Book Review: “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films

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Stephane Dunn

“Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.



Review by Kinohi Nishikawa

In the early 1970s, blaxploitation films popularized images of black masculine brawn and bravado that American audiences had never seen before. The protagonists of these films violated a number of cultural taboos in the way they embodied the “badman” ethos—a mode of self-presentation (derived from folklore and updated for the urban scene) that reveled in black male cunning and strength. In 1971 Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback used his sexual prowess and street smarts to outrun law enforcement “by any means necessary.” The same year Richard Roundtree’s John Shaft stood tall as Harlem’s homegrown black private detective, a leather-clad avenger primed to protect his community by taking on the mob. And in 1973, in the highest grossing blaxploitation film of its time, Max Julien starred in The Mack as Goldie, the pimp whose wide-brimmed hats and sweet-talking raps transformed the ghetto anti-hero into a mainstream icon. Although blaxploitation films reached the height of their popularity in the early 1970s, their larger-than-life male protagonists inspired a generation of hip hop artists and continue to incite debates about African American gender politics.

Given this familiar narrative of the rise of blaxploitation cinema, Stephane Dunn’s “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas offers a refreshing counterpoint to what scholars and critics have long assumed to be an exclusively male-oriented genre of filmmaking. By focusing on the less-recognized subgenre of the black female action movie, Dunn is able to illuminate some surprising features of blaxploitation’s investment in “fantasies” of black womanhood. Specifically, in her analyses of Cleopatra Jones (1973), Coffy (1973), and Foxy Brown (1974), Dunn identifies a tradition of black heroines who call into question their status as passive objects of male heterosexual desire. The protagonists of these films express their sexual agency in problematic but also deeply political ways, and Dunn is interested in recovering the meaning behind their widespread popularity during the Black Power era. “Baad Bitches” is thus notable for being the first book-length, black feminist response to the cultural assumptions about gender that subtend “masculine criticism” of the genre (3).

Dunn’s reading of Cleopatra Jones is particularly effective in challenging the prevailing consensus that black women occupied a static position in blaxploitation cinema. In the film, Tamara Dobson plays a sexy and streetwise federal agent charged with foiling domestic and global drug-trafficking networks. Sporting a Black Power afro and wielding a shotgun (a resonant symbol of phallic authority, if there ever was one), Jones tackles her assignment with stereotypically “masculine” bravado but in a style that is self-consciously “feminine.” Dunn makes it clear that Dobson’s embodiment of sexual agency courts the kind of heterosexual male gaze that would delight in her beauty and voluptuous physique. At the same time, Dunn shows how that gaze itself is interrogated within the film’s narrative. Jones’s desirability, for example, provokes white male anxiety when she approaches her colleagues with “cool professionalism” (97). These men are forced to tarry with the fact that Jones intends to both wear her desire on her sleeve and remain professionally distanced from their advances. Equally revealing is how this expression of feminine cool inflects representations of black manhood in the film. In one case, that ballyhooed icon of streetwise masculinity, the pimp, is undone by Jones’s cinematic presence. The wannabe badman Doodleburg, played by Antonio Fargas with sashaying verve, is feminized not only in light of the righteousness of Jones’s cause but also against the backdrop of the “phallic” agency of her character.

Dunn’s analyses of the Pam Grier vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown reveal the more problematic ways in which blaxploitation cinema appropriated female sexual agency to serve patriarchal ends. Unlike Cleopatra Jones, Grier’s protagonists reflect “the pornographic treatment of their star, a tendency that the prostitute guise motif in both films dramatizes” (111). According to Dunn, something of value is lost in Grier’s having to masquerade as a prostitute in order for her characters to infiltrate organized crime syndicates. Dunn expands on this point by emphasizing that in both films the trajectory of the heroine’s actions is framed as a revenge narrative. If Cleopatra Jones’s feminine cool is expressed in relatively autonomous terms, Coffy’s and Foxy Brown’s vigilantism stokes the fantasy that black women’s sexual agency can only be called forth through its violation by an external force. This reinscription of feminine passivity is what Dunn finds most objectionable about Grier’s oeuvre, in which “[her] body functions as a narrow image of ghettoized black female sexuality” (115). The logic of passivity is taken to the extreme in Foxy Brown, when in a disturbing sequence the heroine’s experience of having been raped is glossed over in the narrative’s drive to represent Foxy “avenging her man’s murder” (127). By not dwelling on the “physical or emotional signs of Foxy’s ordeal” (127), the film manages to deprive the heroine of any characterological complexity. Dunn observes that the resulting vacuum in Foxy’s consciousness effectively subordinates her desire to patriarchal authority.

