Female Masculinity
I recently read an article by Ann Friedman entitled “On Being a Badass,” in which
Friedman explores what it means for women to be considered badass in today’s corporate
landscape. As Friedman explains, the term badass generally seems to imply “both toughness
and disaffectedness. It’s rare to look at someone whose chief qualities are measured
thoughtfulness and open emotionality and declare her total badass. As women carve out
careers and comfortably adopt traits that were once considered ‘masculine,’ there’s strong
social pressure on them to mimic the stoicism that men have traditionally been expected to
maintain in the face of hardship.” While Friedman discusses the implications of the term badass
within a more career-oriented context, her essay got me thinking about the manner in which
badass women are constructed in our narratives as well.
I suppose this line of thinking was especially instigated by my viewing of Mad Max: Fury
Road in 2015. As I watched the events of the film unfold on the movie screen, and as I
specifically witnessed the manner in which Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa played a part in
these events, I found myself wondering – what does it really mean for a woman to be a badass?
So, to return to Friedman’s characterization of the badass, it would seem that the
defining characteristics involved in designating one as such would include a certain level of
toughness, implacability, resilience, composedness, and fortitude. Sure, such a characterization,
you may be thinking, might be only one definition of what it takes to be considered a badass,
but let’s for the sake of argument, stick with Friedman on this, especially since such a
characterization seems to be fairly prevalent, narratively-speaking, in the manner in which male
characters are depicted. Indeed, the disaffectedly tough badass seems to span multiple genres
– from the sun-chapped cowboys of western texts to the hard-bodied heroes of action films,
from the secret agents of spy novels to the hardboiled detectives of file noir. Furiosa is
relatively terse, single-minded, and able to both give and take a substantial beating. So, I
wonder – what happens when the badass is a woman, when such a woman embodies