Abstract

STIEGWARDT, Tomás  and  LOS SANTOS, Gabriel. De la deconstrucción y reinterpretación del sujeto heroico: el ocaso del héroe patriarcal y el advenimiento de la heroína. Una visión holística, complementaria e inter esencial de la heroicidad humana. Cuad. Cent. Estud. Diseñ. Comun., Ensayos [online]. 2023, n.117, pp.20-52.  Epub Mar 01, 2023. ISSN 1853-3523.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18682/cdc.vi117.4273.

Heroism, as a concept and its symbolic value has been a central focus in many cultures. It was the narrative, in its various forms, that has enshrined heroicity in a myriad of stories, myths, and legends from oral fairy tales to transmedia.

Although heroic stories are found all over the world, it has been in the Western culture, where in the need of its own creation and expansion, there have been countless versions or heroes whose actions and feats have built the imagination of our civilization.

Heroicity has a fundamental value in the way of thinking, feeling, and understanding the world and oneself within our culture, and strong individualism is its most recognizable trait.

The self -perception of the westerner is structured around saviors and chosen ones who make a difference in everyone’s lives. This idea has a label, the mark of the dominant thought based upon an indisputable premise: God is male. He has a beard; he is strong, omnipotent and tends to get angry. He creates and punishes. And this axiomatic model was injected into the hero's ideals.

His basics attributes are strength, determination, courage, bravery and occasionally, intelligence.

It is not strange that God’s human version, the hero, is somehow defined -despite his flaws and mistakes- by his heroic (divine) actions and in the vast majority of cases, as male. The hero, as proposed by the western culture, is almost always male. Becoming a hero -and being recognized as such- has been and still is a goal in itself. A point of arrival, a title, a reason for being both for the individual and for the society that produces, adopts, contains, and promotes it. The hero resonates in the minds of people and in their imagination, and, consequently, it is inscribed in history.

The hero immortalizes a fragment of his existence and for that, a, otherwise vulgar and ordinary human becomes a member of a select breed by extraordinary actions. He is, somehow, divine.

Thus, core values such as the ability to listen, to have empathy, to be tender, to be involved in dynamic interactions, to care about nature and countless others that are generally attributed to women, have been left out (almost in cultural secrecy). These values, which are more transcendental in life than in death, are not labeled as heroic in our society.

In recent years (and due to the paradigm shift regarding the role of women and due to a very specific market demand), the movie and television industry has showcased a variety of heroic women. However, the harder the effort to unify the role under different circumstances, the more it has failed (with a few exceptions) under the temptation to build heroines deprived of essence and a raw copies of male heroes. A form of female heroism will undermine the darkest areas of the political model of the Western society and it existing bias: The patriarchal concept.

Thus, in the construction of female heroism, there will be an implicit contradiction with its preexisting notions. There is a conceptual abyss between creating live, nurturing, and caring relative to going out into the world to slaughter enemies

A female heroic form may end up in it not even being named that way unless the concept of a hero is also redefined. The advent of a heroine could create a semantic paradox. Perhaps its effective realization consists in fully undoing the idea that the hero (and the heroic) is necessary, ineffable and natural. Perhaps its mere enunciation can generate a disruptive gap in the system and this will be, in itself, an act of female heroism.

Keywords : Heroicity; transmedial; patriarchy; female; axiom.

        · abstract in Spanish | Portuguese     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )