Abstract

This article examines how the figure—or genre—of “woman” is produced and contested within the traditionally masculine action film through the critical reception of Mad Max: Fury Road. While debates over whether the film is feminist appear to center on representation, they reveal a deeper investment in stabilizing “woman” as a coherent political object. Drawing on feminist film theory, I argue that if the film seems nostalgic for a regenerative birth mother at a moment when sexual difference is reconfigured by queer and trans studies, feminist criticism’s investment in what Robyn Wiegman calls “the world-making stakes of identity knowledge” (2012, 35) ultimately reveals a similar shortcoming in its conceptualization of sex and feminism, limited by a binary conceptualization of gender and the demand that Furiosa’s feminist status ties legibility to political value. The interpretive instability surrounding Furiosa—variously read as empowerment, objectification, sexualization, or resistance—exposes the labor required to render sexual difference intelligible within a binary framework. Just as genre actively shapes the film, feminist criticism shapes the woman it claims to describe, producing the illusion of standing outside its object. At stake in the film’s interpretability is not simply gender representation but the citational and epistemological authority of “woman” itself.

Recommended Citation

Stanitzke, Maik. 2026. "Fixing Furiosa’s Feminism: Gender and Genre in Feminist Criticism of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)." Journal of Feminist Scholarship 27 (Spring): 35-47. 10.23860/jfs.2026.27.03.