Bra-Burners, Showgirls, and Male Masochism

I was impressed by Rabine's formulation of a "contradiction," by which recent fashion trends, which allow a woman to dress more 'sexily', at once articulate women's growing freedom and ownership over their own bodies, and, at the same time, further enmesh them in an economy of subjugation, tethering them to the body and its susceptibilities to abuse (60). This contradictory dynamic is visible, I think, even in the paradigmatic "bra-burning" of Second Wave activists. In one and the same gesture, bra-burners symbolized their liberation from confinement within norms that restricted female mobility (in the name of male control) and enforced a fetishized homogenization of the female form, *at the same time that* 'going bra-less' also (presumably) renders particular females more susceptible and vulnerable to the male leer and its objectifying, dehumanizing, sadistic-producing properties.

Having recently watched "Showgirls" (1995), I was interested in the figure of the 'dominatrix' in this regard. I am defining 'dominatrix' as any scantily dressed woman who is also armed and fully equipped to violently retaliate should she meet with any disrespect. We also see this figure, perhaps, in Wonder Woman in the seventies, in Charlie's Angels (?), and in films like Kill Bill (2003, 2004) and Sin City (2005). Such women raise the spectre of male masochism and seem to offer a potential for a reversal of the conventional S/M positioning that situates woman as passive object and male as active agent.

Given Rabine's formulation of this 'contradiction', which she situates in the postwar period, it doesn't seem surprising that this figure should arise at this historical moment: the figure of a sexily dressed woman who is also fully armed and prepared to wreak violence.