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Pollan, M. (1998, October 25). Playing god in the garden. New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/25/magazine/playing-god-in-the-garden.html
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We begin this book where Bad Girls (Owen, Stein, & Vande Berg, 2007) left off at the turn of the 21st century. In their analyses of media representations of transgressive women, Owen, Stein and Vande Berg argue that women and people of color are transgressive by their very nature because they are not at the top of the “rhetorically crafted…irrefutable social hierarchy” (p. 3). We agree, and we take this a step further. We claim that media representations of women and people of color not only are transgressive—they are also dangerous. The characters studied here are action heroes and villains, hence we embrace the polysemic nature of the term “danger.” Literally, the characters we examine are dangerous to other characters by virtue of their superior abilities to fight, use weaponry, and outwit their enemy. Simultaneously, the characters are dangerous to society as they transgress the boundaries of gendered expectations and offer alternatives to traditional roles. Yet, we offer another conception for the term dangerous. At a cursory glance, the strong characters we examine in this book suggest we are in a postfeminist era, in which feminist aims of equality between men and women have been achieved.1 Upon further investigation and deeper analysis, however, we find this superficial view dangerous to the millions of audience members and fans who approach these texts with an uncritical eye. The fierce females featured in our analyses ←23 | 24→transgress norms of femininity, and by disrupting societal expectations of the alignment of gender, sex, and sexuality, they trouble these relationships and reveal their social construction. At the same time, they also reproduce certain norms and codes of gender performance. Thus, the transgressive characters we feature are dangerous because they simultaneously threaten and reaffirm the established patriarchal status quo.
Considering that media maintain the ability to discipline feminist politics (Owen, Stein, & Vande Berg, 2007), that producing meaning is not a politically neutral activity (Hall, 1980), and that “the battles over gender in this country are never over, but only episodic” (Gronbeck, 2007, p. xviii; also see Phillips, 2004), we hear the concern voiced in Bad Girls about younger feminists forgetting the past when assaulted with numerous postfeminist depictions of “ass-kicking” female-bodied characters in television, film, gaming, digital spaces, and other mediated contexts.2 As such, we continue this line of inquiry to explore dangerous mediated women in the first quarter of the 21st century, beginning with Quentin Tarantino’s box office successes, Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2 (Fusion, 2003; “Kill Bill” director, 2004).3
Released in October 2003 and April 2004 respectively, Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2 were originally conceived of as one film. However, after realizing its lengthy run time, director Tarantino decided to split it into two films, releasing them six months apart (Fusion, 2003). The films, a box office success with a combined income of over $332 million worldwide (“Quentin Tarantino plans,” 2009), tell the tale of an ex-member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DVAS),4 Beatrix Kiddo, codename Black Mamba, known primarily throughout the first film as The Bride. Played by Uma Thurman, The Bride is a highly trained martial arts assassin adept with a katana.5 After a romantic involvement with the organization’s leader, Bill, she learns she is pregnant while on a mission. Within minutes of gaining this knowledge, she is confronted by another assassin. She pleads for her life and the life of her unborn child, promising to end her mission and walk away from her profession. Upon seeing the positive pregnancy test, the assassin spares their lives. Soon thereafter, Beatrix retreats into hiding and begins life anew, planning to marry a man unaware of her past. At the wedding rehearsal, however, Bill and the DVAS enter the chapel and kill everyone present. One final blow comes to The Bride; as she informs Bill it is his child, he shoots her in the head. Four and a half years later, she awakens from a coma and enacts her wrath as revenge, systematically killing all the DVAS members and anyone else who gets in her way, ending with Bill. The films detail her vengeance.
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We examine these films because the number of powerful female-bodied characters they feature far exceeds most earlier cinema. Four of the six DVAS members are women. As they split up, one of them employs a female-bodied bodyguard, and a female-bodied assassin was tasked with killing Black Mamba before learning she was pregnant. Notably, upon the films’ releases, the popular press highlighted the femaleness of the films’ violence (Brown, 2006; Corliss, 2003; Medved,
