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How to Kill an Amazon


Ruby Blondell. "How to Kill an Amazon." Helios 32.2. 2005. 73-103.

The hero of the TV show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys is a family man, utterly devoted to his wife and children.  The show provides little trace of the many women who, in the early mythological tradition, fall innocent victim to his violent (and often extramarital) lust. The Greek Amazons are domesticated in Legendary Journeys much as Hercules himself is, through incorporation into a bourgeois pseudo-enlightened model of the family. They are tamed in a way that deprives them of their transgressive power and the threat it poses to the Greek household. It is for this reason that it is unnecessary for our hero to actually kill any of these Amazons. As far as this TV show is concerned, the Greek Amazons are already dead.

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