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In the past ten years there has been a shift in the depiction of gender roles within Hollywood Blockbusters, from the fixed gender roles as discussed by Mulvey to a more fluid concept of gender. This is not a case of assuming a simple historical model of progress, the ubiquity of the strong female lead in action cinema has older precedents and strong identifiable women themselves are not a new concept in film. In her 1994 book Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship Jackie Stacey argues how female spectators of the 30s and 40s ‘described their pleasures in Hollywood stars in terms of “identification”’ (127). Stacey explores how the spectator ‘remembers “the semi-magical transformation of screen identification”, suggesting that her own identity is indeed transformed through processes of spectatorship’ (1994: 126). One of the interviewees Stacey quotes mentions how she preferred the stars on screen ‘to have more charm and ability than [she] did’ (1994: 126). In the era Stacey is dicussing the stars on screen were required to be more than the spectator, introducing ‘the contradictions of similarity and difference, recognition and separateness’ that Stacey states characterised ‘the relationship of female spectators to their star ideals’ (1994: 126-127). In a similar way, through the strong female lead in action films, female spectators identify with the star on screen because they appear to be the same, or at least have more similarities than differences.

It is crucial to bring to the fore that while the thesis deals with the embodied spectator feminist film theory has often proposed a position or masquerade when it comes to femininity. Drawing on psychoanalysis Stacey argues that ‘feminists have claimed that the masquerade is not only closely connected to femininity but is also inextricable from its cultural ascription within patriarchal representation systems such as Hollywood cinema’ (2010: 119). Both Stacey and Doane draw on the 1926 work of Joan Riviere to discuss femininity:

Womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it – much as a thief will turn out his pockets and ask to be searched to prove he has not the stolen goods. The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade’. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial they are the same thing (Riviere cited in Stacey, 2010: 120)

Film and feminist theorist Mary Ann Doane builds on the work of Riviere to show how feminists are given a way of reading femininity differently. Doane wrote of how the masquerade ‘in flaunting femininity, holds it at a distance. Womanliness is a mask that can be worn or removed. The masquerade’s resistance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as closeness’ therefore ‘to masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image’ (cited in Stacey, 2005: 1858). Stacey discusses this in her work in terms of how the ‘masquerade suggests a “mode of being for the other” which might destabilise the image by challenging the relation between lack and absence in Lacan’s theory of language and in his theory of sexual difference’ (Stacey, 2010: 109). What is highlighted throughout Stacey’s work, as well as Doane’s, is how the problem with psychoanalysis and the cinema is that femininity is defined as closeness whereas with theorising femininity as a masquerade ‘might be deployed to explain to constraints of the place of “women as image” within the sign system governed by the law of the paternal signifier’ (Stacey, 2010: 109). By offering a way to find the contradiction within psychoanalytical theory the masquerade for Doane ‘attributes to the woman the distance, alienation, and divisiveness of self required to refuse to read femininity conventionally’ (cited in Stacey, 2010: 109).

This connects back to strong women in franchises as they have come to represent a form of identification which plays upon the spectator’s longing to be what they see on the screen. The character the spectator identifies with is like them in a number of ways but in other ways is a more idealised version of what the spectator wishes themselves to be; because of this the figure is always unattainable and identification can be understood more as a struggle to identify with the images presented rather than an instant form of identification. The struggle for identification with the characters on screen is ongoing as for women ‘[t]here are no images either for her or of her’ (Doane, 1988: 216). Doane’s work supports Mulvey’s as she explores the notion that women are too close to the object of the gaze as they feel themselves inextricably bound up with the image before them, and as such they struggle

between feminine and masculine viewing positions. Doane was writing in 1988 when the strong female lead, regarding mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, was only in its infancy and this quote reflects the lack of identifiable female characters on screen in the 1980s: Alien was released in 1979 and Aliens in 1986, but Terminator 2 was not until 1991 and it was only in the late 90s and early 00s that the role of strong female lead in action franchises really came to the fore, as discussed below. The strong female action hero is not a recent development, franchise films have attempted to create a satisfactory female lead, films such as Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and Aliens (Ridley Scott, 1986) are examples of this. The protagonist of these films is Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) who, through her fight with the alien invading her ship, shares traits with Katniss such as self-interest and disrespect for authority. Typically strong female leads have been more apparent in films which can be categorised as either science-fiction or fantasy. Franchise films of this type include: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (2003, 2004), Underworld (2003, 2006, 2009, 2012), Resident Evil (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2012), Salt (2010), Hannah (2011) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012).

