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Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the "Point of No Return"

The figure of the tough heroine in early 1990s action films crosses variable gender boundaries; she is a performance of masculinity in Aliens and Terminator and is the reinscription of a feminine masquerade in Point of No Return. As one of the most dominant genres of popular cinema since the early 1980s, the action film has done much to construct the body of the male hero as spectacle. The well-displayed muscles of such heroic icons as Sylvester Stallone and JeanClaude Van Damme have worked within a narrative space that presents masculinity as an excessive, almost hysterical performance. Indeed, the spectacle of the muscular male body has become the genre's central trademark, a feature that has allowed Arnold Schwarzenegger to catapult from professional body builder to the highest paid movie star on the planet. With their obvious emphasis on masculine ideals, action films in the 1980s seem to deny any blurring of gender boundaries: men are active, while women are present only to be rescued or to confirm the heterosexuality of the hero. Yvonne Tasker has described the action genre as "an almost exclusively male space, in which issues to do with sexuality and gendered identity can be worked out over the male body."' Yet as the genre evolves into the 1990s, women are increasingly being placed at the center of these traditionally male-only films. Building upon the success of the few eighties action films that feature female protagonists (most prominently, Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Aliens [1986]), the genre has recently produced a number of narratives revolving around action heroines: Blue Steel (1990), Silence of the Lambs (1990), Eve of Destruction (1991), V I. Warshawski (1991), Thelma and Louise (1991), Aces: Iron Eagle III (1991), and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), as well as numerous straight-to-video works such as Sweet Justice (1993) and the Cynthia Rothrock martial arts videos. All of these works, and many others, revolve around heroines who are more than capable of defending themselves and vanquishing the bad guys. The development of the hardbody, hardware, hard-as-nails heroine who can take it, and give it, with the biggest and the baddest men of the action cinema indicates a growing acceptance of nontraditional roles for women and an awareness of the arbitrariness of gender traits. The reaction of both the general public and film critics to these new action heroines has been remarkably varied. While Aliens and Terminator 2 have reaped huge profits at the box office and Thelma and Louise and Silence of the Lambs have collected Academy Awards for best screenplay and best film, respectively,