The cultural-economic logic of contemporary action heroine cinema: (Post) Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Consumption of Spectacles

Abstract

Featuring sexually attractive women as the central action figure, contemporary action heroine cinema has brought opposing interpretations from the feminists and postfeminists. To disentangle the root of their bifurcation, this dissertation intends to look at the extra-textual cultural logic that forms and transforms the way audiences are engaged with the action heroine films now. Navigated by Jean Baudrillard?s theories of postmodernism, particularly of semiurgy, sign value, simulation, implosion, and consumer culture, I argue that watching these films is purely a consumptive process, and a multiple process in which the action heroine cinema is consumed as the composite commodity, as the spectacles of technology, as the spectacles of the heroines? bodies, and as the idea of feminism. In a cultural logic where representations become free-floating media simulacra, any political engagement with the image is thus diluted and invalidated ? a situation that puts feminist engagement with cultural representation in a chaotic dilemma.