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Notes
1 There were, of course, other “tough” ’90s telefantasy heroines besides these three—The X-Files’ (Chris Carter, Fox, 1993–2002, 2016–2018) Dana Scully is perhaps, along with Buffy, the most famous of all—and others with supernatural or superhuman powers, such as Star Trek: Voyager’s (Rick Berman, Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor, UPN, 1995–2001) cyborg Seven of Nine or the (much less steely) witches of Charmed (Constance M. Burge, The WB, 1998–2006) or Sabrina the Teenage Witch (Nell Scovell, ABC/The WB, 1996–2003). But none of these were action heroines per se—they did not regularly participate in physical combat, for instance—and are therefore less relevant to my discussion here. I shall return to Seven of Nine later, however, since she has become much more action oriented in her recent appearances in Star Trek: Picard (Akiva Goldsman et al., CBS All Access, 2020–).
2 These specific kinds of clothes are, of course, only worn by characters in TV shows that are either set in the present day or in a future/alternate reality in which the costume is not markedly different from that of the present—and it is on this type of show on which I will be focusing. The clothes of action heroines in fantasy shows that are set in a mythologized version of the past are naturally very different, though some of these are also utilitarian in their own way, e.g., the metal or leather armor and pants of Game of Thrones’ (David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, HBO, 2011–2019) warrior women Arya Stark and Brienne of Tarth.
3 As will be discussed further below, in both Dollhouse and Westworld, the heroines spend much of the narrative forced to play various roles for the amusement of customers. However, when they are able to choose their own clothes, they opt for plain, utilitarian attire.
4 The Handmaid’s Tale has been accused of erasing other vectors of oppression, especially race, since Gilead is portrayed as an apparently colour-blind society (Crawley Citation2018; Phoenix Citation2018).
5 Green observes that there is a parallel between the trauma suffered by Trish due to Dorothy’s actions and that experienced by Jessica as a result of her ordeal at the hands of Kilgrave (Green Citation2019, 10).
6 As Aleah Kiley and Zak Roman explain, Trish’s backstory as the child star of a sitcom also alludes to the comics featuring Patsy Walker (Kiley and Roman Citation2018, 49). Patsy, who, like the character Trish played in her sitcom It’s Patsy, was redheaded, originally appeared in a series of high-school romance comics that ran from the 1940s to the 1960s before being repurposed as the superheroine Hellcat in the 1970s (Bacon Citation2019).
7 The revelation that it is Trish rather than Sallinger who is the “real” “bad guy” is especially disturbing given that the latter is explicitly associated with anti-feminist discourse. In “AKA. The Double Half-Wappinger” he gives a statement to the press accusing Jessica of being a “feminist vindicator” who is trying to pin the blame on him for a string of murders because a “single, white male” is an “easy target” and because she and her companion (Trish) want to “tak[e] back the night or something.” When his lawyer reprimands him for this accusation, he responds that he “thought it would play to the base,” implying that he sees himself as a representative of other anti-feminist/misogynistic men. By revealing that Trish is in fact “worse” than Sallinger, the writers arguably undermine the feminist message of the first season, which is firmly focused on vilifying Kilgrave, another character who, as MacDonald argues, “directly represent[s]” the “popular misogynist backlash” against “current feminist movements” (MacDonald Citation2019, 74).
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Eve Bennett
Eve Bennett, Institut de Recherche Médias, Cultures, Communication et Numérique, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France