Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema

by Yvonne Tasker

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.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Academic, Feminism

216 pages, Paperback

First published December 6, 1993

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-read this classic study of gender in the action film for the first time in years. It's still a wonderfully insightful work that remains very helpful for coming to terms with contemporary genre cinema, even three decades after its first publication – though the many misspellings are also still annoyingly distracting.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important book for everyone looking to analyse gender dynamics in (action) cinema. Also deals with questions of race and class.

[Whitney Borup · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked how Tasker rejected the ideas of male/masculinity vs. female/femininity in favor of a more shifting and complex reading in action films. Like, for example, she doesn't see Ripley as a "man in drag" like other critics have claimed, but as a "musculinized" heroine acting within genre conventions. I think she could have taken some of her ideas further instead of just opposing previous ideas, though. (maybe she does in her other books) I also don't think there was cohension between chapters. They each seemed like separate essays on the action genre. I love how much she liked Point Break.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting overview, this is a reread as I read the book initially as an undergrad. i was much more impressed with it then. It has some excellent points, particularly in noting intersections of gender and race in the action cinema. However, her concept of musculinity does not work for me, when read through the lens of Butler's work on gender performativity - if masculinity is a performance, and musculinity is a performance, why does it only apply to women? I find some of her work relies upon a biological essentialist reading of sexed and gendered bodies.

[molly]

So. I'm working on an essay about feminism in Resident Evil. Yes, it's weird inside my head - why do you ask?