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NEW LARA CROFT
BOOK TO DEBUT IN 2005
Copyright 2004 www.tombraiderchronicles.com
[ December 29th 2004 ]
Since
the game Tomb Raider was first released in 1996,
its protagonist Lara Croft has become an international
celebrity. The virtual archaeologist-adventuress
has been featured in various sequels to the original
game, a line of action figures, two Hollywood
films starring Angelina Jolie, forty comic books,
a series of novels, and a variety of clothing,
merchandise, and ephemera. She has appeared on
the covers of Time and Newsweek, spawned innumerable
Internet fan sites and a library of adulatory
fan fiction, become a pornographic sex symbol,
and even inspired a look-alike beauty pageant.
Astrid
Deuber-Mankowsky’s groundbreaking study examines
Lara Croft as a cyber heroine—a female body ubiquitously
inhabited by game players, an icon of both female
strength and male objectification, and the virtual
future of fame. Despite Croft’s prominence there
have been few critical inquiries into her bridging
of the boundary between virtual and real worlds
or the extent to which she reflects and influences
the image of women in digital media. First published
in German and revised and updated for this English-language
edition, this book is an innovative analysis of
the multimedia heroine, tracing the top-down marketing
strategies and bottom-up frenzy that precipitated
the Lara Croft phenomenon.
For
girls and women, Croft is a symbol of empowerment,
a tough and self-assured riot grrl who has opened
up the overwhelmingly masculinized world of computer
gaming to female participants. At the same time,
she personifies both heterosexual male fantasies
and the twinned processes of globalization and
cultural imperialism. Drawing on feminist and
cultural studies, Deuber-Mankowsky sees Croft
as symptomatic of the new media environment and
its tendency to erase all qualitative difference,
even sexual difference.
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