Spectacular Bodies Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema

• Main Author: Tasker, Yvonne
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Routledge 1993; Taylor and Francis; Taylor & Francis Group
• Edition: 1
• Series: Comedia
• Subjects: action; Action and adventure films; Adventure films; beauty; connor; dolph; fatal; Film Studies; heroine; Machismo in motion pictures; sarah; Sex role in motion pictures; stallone; Strong men in motion pictures; sylvester; United States; Independent Woman; Air Hostess; Female Bodybuilding; beauty; Young Man; Point Break; Young Guns; sarah; Muscular Male Hero; Fatal Beauty; dolph; Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song; fatal; Eroticised Male Body; Country Music; Joe Pesci; Blood Part II; action; Muscular Female Body; Publicity Image; Rambo Films; stallone; Pump Iron II; Blue Steel; film; sylvester; Miami Vice; connor; Star Image; Muscular Male Body; Muscular Hero; heroine; Popular Cinema; Action Heroine; Female Bodybuilder
• ISBN: 9780415092241; 041509223X; 9780415092234; 0415092248
• DOI: 10.4324/9780203221846

While films such as Rambo, Thelma and Louise and Basic Instinct have operated as major points of cultural reference in recent years, popular action cinema remains neglected within contemporary film criticism.Spectacular Bodies unravels the complexities and pleasures of a genre often dismissed as `obvious' in both its pleasure and its politics, arguing that these controversial films should be analysed and understood within a cinematic as well as a political context.Yvonne Tasker argues that today's action cinema not only responds to the shifts in gendered, sexual and racial identities which took place during the 1980s, but reflects the influences of other media such as the new video culture. Her detailed discussion of the homoeroticism surrounding the muscleman hero, the symbolic centrality of blackness within the crime narrative, and the changing status of women within the genre, addresses the constitution of these identities through the shifting categories of gender, class, race, sex, sexuality and nation. Spectacular Bodies also examines the ambivalence of supposedly secure categories of popular cinema, questioning the existing terms of film criticism in this area and addressing the complex pleasures of this neglected form.