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Abstract: A number of critical works address the sexual politics of dangerous women in popular films: "monstrous feminine" horror or science fiction imagery and violent, predatory femme fatale types in the film noir. Yet all too these deal inadequately if at all with racial significations. Despite even the linguistic commonplace that horrors is "dark" and femmes fatales and the films they appear in are noir, many theorists neglect critiquing representations of dangerous, monstrous and violent women of color. Yet much of the standard imagery associated with the white femme fatale actually is rooted in colonialist and racist projections. The very characteristics that make the white woman "bad" or "noir" are those qualities that according to a racist/sexist viewpoint are especially endemic in women of color: primitive emotions and lusts, violence, sexual aggression, masculinity, lesbian tendencies, promiscuity, duplicity, treachery, contaminating corruption, sovereignty, and so on We provide some analysis of the racial politics of femme fatale imagery and offer textual readings of several narratives grouped around three types of femme noire: the Virgin/Cannibal, Dragon/Lady and Queen/Bitch. Femme noire stereotypes are often read as confirming women's base inferiority, immorality and monstrosity and can inspired hatred, scapegoating, and retaliation. Yet, many viewers resist these conventions, identify with the defiance and energy of these "bad" women, and elaborate conventional stories from the perspectives of the "other."
Keywords: femme fatale, film, women of color.
Numerous of critical works address the sexual politics of dangerous women in popular films: "monstrous feminine" horror or science fiction imagery (Creed, 1993); and violent, predatory femme fatale types in the film noir (Doane, 1991; Hart, 1994; Holmlund, 1994; Jermyn, 1996). Yet all too often these (with Doane as an exception) deal inadequately if at all with racial significations. Despite even the linguistic commonplace, itself steeped in racism, that horror is "dark" and femmes fatales (fatal women) and the films they appear in are noir (black), many theorists, through differing strategies, neglect critiquing representations of dangerous, monstrous and violent women of color in the recurring fantasies found in popular culture (Hannsberry, 1998). Our purpose here is to address this oversight, provide some analysis of the racial politics of femme fatale imagery, and offer textual readings of several narratives that we find particularly revealing.
In her 1994...