Stretch and Challenge - excellent article on the rise of the female action hero.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/12/female-action-heroes-katniss-role-models-women

This is a particularly interesting paragraph as it suggests that the female action hero is not totally empowering for women!

In Gender and the Action Heroine, Jeffrey Brown writes: "The modern action heroine confounds essentialism through her performance of traditionally masculine roles." Yet whether through nurture or nature, women in the real world tend to recoil from violence. Most feminists define it as "patriarchal and oppressive", according to Martha McCaughey and Neal King in Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies. These authors suggest that female action heroes may be "phallic women" who "reproduce male domination".