American action films continue to portray female heroines as the weaker sex, says Katy Gilpatric, and that has the potential to influence a young viewing audience (assuming the success of American action films at the domestic box office can be attributed to the targeted youth audience) and their ideas about gender and violence. Her study is published in Springer's journal Sex Roles.
Over 58% of violent female characters were portrayed in a submissive role to a male hero in the films analyzed - despite being only 51% of the population - and 42% were romantically involved with him. The average violent female character in films was young, white, highly educated and unmarried. These women engaged in masculine types of violence (fought against males and strangers most of the time, often used weapons and caused high levels of destruction) yet retained feminine stereotypes.
They retained these feminine 'stereotypes' due to their submissive role and romantic involvement with the dominant male hero character, claims Gilpatric. Any idea where she is going with this?
Some film theorists content that the action character Lt. Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver in the movie "Alien" in 1979, paved the way for a new type of female representation in American popular culture. It is now common to see female action characters take part in hand-to-hand combat, wield swords, shoot machine guns, and use high-tech weaponry to destroy both people and property – behaviors once exclusive to male action heroes.
So what's the complaint?
Through the analysis of female characters in American action films, Gilpatric's study seeks to dispute the portrayal of female heroines as really transcending traditional gender roles and is instead re-articulating and representing gender stereotypes in a new guise.
In other words - society can't win. She looked at the most popular, highest grossing action films (a total of 112) released between 1991 and 2005 featuring violent female action characters with a focus on gender stereotypes, demographics and quantity and type of violence.
Katy Gilpatric said, "The debate continues as to whether the few action heroines that we are familiar with, such as Sarah Connor and Lara Croft, have broken down gender barriers in action films. This research provides evidence that the majority of female action characters shown in American cinema are not images of empowerment; they do not draw upon their femininity as a source of power, and they are not a kind of 'post-gender woman' operating outside the boundaries of traditional gender restrictions. Instead, "they operate inside highly socially constructed gender norms, rely on the strength and guidance of a dominant male action character, and end up re-articulating gender stereotypes."
Reference: Gilpatric K (2010). Violent female action characters in contemporary American cinema. Sex Roles, DOI 10.1007/s11199-010-9757-7