Introduction

Abstract

“Ladies, get out your boxing gloves and bustiers,” Jennifer Steinhauer writes in a 2000 article from the New York Times. “This year’s heroines of prime time and the big screen are muscular and trained in the martial arts, and they have no compunctions about slapping, immolating, and kicking their way through life …. They are restoring world order and ending bad dates with swift, punishing blows.”¹ Recent years have witnessed an explosion of tough women in the popular media—including films, television shows, comic books, and video games.² Along with Steinhauer, other commentators have noted this phenomenon.³ In 2000, Lorraine Ali comments in Newsweek:

The petite actress Zhang Ziyi in Ang Lee’s new movie “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” slays several men twice her size while drinking a cup of tea. In “Charlie’s Angels,” Drew Barrymore manages to pulverize her captors with her feet bound to a chair. And then there’s “The Matrix’s” Carrie-Anne Moss, who, even in a skintight body-suit, manages to flip her enemy like a flimsy omelet. Across the country female moviegoers no longer dream of being saved by Jean-Claude Van Damme but of kicking and chopping the bad guys till they cry for mercy.⁴