JLo conforms to type in action film The Mother

Jennifer Lopez is reconnecting with her action lm roots, starring in the new Net ix lm e Mother. In it, she plays the titular character, a veteran and expert sniper who gives up her daughter at birth in an e ort to protect her. When forces later threaten 12-year-old Zoe, Lopez jumps into action, doing everything she can to keep her daughter safe.

e Mother celebrates Lopez’s physical ability and hyper tness. “She is de nitely performing a very physical role in a revenge action lm [and] she’s bringing it to the next level. As an actress, that’s an incredibly di cult move to make, the jumps [and other action sequences],” says Angharad N. Valdivia, Research Professor at the Institute of Communications Research and Professor in the Department of Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois. e protagonist of e Mother is physically tough, but she’s also incredibly street smart, a fact that doesn’t surprise Mary Beltrán, Associate Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Latina/o Stars in US Eyes. “Latinas have sometimes been more likely depicted as more able to handle themselves and be tough,” she says. “It’s almost like white women were not seen as viable action protagonists unless they transformed and became more masculine in some ways, whereas Latinas typically didn’t go through any transformation at all.” e Mother is a “pretough” character who actualises her strength rather than being forced to adapt. And that can be a doubleedged sword. Hollywood often reinforces “notions of Latinas as more violent and potentially as more intelligent with their bodies than with their minds in a way in our real life, worlds, [we] usually don’t reward or see as moral . . . ey’re not necessarily the traits that we ascribe to our political leaders or business leaders [even if] these are admired traits within the story worlds.”

And that’s not the only pitfall Latina action heroes have to contend with. Professor in the Department of Sociology at Virginia Tech and author of Gender in Film and Video Neal King says that women in action lms generally have just two options in terms of their plots.

“Women are much more likely than the male heroes to nd out the hard way that the bad guy is their boyfriend, or boss, or otherwise good friend. He’s right under her nose,” King says. “And that’s not to say it never happens with guys, but it just doesn’t happen very often with the guys, where it happens all the time with the women.”

In addition to this oversampling of the close-badguy plot, women action heroes tend to also share a motivation: “ ere’s a history of women who are good at doing violence for a living, playing cops and adjacent, and they tend historically in these roles to protect kids, whether their own or others,” Dr King says. In e Mother Lopez does both. She’s ghting o two of her exes to protect her daughter, and she’s irt- ing with stereotypes while also subverting them. She’s essentially playing within the established structure to carve out a niche for herself and her community — and it hasn’t been easy.