A Woman Like You? Emma Peel, Xena: Warrior Princess, and the Empowerment of Female Heroes of the Silver Screen

This article presents an approach for ranking the female characters of action films and TV series on a ten-point scale, which offers a model for establishing and measuring the levels of female empowerment. Using The Avengers and Xena: Warrior Princess as prime sources of evidence, and addressing earlier feminist critiques of these shows, it argues that their leading characters incorporate the highest level of female (super)heroism. The article also demonstrates that the idea of toughness is indeed fully compatible with femininity, in that although the female superhero differs in many respects from what characterizes the stereotypical woman, the former also distinguishes herself in subtle ways from the qualities generally found in the conventional male superhero.