Feminine Purity and Masculine Revenge-Seeking InTaken(2008)

Abstract

The 2008 film Taken depicts the murderous rampage of an ex-CIA agent seeking to recover his teenage daughter from foreign sex traffickers. I argue that Taken articulates a demand for a white male protector to serve as both guardian and avenger of white women's "purity" against the purportedly violent and sexual impulses of third world men. A neocolonial narrative retold through film, Taken infers that the protection of white feminine purity legitimates both male conquest abroad and overbearing protection of young women at home. I contend that popular films such as Taken are a part of the broader cultural system of representing social reality that elicit popular adherence to common-sense myths of white masculinity, feminine purity, and Orientalism.

The consumption of patriarchy: commodification to facilitation and reification

“…Analyses of films, television shows, video games, music, books and magazines reveal patterns of media portrayals of patriarchal displays of rape (Bufkin & Eschholz, 2000;Kettrey, 2013), the reinforcement and normalization of dating violence (Collins & Carmody, 2011;Nayar, 2010;Silver, 2010;Wilson, 2011), the romanticizing of intimate partner violence (Bonomi, Altenburger, & Walton, 2013;DeKeseredy, Muzzatti, & Donnermeyer, 2014), the dependence of women, specifically white women's purity, on men for protection from harm (Kelly, 2012), and the expendability of women as commodities as portrayed through the violence that is done to their bodies -i.e. pornography (Bergen & Bogle, 2000;Hald et al, 2010;Jarvis, 2007;Jones, 2013;Simmons et al, 2008;Tempest,1990).…”

Shithole rhetorics

“…Thus the very act of creating borders and border walls engage white notions of purity, privacy, and control, making it possible for shithole rhetorics to make a case for controlled immigration of "shithole people." Such fixation on purity also seeks to safeguard white femininity (Douglas, 1966;Kelly, 2014), which is maintained by both hovering over toilets as well as being protected from non-white immigrant bodies. Donald Trump cited the murder of a young white woman by an undocumented individual to call for harsher immigration reform (Arkin & Siemaszko, 2017), and has broadly referred to Central American migrants as "rapists" (Washington Post Staff, 2015).…”