Furious Feminisms: Alternate Routes on Mad Max: Fury Road

Forerunners: Ideas First

by Alexis L. Boylan, Anna Mae Duane, Michael Gill

A provocative peek into this complicated film as a space for subversion, activism, and imaginative power While both fans and foes point to Mad Fury Road ’s feminist credentials, Furious Feminisms is there really anything feminist or radical happening on the screen? The four authors—from backgrounds in art history, American literature, disability studies, and sociology—ask what is possible, desirable, or damaging in theorizing feminism in the contested landscape of the twenty-first century. Can we find beauty in the Anthropocene? Can power be wrested from a violent system without employing and perpetuating violence?  This experiment in collaborative criticism weaves multiple threads of dialogue together to offer a fresh perspective on our current cultural moment. 

Ideas First
Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

Genres: Nonfiction

82 pages, Paperback

Published January 21, 2020

About the author

Alexis L. Boylan is Director of Academic Affairs at the Humanities Institute of the University of Connecticut, where she is also Associate Professor in the Art and Art History Department and Africana Studies Institute. She is the author of Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man.

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this collection of essays up because I'd been reminiscing about how much I enjoyed Mad Max: Fury Road back when it came out, especially because of how it managed a blockbuster feminist narrative in the midst of a macho and pretty standard dystopian franchise. I got a kick out of the introductory quote "Four feminists walk into a bar... and the next thing you know, there's a 30,000-word monograph on Mad Max: Fury Road" because, yes there are so many angles for exploration and discussion, but ultimately I came away from this collection feeling like only some of the contributors were sincerely interested in the source material.

Barbara Gurr's section was fantastic and I wish I could give it five stars separately. I loved the exploration of the Just Warrior/Beautiful soul archetypes, how indigenous figures are missing and the racial politics of post-apocalyptic stories, and the discussion of the hero's journey as a search for salvation. I think the commentary on how male online fandom widely balked at the film for being a 'feminazi lecture' is important context.

The essay on disability politics was the most disappointing for it's admittance that it neglected to really discuss the central character's disability and brushes her off as a 'supercrip' despite not having any 'super-' abilities at all. This essay could have compared and contrasted her with popular disabled superheros in film, or how Max's flashbacks and Furiosa's amputation frame them as foils but I guess that's not as interesting as the hypothetical lives of background characters.

I wish someone would have commented more on the the green place and the many mothers as a lesbian/female separatist narrative. Especially if you don't like traditional hero-focused action movies, I think the vulvilini are a pretty profound rebuttal to belief that in a gas-starved world, monster truck warlords would reign unquestioned. When the apocalypse comes my plan is also to move to a sepratist farm and get into motorcross and marksmanship tbh. I'm surprised nobody commented on how the many mothers are using gas efficient motorcycles and bullet efficient rifles and living off the land, and creating a society out of only people they trust is part of a utopian project in the midst of a mad max wasteland.

I think this book will be a fun oddity on my shelf but wish that for the wealth of feminist material in the film some feminist theorists weren't too far removed from popular culture to appreciate it.