What does power look like? Women heroes in digital action cinemaPurse, L. (2024) What does power look like? Women heroes in digital action cinema. In: Holmlund, C., Purse, L. and Tasker, Y. (eds.) Action Cinema Since 2000. The British Film Institute / Bloomsbury Publishing, London, pp. 221-236. ISBN 9781839022784
It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing. To link to this item DOI: 10.5040/9781839022814.ch-012 Abstract/SummaryThis chapter examines the commonalities between DC's and Marvel's first two solo female superhero movies. The chapter argues that Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel offer highly militarized visions of the solo female action hero, recuperating conventional notions of military power through their visual emphasis on ballistic weapons and jet flight, even as they signal their progressive anti-war and feminist credentials. Digital action cinema's ability to visualise its heroines in innovative ways is here constrained by the longstanding cultural ambivalence about women in possession of great power, and both films reach for conventionally masculinist tropes of military might, and of the fantasy of endless propulsion on which our patriarchal petro-culture has historically been founded. These films also locate whiteness as the seat of unimaginably extensive powers. At the same time, these films' narrativising of the challenges of retaining access to power and energy at least encourages a more critical stance on such issues. The chapter thus demonstrates the ongoing importance of being attentive to the ways in which fantasies of empowerment in cinema are designed and staged, and what this might tell us about wider sociopolitical and cultural contexts.
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