Abstract:
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, female characters that are different from the
sexualised and passive women of the 1960s started appearing in science fiction
film and television. Three prominent women on screen that reflect the increasing
awareness of women’s sexualisation and lack of representation as main
protagonists in film, and that appeared at the height of feminism’s second wave,
are Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise (1979-1997), Sarah Connor from the
Terminator film series (1984-1991;2019) and Kathryn Janeway from the Star Trek:
Voyager (1995-2001) television series. These female characters were, in contrast
to their predecessors, the main protagonists and heroes at the centre of their
respective narratives, they were desexualised, and they were not subservient
to their male contemporaries. Most importantly, and as I show in this paper,
they are complex, hybrid characters that do not perpetuate the masculine/
feminine dichotomy as their predecessors did. I further argue that it is these
characters’ hybridity that makes them heroines instead of simply being male
heroes in female bodies, which they are often accused of. I term the heroine
archetype presented by these characters the “original action heroine”, and I
argue that these women are likely candidates to be regarded as the first heroine
archetype on screen.
