Sherrie Inness’ Tough Girls (Book Review) by Jessamyn Birrer/Schnackenberg

Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture.  By Sherrie Inness (Philadelphia: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.  228pp.

In Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture, Sherri Inness examines definitions and portrayals of “toughness” established by the popular media.  Inness argues that toughness is a necessary topic for study, in that as a media construct it reveals not only how the media expands or limits notions of gender and identity but also demonstrates how we constitute gendered identities in popular culture (7-8).    As her title suggests, her focus with this project is on the performance of toughness by female actors and characters.  For Inness, the construction of the “tough girl” suggests “a great deal about changing gender identities” (9).  Her goal is to highlight the boundaries and transgressions of a trajectory of tough girl characters in the hopes of drawing out the ways in which their constructions admit potential for reevaluating gender limits.  She explores the figure of the tough girl in comic books, film, and television, touching briefly on literary characters, and concludes with a look at “real” tough girls such as Iditarod racer Susan Butcher.  Inness divides her tough girls into roughly five categories: the “semi-tough” “wanna-bes” of Charlie’s Angels and the Avengers; the “pretty tough” figures cut by women’s magazines and female body guards; the “one of the boys” characters played by Jodie Foster and Gillian Anderson; the sci-fi girl in both space and post-apocalyptic earth; and “tough girl for a new century,” Xena.  In a practical sense, Inness’s book is a series of textual analyses of popular culture, arranged to offer a “comprehensive” scope of women and toughness.

As Inness points out, most existing studies of toughness in popular media focus on “tough guys”; the absence of comparable studies of tough girls is telling here for Inness, and she asserts that she began her project out of a desire to examine the “apparent lack” of tough girls in popular media (4).  It is her express belief that the absence of such characters “shapes how women construct themselves as gendered subjects” (4).  She sets herself the task of surveying the ways in which popular media, when it does employ the “tough girl,” mollifies that toughness with femininity, reinforces traditional roles while seemingly providing escapism, or presents such tough girls as “exceptions to the rule” (5).  Inness consistently charts the ways in which even the “toughest” women have their toughness limited and regulated by traditional notions of female sexuality and gender role (178-9).

Perhaps at the core of all of Inness’s analyses is her assertion that “there is an on-going cultural battle about whether or not women should be allowed to possess the same tough attributes as men—a battle in which [Susan] Butcher and Xena are foot soldiers” (178).  Inness offers Butcher and Xena as counterpoints to most of the other tough girls in her collection, in that their toughness is not mitigated by consistent referencing of heterosexuality, maternity, or other feminizing descriptors.  She qualifies every other character’s toughness (Emma Peel’s, Ripley’s in Aliens) by showing how that toughness is undermined by their decidedly feminine sexual flirtation, nurturing, or vulnerability.  Inness has, in fact, been criticized already for this dimension of her project.  In her November 1999 review for the Journal of Gender Studies,  Judy Giles spends much of her time disappointed with Inness’s conclusions that the toughness she can locate in female characters is “fatally undermined” by more traditional accompanying ideas of heterosexuality and femininity (Giles 368).  While Giles makes a strong case against Inness, she neglects to really acknowledge Inness’s actual position.  It would be easy to misread Inness as advocating that a “real” tough girl be masculine, or wholly defy traditional femininity.  However, a close reading reveals Inness herself grappling with the problem of the masculine bases for toughness.  Rather than arguing that traditional femininity undermines toughness and that’s that, Inness is arguing that the ways in which popular media and culture define and restrict notions of both masculinity and femininity undermines the ability of tough girls to represent toughness without perceived mitigation.  “American culture,” Inness asserts, “has become so accustomed to the notion of male/masculinity and female/femininity, that anything else looks like a travesty” (21).  Inness is arguing not that true toughness must shed any attendant femininity, but that the inability of American culture to shed any notions of femininity and masculinity is what undermines.  She further argues that working against rigid identity oppositions is what allows the tough girl her power and subversion.  She is not arguing for the masculinized tough girl; rather, she is advocating what many feminists have advocated—the need to undermine the posited or presumed naturalness of gender.  It would be more accurate to criticize Inness, then, not for asserting her own rigid constructions of gender toughness, but for recognizing but not exploring the limits of her own analysis.

This is, perhaps, the real weakness of Inness’s project; we are given an almost wholly textual analysis.  Though she acknowledges the need for greater research into production, audience reception and agency, and the aforementioned challenge of existing gender ideologies, those levels are not just weak in Tough Girls, but mainly absent.  Also, by restricting herself to textual analysis, Inness acknowledges that important critical inquiry into questions of race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality are sidelined.  It would be interesting to see Inness pair her work in Tough Girls with other books she might pursue in conversation with it; if she can bring the specificity and critical inquiry of her textual analyses to other elements of audience, production, and sociocultural context, we might have a fine first photograph of gender construction in popular media.

Of all of her textual subjects, I find Inness limiting only in her discussion of the science fiction genre.  She examines the ways in which science fiction is used to remove or mediate contemporary resistance to transgressions of gender stereotyping.  While this mediation may easily (and perhaps often accurately) be taken as a weakening of politic in such subversive representations, I believe Inness somewhat overlooks the genre’s potential for critically and effectively misdirecting audience resistance, as well as its observed success in some popular media at granting critical voices to subjects often avoided in other areas of popular culture.  I am thinking here of such science fiction writers as Octavia Butler and Ursula K. LeGuin.  Using science fiction’s freedom from certain “realist” constraints, they can engage the reader in understanding and immersing themselves in a world “not their own.”  This promise and expectation of escapism opens the reader’s mind to ideas that might have been resisted in more rigid genres—it persuades the imagination towards queered thinking.  So, in Kindred, Butler can explore issues of racism and historicism via time travel and physics, and in The Left Hand of Darkness, LeGuin can explore gender and sexuality by having an earthling ambassador to a planet with no operative gender constructs in language or public life, and fluid notions of sexuality.  Both writers take advantage of the lowered “logical” resistance of the genre to engage critical encounters with race, gender, and cultural assumption.  Of course, other genres of fiction approach social issues, but the science fiction genre, typically dismissed from literary valuation, functions as less intimidating popular text.  Inness is, I think, too inclined to overlook the subversive potential of the genre as a whole, without engaging (as she actually does in her discussion of Xena: Warrior Princess, an arguably science-fictive fantasy) the ways in which the slight mediation of the genre allows greater transgression of gender boundaries.

Ultimately, Tough Girls represents a solid, linear exploration of gender representation and mediation in film and television.  Inness’s identifications of constructions and deconstructions of toughness are careful and accessible.  If she follows her instincts and continues into further research of the ways in which such tough-girl texts are controlled and produced, and the ways in which both male and female audiences engage, respond to, and resist these texts, the resulting body of study may open up a greater discussion of how gender identity is constructed and maintained by the holistic popular machine.