: “While forced to use hegemonic languages, the new diasporic cinema is regarded as creating hybrid combinations of images that express the disjunction between the visual and the verbal.” General readers might be turned off before they make it out of the introduction, but those who stick with it will find that Fussfeld Cohen has constructed a comprehensive study of this particular archetype. More interestingly, she has shown that the digital revolution has changed popular entertainment in more ways than simply allowing for more convincing green screen environments and better video game graphics. It has altered the way we consider gender, beauty, and the human body (for better and for worse). Suffice it to say, readers will go into their next summer blockbuster with a new perspective.
A challenging but illuminating critique of female action heroes.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-978336-18-6
Page Count: 214
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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