Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine (Electronic Mediations) by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky

Electronic Mediations

by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky

Since the game Tomb Raider was first released in 1996, its protagonist Lara Croft has become an international celebrity. The virtual archaeologist-adventuress has been featured in various sequels to the original game, a line of action figures, two Hollywood films starring Angelina Jolie, forty comic books, a series of novels, and a variety of clothing, merchandise, and ephemera. She has appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek, spawned innumerable Internet fan sites and a library of adulatory fan fiction, become a pornographic sex symbol, and even inspired a look-alike beauty pageant. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky's groundbreaking study examines Lara Croft as a cyber heroine - a female body ubiquitously inhabited by game players, an icon of both female strength and male objectification, and the virtual future of fame. Despite Croft's prominence there have been few critical inquiries into her bridging of the boundary between virtual and real worlds or the extent to which she reflects and influences the image of women in digital media. First published in German and revised for this English-language edition, this book is an innovative analysis of the multimedia heroine, tracing the top-down marketing strategies and bottom-up frenzy that precipitated the Lara Croft phenomenon. For girls and women, Croft is a symbol of empowerment, a tough and self-assured riot grrl who has opened up the overwhelmingly masculinized world of computer gaming to female participants. At the same time, she personifies both heterosexual male fantasies and the twinned processes of globalization and cultural imperialism. Drawing on feminist and cultural studies, Deuber-Mankowsky sees Croft as symptomatic of the new media environment and its tendency to erase all qualitative difference, even sexual difference.

Hardcover

First published August 27, 2001

About the author

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky (born 1957) is a Swiss media and cultural scientist and a professor at the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum, Germany.

Reviews

[Reading Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Obviously a fan of Lara Croft, Deuber views Lara Croft as a cultural moment. Connecting her to de Lauretis's Dream Woman--the idea that the ideal woman is a mythic existence that no real, actual woman can live up to--Deuber reads Lara Croft as a fantasy of desire for both men and women (heterosexuals, of course). Men enjoy the action and the control of the desirable figure (wow it sounds creepy when I write it like that), and women can enjoy the fantasy of a woman who is smart, resourceful and respected. Both want...and can never have nor be.

Lara Croft spanned media--not just a game, but a movie, advertising, etcetera, becoming larger than life and larger than any male game character. Her hyperfeminine qualities (the boobs, mostly) Deuber reads as necessary markers of femininity, that serve to counterbalance the 'masculine' performance.

The real tragedy, which Deuber merely alludes to, is that for Lara Croft to be the iconic figure that she is, she must be...alone. In the movie and games, she has no parents, no family, no love interest. She is sexual and sexy, but never uses it. Which does interesting things to the femme fatale identity, I think. Deuber relates this to, of course, the Ideal Woman, who is also disconnected from all personal entanglements, but it makes Lara a rather hard figure to emulate for long--is the price of autonomy for a woman that kind of isolation?!

[Scott Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm getting a collection of books all to myself on this site.
So I'm writing a paper on Lara Croft for my media class. She is a media icon after all, and good example of the all sorts of transmedia enterprises. This book is pretty well done. It's short and easy to read, but gets into pretty complicated ideas of psychological identification and gender collapse, etc. Too bad for this paper I need to focus on the industry and less on the psychoanalysis. Oh well. It was interesting.