According to professor of popular culture Jeffrey A Brown ‘[f]ictional women in contemporary popular culture are just as likely to be super-spies, superheroes, monster slayers, avengers, detectives, kung fu masters, and revolutionary leaders as they are damsels in distress or romantic leads’ (Brown, 2015: 5). Brown’s book, Beyond Bombshells: The New Action Heroine in Popular Culture, discusses how action heroines are now more popular in movies, comic books, television and literature than they have ever been; some of the television shows include: In Plain Sight (2008-current), Nikita (2010-current), Covert Affairs (2010-current), Homeland (2011-current), Revenge (2011-current), Revolution (2012- current), The Blacklist (2013-current) and Killer Women (2014-current). While women in action roles are still sexualized and objectified they also challenge the preconceived myths about normal or culturally appropriate gender behaviours, though sometimes through reactionary masculine stereotypes: ‘[t]he modern action heroine can fight, shoot, solve mysteries, and save the world as well as Rambo, James Bond, or Indiana Jones ever did’ (Brown, 2015: 5). The below quotation emphasises the augmentation the strong female lead presents to the male-dominated fictional ideal of heroism:

It would seem that female characters have finally established more than just a foothold in action genres. The action heroine is no longer just an anomaly or a novelty, she is a full-blown character type and a financially dependable one at that. Audiences in this new millennium have demonstrated that they want to see

women kick ass, and they are willing to pay to enjoy the heroic exploits of female characters (Brown, 2015: 6)

However, the strong female lead is a complex figure, particularly with regards to the character of Katniss as a figure of identification for fans as she both fits into this image of women, but also deviates from and complicates it as the character incorporates several gender roles into one. This means that the character of Katniss can encourage male as well as female identification. However, as mentioned earlier in the thesis, the focus will be on gendered female spectatorship given the self-reflexive nature of the research. Identification with a character such as Katniss allows for a discussion into how it makes multiple identities visible within a single spectator. This has implications for the gendered politics of representation that Mulvey discusses in her research as it allows for a wider variety of gendered identifications.

The Hollywood action heroine is a character that has finally succeeded in establishing a record of popularity and profitability after uneven success at the box office. There has been a resurgence of strong female action heroes, particularly in young adult films such as The Hunger Games franchise. Other films from the young adult genre which have embraced the strong female lead include: City of Bones (2008), Paranormalcy (2011), Firelight (2011), Divergent (2012), Delirium (2012) and Dustlands (2012). This confirms that the role of the strong female lead has established more than just a foothold in the young adult genre. In film and literature young adult genres are defined as being marketed to adolescents and young adults, usually in the age range twelve to eighteen. The term was first used by G. Robert Carlsen in 1980 in relation to literature ‘wherein the protagonist is either a teenager or one who approaches problems from a teenage perspective’; he argues how such ‘novels are generally of moderate length and told from the first person’ and they typically ‘describe initiation into the adult world, or the surmounting of a contemporary problem forced upon the protagonist(s) by the adult world’ (56). Through this quotation parallels can be seen between the description of young adult literature and that of the young adult genre with regards to film. The Hunger Games series is a prime example of teenagers trying to surmount a problem forced upon them by the adult world. The Hunger Games franchise is worth examining because it attempts to do something different with the strong female lead and introduces several identities and gendered roles which a young adult audience can identify with. It is important to make clear that the thesis is not proposing distracted female spectatorship in an uncritical way. Dubrofsky and Ryalls bring this to the fore in their discussion of Katniss and race where, in the films, ‘altered bodies—bodies marked as surgically transformed or adorned

with makeup and ornate clothing—are constructed as deviant, in opposition to Katniss's natural, unaltered white femininity, dangerously entrenching notions of naturalized embodied feminine whiteness’ (2014: 395). As such the films are troubling in their ‘seamless privileging of an unconscious production of observable trustworthiness and earnestness of character, instantiating a new ethic of whiteness and femininity’ (Dubrofsky and Ryalls, 2014: 395). This is partly done through the casting of Jennifer Lawrence as ‘Collins describes Katniss as having olive skin, gray eyes, and black hair, leaving her racialization open to a few possibilities (such as mixed race, Middle Eastern, Latina), but the film portrays Katniss as white’ (Dubrofsky and Ryalls, 2014: 399). They go on to argue that the world of The Hunger Games is one where issues of inequality and disenfranchisement are centred and as such ‘race does not factor into questions of equality: white and Black people are likewise disenfranchised or privileged, and people of other races appear briefly as background characters’ (Dubrofsky and Ryalls, 2014: 398). Dubrofsky and Ryalls also argue that the way Katniss is presented is ‘premised on her authentic whiteness, her naturalized heterosexual femininity, and her effortless abilities as a potential future wife and mother’ (Dubrofsky and Ryalls, 2014: 409). What I explore below is how Katniss, in embodying multiple gender roles simultaneously, moves beyond her heterosexual femininity and becomes more than a potential wife and mother.