Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Closer Look

2007; Volume: 37; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/flm.2007.0039

1548-9922

Courtney Bates,

Cinema and Media Studies

A Closer Look Courtney Bates Yvonne D. SimsWomen of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action-Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture. McFarland, 2006. 240 pages; $35.00. Blaxploitation, a short-lived motion picture genre popular during the early to mid 1970s, is often dismissed by critics, scholars, and audiences alike as aesthetically inferior and rife with denigrating stereotypes. However, in Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action-Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture, Yvonne D. Sims gives this subject the closer look it deserves, focusing on various heroines, including Pam Grier (Foxy Brown), Tamara Dobson (Cleopatra Jones), Teresa Graves (Get Christie Love!), and Jeannie Bell (T.N.T. Jackson). Combining textual and historical analyses shaped by feminist theory, Sims traces the careers of notable Black actresses across genres, including Hattie McDaniel and Halle Berry, to illustrate the racism and burden of representation faced by Hollywood women since cinema's inception. Sims points out how the careers of all Black actresses have been shaped in relation to stereotypical conceptions of womanhood, including the Mammy, Sapphire, Aunt Jemima, and Jezebel/Tragic Mulatto archetypes, that took hold in films of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Gone With the Wind and Imitation of Life. Sims documents the ways in which Black actresses during this period [End Page 111] struggled against racism in Hollywood and turned limiting, one-dimensional roles into complex portrayals. By linking the careers of these earlier actresses with those of their blaxploitation counterparts, Sims interrogates the notion that Black actresses in exploitation films of the 1970s maintained the stereotypical status quo. She illustrates the ways in which actresses such as Grier and Dobson, in the same vein as their cinematic sisters from earlier eras, both reinforced and challenged such archetypes, and ultimately complicated conceptions of Black femininity in American popular culture at large. Although Sims eschews a complete survey of the blaxploitation genre, she provides a solid overview of the social, political, and economic forces that made possible its development. In line with other blaxploitation scholars such as Ed Guerrero and Mark A. Reid, Sims argues that growing Black nationalism, the rise of the Black middle class, and the foundering American movie industry converged in the emergence of the genre. However, Sims adds a compelling layer to the existing body of work on blaxploitation in terms of its lasting effects on American popular culture, ultimately positing that characters such as Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones paved the way for popular (white) action heroines such as Ellen Ripley in Alien and Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Directing her work to film scholars as well as aficionados of the genre, Sims avoids academic jargon for an easily accessible delineation of blaxploitation's heroines that would be at home in undergraduate film courses as well as in a fan's collection. The inclusion of a selected filmography of female actresses is helpful in this regard. As a survey of several of key heroines, Women of Blaxploitation is particularly useful in that it provides not only an historical and political milieu for the emergence of such heroines, but also draws upon many of the actresses' own words to further contextualize their work. The compilation of interviews with such blaxploitation actresses as Grier and Dobson is noteworthy, as such a project has not been undertaken previously. In this way Sims adds to the ongoing popular and scholarly discussion about blaxploitation, and offers information about its often-ignored female stars. Moreover, Sims' work augments the existing body of knowledge regarding African-American women, especially the construction of Black womanhood in American society, and representations of this group in film and television. Courtney Bates University of Wisconsin – Madison cebates@wisc.edu Copyright © 2007 Historians Film Committee