| This dissertation surveys the hidden labor behind the production and marketing of television's action heroine, seeing how her image is manufactured, promoted, and marketed to audiences through rituals of doubling that are designed to fashion her an easily imitable, unproblematic heroine. By exploring the below-the-line production of this icon---in particular the work of costume designers, stunt women, and merchandisers---this dissertation offers an extension of previous critical narrative analyses of the heroine to engage with the material world of production and labor. Through an analysis of the processes of production of an industrially mediated feminism, this dissertation examines the labor necessary to the manufacturing and merchandising of a heroine, and how that labor is erased in order to present this heroine as imitable. Informed by the insights of television practitioners and pulling from a variety of theoretical disciplines, this inductively engaged analysis examines how television's action heroine as a icon provides a central forum through which television producers, the popular press, and audiences negotiate the ideals of femininity. |
