Looking for articles again

I've just found out that instead of teaching ENG 102 next semester, I'll be teaching ENG 101, and need to come up with a new course tout suite, since I don't want to recycle any of my old 101 courses again—I've done "Monsters" and "Warriors" twice, and don't want to repeat my Tolkien course in a semester where there won't be many 101 courses so students have less choice, since you can only get away with doing a whole course on Tolkien if you're guaranteed a class of hardcore Tolkien fans rather than students who were put in that section because it was the only one that fit their timetables. (Our Freshman English courses are all based on a theme chosen by the instructor—students sign up for whichever course interests them.)

I've decided to base this course on the final third of my old "Warriors" course, which was about female warriors, as this was the most interesting and popular part. The working title is "Amazons: women warriors in history, legend and popular culture." The popular culture part is easy: I've just found a couple of good articles on Kill Bill, and thanks to Slayage and Whoosh! I have oodles of papers on Buffy and Xena. To kick off the historical/legendary part, I have a chapter from Lyn Webster Wilde's On the Trail of the Women Warriors: The Amazons in Myth and History. What I really need now is some texts on how historical female warriors have been used to create nationalist or feminist icons. Boadicea/Boudicca is the obvious example, and I may bring in Elizabeth I, since although she didn't physically kick anyone's ass, she did direct a war, and played on the woman warrior image quite consciously. There are some similar figures in Chinese history that I may look into.

Another idea I'm toying with is looking at female action characters in computer games. Lara Croft is an obvious choice, and it would be interesting to look at female fighters in MMORPGs. There's an interesting tension there between feminism and male adolescent lust!

Anyway, gentle reader, if you know of good online texts along these lines, please share!

Sad but True

The course is coming together already. From an article about Lara Croft: "Many commentators have pointed to a recent tendency to allow female characters to be physically and powerful and independent—so long as they’re young, pretty and have large breasts."