Abstracts
Silke Andris
(Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU)
On the Ropes.
Accompanying the growth
of women’s amateur and professional boxing has been an
array of media images, particularly in sports photographs and
television, advertisement documentaries and fiction movies,
all depicting female fighters or women wearing gloves. Whereas
the physical combat of two men in a ring, with its fast action
and pace, the fluctuation of fortune and the promise of suspense
and resolution, has long been one of the great elemental story
lines for fiction films, female boxers are rather new to the
sport and the screen. Especially the 1999-2000 cinema season
celebrated the new occurrence of female fighters at the screen
with features such as New Waterford Girl (1999) and Girlfight
(2000), and documentaries such as Shadow Boxer (1999), On the
Ropes (1999) and Red Rain (1999). The Oscar-winning movie Million
Dollar Baby (2004) is the latest ‘reel’ knock out
delivered by a woman. In order to grasp the novelty of the active
female contender in the boxing genre, it is relevant to consider
her arrival, first, in the context of earlier, more (stereo-)
typical roles and conventionally accepted places given to females
and males in boxing movies. The task is to describe the key
meanings, attempted fixities and recurring visual and narrative
patterns and roles for females in boxing films and then the
discuss whether representations of women boxers follow or contradict
formerly established normative patterns. The question I wish
to raise are: How is the arrival of females in the gym debated
and rationalised? In which ways are the genre specific orders
of gender differences resisted or reconstituted when it comes
to active participation in the ring? In short, what are Hollywood’s
Queensberry rules for a girl fighter?
Barbara Creed
(Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology, The University
of Melbourne)
The Alien Quartet: Ethics & the Woman Warrior
The four films of the alien quartet
(1979-1997) have achieved enormous popular and critical success.
The main reason is that they focus on ellen ripley (sigourney
weaver) as a courageous woman warrior in order to explore a
series of aesthetic & philosophical questions. Over
a 20 year period the alien quartet has created a new image of
the woman warrior which has changed the way in which women fighters
are viewed in the cinema today. What are these changes? What
is a woman warrior? How have they influenced the representation
of the woman fighter in relation to the body? Sexual difference?
Mothering? The alien films pose a series of key philosophical
questions about women, ethics & the ruin of representation.
Catherine Driscoll
(University of Sydney)
The Melodrama of the Martial
Actress
Beginning with a comparison of
two 2004 releases, Catwoman and House of Flying Daggers, this
paper discusses a history of the woman who fights, with a particular
focus on how U.S. cinema distributes, deploys and intervenes
in the representation of fighting women in Chinese-language
martial arts films. A range of recent U.S. film and television
releases feature fighting women in ways that are directly indebted
to such images of the woman martial artist. This paper will
consider the shifting traditions of the woman as martial artist
since the success of "new wave" Hong Kong martial
arts cinema and current globally distributed Chinese-language
martial arts films, and the ways in which these have been used
by Western cinema. In particular, the paper will contrast the
Chinese woman warrior with the U.S. female superhero, but also
look for continuities that mark the exchange of strategies and
themes between these film histories. This will also raise more
hybrid films that self-consciously employ these intertwining
histories, including the Kill Bill films and Crouching Tiger,
Hidden Dragon.
Stressing cinematographic and narrative strategies, I will argue
that the woman who fights is always characterised as wounded
and vengeful rather than motivated by a public good. This is
a characteristic of superhero in general, although gender inflects
the articulation of this wound and this fight, and the female
superhero is always also both subject and object of various
disciplines that emphasise her personal/affective power as the
basis of her technical skill. While such melodrama also characterises
the woman warrior (in, for example, The Bride With White Hair
or Hero), the warrior has a calling which articulates her personal
wound as a wound to the community. The cinematographic, choreographic,
and other visualising strategies for depicting women who fight,
as well as certain narrative motifs, are clearly exchanged between
U.S. and Chinese-language cinemas, but the romantic melodrama
of the woman warrior is subsumed into the technology of the
body for the female superhero.
Alison McGregor
More than Mere Revenge? Violence and Identity in Kill
Bill
This paper hopes to examine the
motivations behind Beatrix's use of violence in the two volumes
of Tarantino's Kill Bill. Complex interactions with what is
ostensibly a simple revenge narrative show how the motives behind
Beatrix's violence go beyond revenge. These include the way
that the films are constructed, the relations between the characters
and, of couse, the 'inversion' of typical gender roles. I will
show how the self-conscious withholding of Beatrix's name points
to her identity being a central issue of the films, and how
her performance of violence shapes her identity. Finally, I
wish to examine the element of spectacle present in the films
as a possible extension of Clover's 'body genre', showing that
in these films Beatrix embodies rage.
Carolyn Strange
(Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU)
Schlock, Doc's and Blockbusters: Filmic Interpretations
of Aileen Wuornos
Aileen Wuornos was a mortal
who metaphorphosed into a monster long before the eponymous
film named her as such. Incorrectly identified as "America's
first female serial killer," she nonetheless joined other notorious
multiple murderers (Ted Bundy, John Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer) in
the popular cultural pantheon of predatory killers, whose names
became synonymous with evil over the 1980s and '90s.
Wuornos was different, however: some (notably feminists) framed
and claimed her as a victim of male violence and sexual exploitation,
who had upset the gender order by fighting back. In two made-for-tv
movies, two documentaries (both by Nick Broomfield) and most
recently Patty Jenkins's Oscar Award-winning hit, Monster,
film has become the principal medium through which Wuornos's
conflicting self representations (as a victim, as the incarnation
of evil) have circulated. Surprisingly, Wuornos' Hollywood-studded
portrayal has most successfully mapped the borderland between
female victimisation and culpability.
Catherine Summerhayes
(Film Studies and Centre for New Media Arts, ANU)
'Just a Woman Among the Cyborgs - Sarah Connor in James
Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)'
Early on in Terminator 2 ,
we see Linda Hamilton's character 'Sarah Connor' preparing her
body for battle even while under the severe limitations of a
high security facility for the 'mentally disturbed'.
We watch her imprisoned body as it is sexually abused within
the same situation. We also watch her during flashbacks
re-living the reasons why she has put her own body at risk.
This woman bears authority, courage and critical agency with
regards to the film's plot: she is the first warrior fighting
for earth. Besides her body being at risk, her autonomy and
warriorship is also at risk because of the important female-to-male
relationships which she has with the other main characters.
She is mother to one hero and once-victim/ now friend
to the other, Schwarznegger's cyborg character, T800. Sarah
Connor is interesting to watch for the ways in which a tough,
determined heroine can retain most of the agency available within
a narrative whilst also negotiating the 'feminine' traits of
being a 'significant other' to two very strong male characters.
Adding another twist to her predicament is the fact that
she is the only character 'bound' by the film to her own time
and place - she is trapped on earth, whilst time travelers and
cyborgs inhabit an ambiguous if inglorious realm in which they
play out the battles that she has initiated.
