Becoming Heroic: Alternative Female Heroes in Suzy Mckee Charnas' the Conqueror's Child‪.‬

Second wave feminism's influence on society saw an increased number of female heroes represented in popular culture. The second wave focus on women's rights and women's differences from men encouraged women to participate in social roles previously considered outside their capabilities. The dominating themes in literature and popular culture of 1970s radical feminism were sex wars and separatism. Popular culture's representation of post and/or third wave (1) feminisms in the 1980s and 1990s was simplistic and contradictory. The dominating themes went from super-mom to a combination of spice girl femininity and kick-butt-action girl hero sex and success object, most commonly found in the super-model or super-star (Hopkins). Susan Hopkins states that the "new breed" of "girl power" female hero is everything that the traditional heroine was not (3). Gone are the days of women being confined to roles of assistant, enemy or motive--to serve, surrender or be rescued by the male hero. These new types of female heroes are acceptable to the current generation of young women (and men) because they embrace masculine acts of heroism combined with desirable forms of femininity. They are beautiful, busty, kick-butt chicks that do their own "hunting, fighting and monster-slaying" (Hopkins 3). This is most recently evident in films such as Charlie's Angels and Kill Bill. Not only does this popular but conservative representation reduce feminisms' complexities to a banal message, it contains the heroic within traditional boundaries. And those boundaries continue to restrain both women and men. Feminist science fiction offers alternatives to the new breed of female hero in popular culture. Many women writers call for new stories and Ursula Le Guin states that "science fiction's traditional concept of hero and killer story" has transformed "to one of human culture" whose purpose is "neither resolution nor stasis, but continuing process" (7). In Le Guin's "carrier bag" called fiction there are people in her novels, not heroes (7). Sue Vaughn calls this new breed the "hero which is not one" (85). Similarly, Marleen Barr suggests a better type of community hero in her "world-changing womanists"--women who are committed to the survival of an entire people at the expense of neither women nor men (61). What Vaughn's "hero which is not one ... " and Barr's "womanist" heroes have in common is that they are not trying to be heroes, in the traditional sense, just people committed to establishing change within their fictional worlds. And this is precisely how they differ from popular culture's "girl power" female hero who is not interested in societal transformation but has been seduced by capitalist patriarchy's desire for power, fame and fortune.