Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture

Sims, Yvonne D.  2006.  Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture.  Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company

Although written a few years before Stephane Dunn’s book, Yvonne Sims also tackles the subject of black women in blaxploitaiton film from a feminist film theory lens. However, she also gives critical analysis on their impact on popular American culture as a whole and not relegating it to simply the African-American experience. Her argument is that by reshaping notions of African-American femininity and gender blaxploitation films allowed for all women to be seen in less marginalized ways in mainstream action films. There is a comprehensive history of early race films and their use of stereotypical tropes such as Aunt Jemima, Mammy and other domesticated roles. She also employs the sociological and cultural lenses of Patricia Hills Collins, Bell Hooks, and other noteworthy African-American feminist critics as the basis for her analysis of women in blaxploitation.

Other than the introduction, Sims’s book is less narrative and is a strictly critical, qualitative analysis of blaxploitaiton films. Sims does a thorough job of analyzing roles played by Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson as well as their high sexualized, yet power-centered roles’ impact on mainstream action heroines (such as Sigourney Weaver in Alien). The chapter on Pam Grier as the “queen of blaxploitation” (71) is particularly interesting and critical of her oversexualized portrayals of African-American women, yet Sims praises her as a trailblazer in being the most bankable African-American actress of the 1970s and as an unconventional, empowering super-heroine.   Tamara Dobson is analyzed as the antithesis of many of Grier’s characters, not using blatant, irrelevant nudity and sexual overtones to sell the image of strength, femininity, empowerment, and social consciousness (94). The only weakness of the book is that there isn’t a clear correlation between the end of blaxploitation films and the rise of mainstream films (perhaps other than lack of interest and white directors employing blaxploitaiton themes to more mainstream films with mainstream actresses). Again, much of that is inferred from the text and not explicit.