Sovereigns, Breadwinners, and Slayers: The Huntress in Popular Culture

While hunters in the history books and literary canon of the Global North are traditionally male, the number of female hunters in popular culture has increased over the last decades. Heroines such as Buffy Summers and Katniss Everdeen have seemingly tackled gender stereotypes by skillfully hunting down their prey. These capable huntresses have been widely celebrated and critically acclaimed for their representation of strong women. But is the huntress as a character capable of challenging binary hierarchies rather than only reversing them? And how subversive are these figures once we include the categories of class and race in the analysis alongside gender? This chapter follows the character of the huntress in popular culture over the last ninety years—from comic book heroine Sheena, Queen of the Jungle in 1938 through Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Katniss Everdeen from Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games. The tripartite analysis of various representations of female hunters not only shows how skilled slayers found their place outside the canon but also highlights how binary hierarchies of the hunt have remodeled the role of the huntress at the intersections of race, class, and gender.