The Afro-Asian Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation in Pam Grier’s Coffy and Foxy Brown

Abstract: In the early 1970s Pam Grier became the first American woman action star. Her films Coffy (dir. Jack Hill, 1973) and Foxy Brown (dir. Jack Hill, 1974) inspired a generation of young women to assert themselves and declare their liberation. Through a close rhetorical analysis of her two iconic films, I argue that Grier’s characters in Coffy and Foxy Brown are manifestations of an Afro-Asian rhetoric espoused by the women of the Black Panther Party (BPP). They were inspired by the heroic Vietnamese women guerilla fighters known as “the long-haired warriors.” In both Coffy and Foxy Brown, Grier enacts the Afro-Asian influences that helped give rise to the women’s liberation movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I focus on how the women members of the BPP drew inspiration from Vietnamese women and how this combination of influences, through Grier’s films, exposed the world to the Afro-Asian rhetoric of women’s liberation.