The Challenges of Research

I feel like this week I need to address something other than the reading. As important as the reading was (and I may write an extra journal entry about it this week if the holiday permits) the lack of resources or the nature of the resources I found while researching this course has been revealing and disheartening. Trying to supplement my reading with articles and books on the subject of heroines has repeatedly ended in failure. At first, I thought my lack of progress was due to a fault in my research skills. Perhaps I just hadn’t found the right incantation to feed Google. The vast majority of links I found pertained to the drug heroin and heroin addiction, in spite of the fact that the words aren’t even spelled alike These are actual results I came across before I could find anything remotely related to my subject matter:

“10 Disney Heroines Chosen To Be “Doctor Who” Companions”

“Show Your Love For DC Comics Heroines With These Dreamy 1940s Pin-Ups!”

“Which Heroine Should You Cosplay For Comic Con?“

And so on. I even found a recipe for “Heroin Chicken Tenders” before I found anything about female heroes. I tried every outlet I could find. One of my personal favorite online indulgences, Pinterest, only gave me hypersexualized images of Disney princesses and superheroines that other women were sharing back and forth while gushing about how much they wished they looked like Tinkerbell or Wonder Woman. One of the few people online who is dedicated to studying the heroine is a writer named Kate Winter, whose Girls Underground website was part of the inspiration for this course. She is specifically focused on heroines who delve into the underworld, and her site was a great resource for materials for this course. Outside of that… the internet is fairly dark on the subject.

The quality of video I usually find when searching for “superheroines” on YouTube.

Searching for books on the subject proved even more challenging. I would have liked to have explored some non-Jungian angles to this concept, but the discussion on the matter is completely obscured by the androcentric precedent set by Campbell. We can’t even discuss the heroine on her own terms, we can only discuss her through the scrim of the male, which means she constantly has to be compared and contrasted with his motivations and actions in order for us to even recognize her as a heroine. Even academic journals presented little that applied to my field of study, and again came up with mostly drug abuse articles. It seems that in our culture, the image of the heroine is overshadowed by the image of woman as object, to the point where we are more likely to discuss the drugs women are addicted to rather than acknowledge they themselves might be capable of anything heroic.

I have no real resolution for this. Other than just stating the obvious need for more scholarship into this area, society itself must change in order for the heroine to emerge as a full-formed and independent entity. Media representations must transcend the “man with breasts” or “objectified but it’s ok because she can fight” models we are currently presented with. We need to learn to broaden our concept of what makes a hero a hero and how that is different from the heroine. Currently, I have reached my maximum level of irritation at the complete lack of recognition of heroines, both fictional and real. I will leave you with some of the search results I got when I searched for the term “hero” for comparison. The depth of the problem becomes obvious after only a few clicks:

“The Last, Disposable Action Hero”

“3 Ways to Let Your Man Know that He’s the Real Hero”

“Tintin: A very European hero”

Campbell, J. (1972). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Murdock, M. (1990). The heroine’s journey. Boston, MA: Shambhala.

Estés, C. P. (1992). Women who run with the wolves: Myths and stories of the wild woman archetype. New York: Ballantine Books.

Winter, K. (n.d.). Girls Underground. Retrieved from http://girls-underground.com/

Rankin, A., & Bass, J. (Directors). (1982). The Last Unicorn [Motion picture on DVD]. Sunn Classic.

Pinterest. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.pinterest.com/