Despite their problematic gendering of Grier’s characters, black female action movies give Dunn access to a new way of historicizing Black Power’s relationship with blaxploitation cinema. She proposes that even the avowedly political valences of blaxploitation were premised on the subordination of black women to a male fantasy of revolutionary vitality. In her readings of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)—arguably the touchstones of Black Power-inspired cinema—Dunn contends that popular representations of “black political and social empowerment” relied on “conservative models of gender” to achieve their radical import (84). Yet the problem of gender in these two films was not only a matter of affirming black patriarchy under the sign of revolution. It was also, more profoundly, a matter of negotiating black men’s increasingly precarious socioeconomic realities in the post-civil rights era. In this regard, Dunn’s assessment of “political” blaxploitation outlines the unnerving degree to which competing forms of masculinity were projected onto a figure like Sweetback. Presented with the option of either “liv[ing] the castrated existence of a sexual ‘freak’” or realizing “the potential for revolt” (69), Sweetback was, in this account, a fraught hero—as much a product of male anxiety as he was an expression of revolutionary desire.

In addition to resituating our understanding of male-centered blaxploitation, Dunn’s analysis of black female action movies has the salutary effect of shedding light on contemporary embodiments of sexual agency among female hip hop artists. As many scholars have noted, hip hop culture is the natural heir to blaxploitation’s heady mixture of radical politics, vernacular flair, and representations of racial pride. Yet as with her readings of blaxploitation heroines, Dunn is careful to point out how black women occupy a tenuous position in hip hop’s gendered imaginary. Even when they are not being explicitly objectified as “video vixens” or backstage groupies, women in hip hop, like Pam Grier before them, sometimes have to hew to gendered stereotypes in order to get ahead in the culture industry. Artists like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown (a stage persona taken up as an homage to Grier’s iconic heroine) have wielded their sexual agency with feckless daring, and their music challenges certain male artists’ constant valorization of the phallus. At the same time, Kim’s troublesome devotion to the late Notorious B.I.G., her well-known legal troubles, and her array of cosmetic enhancements give pause to the notion that her persona constitutes a radical departure from the patriarchal script. Coupled with Brown’s “excessive sexualization of her body onstage and off” (31), Kim’s travails leave Dunn wondering whether these female rappers can be seen as “icons of true empowerment” (34).

The question of exactly what a black female icon of empowerment would look like in popular culture today is left invitingly open at the end of “Baad Bitches.” Dunn recognizes that popular expressions of female sexual agency, whether in blaxploitation or in hip hop, are bound up with the culture industry’s historical denigration of black women’s bodies. The hypervisibility of heroines’ and rappers’ bodies may defy stereotypes of passive femininity, but they may also play into deep-seated, racist assumptions about black women’s hypersexuality. This complex double-bind is captured in Dunn’s description of blaxploitation as offering “radical and conservative fantasies of the status quo” (xiv).

In attempting to move beyond this double-bind, Dunn speculates on how black women’s bodies might serve as radical sites of pleasure for black female identification. Throughout “Baad Bitches,” Dunn recounts watching black female action movies with friends, students, and family members. In the spirited conversations that follow the screenings, Dunn notices how Dobson’s and Grier’s characters are as much appreciated for their beauty and toughness as they are critiqued for their gendered stereotyping. According to Dunn, the way spectators, and particularly black women, relate to these characters allows them to make strides toward realizing “an autonomous public sexual imaginary” of black female desire (xiv). This poignant insight may be the first step in imagining how black women can claim sexual agency for themselves without needing to apologize for it.

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Kinohi Nishikawa is a Ph.D. candidate in the Programs in Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University. His dissertation analyzes the pulp fiction of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines in the context of the black urban experience during the civil rights and Black Power movements.