Kathryn Bigelow's success at the 2010 Academy Awards, when she became the first woman to receive an Oscar for Best Director for The Hurt Locker (2008), has renewed scholarly and critical interest in women's filmmaking and the position of female directors within Hollywood, as illustrated by The New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis's comment above. The controversies surrounding Bigelow's historical win, as Dargis suggests, can be compared to those that emerged from the critical reception of Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), a generic amalgam of the Western, the buddy film and the road movie – three genres traditionally codified as male – and which significantly features two female leads. At the time of its release, Scott's film sparked considerable debate regarding its political value for feminism, often being read as a radical revision of Hollywood's conventional representation of woman's place in the domestic sphere (Tasker 1993: 134–9).

In spite of Dargis's enthusiastic response, The Hurt Locker, a war film about an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team deployed in Baghdad, centred on the representation of US soldiers (of which all are male in the film), has not generated similar consensus on its significance in relation to feminist politics. While many commentators in the mainstream press celebrated the filmmaker's triumph as a female director working in a predominantly male industry – in the vein of Barbra Streisand, who famously announced that ‘the time has come’, just before declaring Bigelow the winner of the Best Director category during the awards ceremony – the event also provoked a fair number of hostile responses, which emanated in part, and perhaps perplexingly, from feminist circles. In a frequently quoted salon.com article on The Hurt Locker provocatively entitled ‘Kathryn Bigelow: Feminist Pioneer or Tough Guy in Drag?’,