Meaghan Morris

Fluctuating over the decades with audience uptakes of technological change, the long career of martial artist Cynthia Rothrock presents a complex case for discussion of the uses of self-invention for women in media-intensive cultural industries. Born in 1957, she was renowned in live competitive performance in 1981-85, starred through the late 1980s in major Hong Kong films of the period (Yes, Madam!, Righting Wrongs), then worked in the direct to video industry that flourished in the 1990s. When that collapsed she built new fame through the burgeoning martial arts ‘event’ industry, and now enjoys a fifth, cyber-based phase of celebrity thanks to her exuberant participation in social media and on-line sites, even as her films are re-issued in boutique Blu-Ray series. After acting in over 60 films, Rothrock recently crowd-funded her first film as a director, Black Creek.

Asking how her creative response to changing reception conditions has transcended the industrial pressures on fighting women to get off screen as they age, this paper focusses on Rothrock’s production of a social media persona and how she uses this to resist the expectation that an older woman in martial arts (too expendable for The Expendables) no longer has a visible role to play. Along with the irreducible issues of sexism and now ageism that Rothrock has faced, this paper is concerned with the force of comedy in popular martial arts culture and the ambiguous affordances of “neo-liberal” practices of the self.