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REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN

A2Media_CaseStudy2

Gender inequality

Narrow range of images of women (e.g. woman as object)

Media reinforces the status quo

?

A2Media_CaseStudy2

The ‘male’ camera debate

The ways in which film language constructs a ‘gendered’ look

What about the female spectator’s viewing posiEon?

ObjecEficaEon

Feminist Film Theory

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Psychoanalytic theory (Freud & Lacan)

key to development of feminist film theory

IdenEficaEon always with the male 

Female (passive or threat) influence of patriarchal society

Patriarchy & phallocentrism linked: phallus is a  symbol of power/having 

Woman has no phallus (castrated), which relates back to Freudian theory that the woman is lacking and therefore inferior

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AcEon heroine is ‘really man’ (symbolically male)

Greater emphasis on the muscularacEon heroine can be seen as anexample of this phenomenon

Feminist criEcs have responded in avariety of ways to such texts –pleasure, disgust, enthusiasm andsuspicion

Yvonne tasker- "Spectacular bodies" 1990

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Asks ‘is the gaze male?’

Argues that men and women can adoptdominant or submissive roles

But this means that the sameopposiEon (masculine/feminine) sEllexists

E. Ann Kaplan 1983

A2Media_CaseStudy2

Carol J. CloverMen, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the

Modern Horror Film, 1992

Audience identification is unstable and fluid across gender lines, particularly in the case of the slasher film.

Villain often a male whose masculinity, and sexuality more generally, are in crisis.

The phenomenon of the male audience having to identify with a female in an male-oriented genre, usually associated with sadistic voyeurism, raises interesting questions about the nature of slasher films and their relationship with feminism.

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Argues that women have been stereotyped since the silent era

ConvenEonal Hollywood narraEve an extension of the male vision

She argued for there to be a cinema where women were not portrayed in these restricted convenEons

But aware that also had to have popular appeal

Claire Johnston “Women’s Cinema and Counter Cinema” 1973