CHICAGO DEFENDER — Women characters becoming sword slashing or shotgun-toting badasses (i.e., Kill Bill and Foxy Brown) or rebels against their prescribed roles (i.e. Thelma & Louise) have often still registered as objects of the traditional gaze, rendered more exotic or erotic because they take on expected tropes of masculine toughness or step out of their domestic roles and temporarily seize the day. Women wielding weapons as well as or better than men can too easily be deemed as radical representations of women with little attention to context or the problematic association of violent toughness with heroic maleness on screen.

The post COMMENTARY: Why ‘The Woman King’ Is Revolutionary first appeared on BlackPressUSA.