How do Representations in Hollywood Action Films Contribute to the Othering of Women in Contemporary Society?
[Joe's undergraduate dissertation]
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the representations of women within the American film industry, paying particular attention to the action genre, in order to discern how the Hollywood industry contributes to the othering of women in society. This research examines Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of the woman as ‘other’ outlined in The Second Sex to both highlight and examine the ethical implications of a cinematic institution that promotes the unequal status of women in society,
Using Foucault to illustrate the practical consequences of this kind of representation, I focus on Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘Male Gaze’ that operates within cinema, in order to distinguish whether the representations and symbols surrounding women in films are simply a reflected by-product of established patriarchal ideologies, or whether films actually initiate and develop them.The consequences of mass media that holds a patriarchal view of sexual difference are hugely important, as such, this dissertation also tries to discover whether there is any is there any possibility of feminist thought being represented in mainstream Hollywood action films. Examining Benjamin and Flusser, it becomes clear that through audience interpretation, and messianic advertising, there is a possibility for Hollywood to possess redemptive qualities, regardless of intention.
The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the representations of women within the American film industry, paying particular attention to the action genre, in order to discern how the Hollywood industry contributes to the othering of women in society. This research examines Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of the woman as ‘other’ outlined in The Second Sex to both highlight and examine the ethical implications of a cinematic institution that promotes the unequal status of women in society,
Using Foucault to illustrate the practical consequences of this kind of representation, I focus on Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘Male Gaze’ that operates within cinema, in order to distinguish whether the representations and symbols surrounding women in films are simply a reflected by-product of established patriarchal ideologies, or whether films actually initiate and develop them.The consequences of mass media that holds a patriarchal view of sexual difference are hugely important, as such, this dissertation also tries to discover whether there is any is there any possibility of feminist thought being represented in mainstream Hollywood action films. Examining Benjamin and Flusser, it becomes clear that through audience interpretation, and messianic advertising, there is a possibility for Hollywood to possess redemptive qualities, regardless of intention.
Introduction
A recent report conducted by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, investigating an 11-year sample of popular Hollywood films spanning from 2007 to 2017, has found that of the 1,100 films they examined, 28.4% of female characters, compared to just 7.5% of male characters, were shown in alluring apparel with some nudity. The study, which focuses on the 100 top-grossing movies according to the American box office each year, also shows that younger females (13-20 years old) were just as likely as older females ( 21-39 years old) to appear in sexy attire or with some nudity. Females accounted for 64.9% of all instances of sexy attire across the 100 top films of 2017.[1] The data from this publication serves to briefly introduce and define the scope of gender inequality as an issue in Hollywood.[2]
This dissertation intends to detail how Hollywood action films repeatedly represent women through a limited, constraining, and ultimately oppressive set of characterisations that serve to make them the Other.[3] It contends that expressions of normativity found Hollywood films have the ability to uphold and inform normative gendered binaries, affecting the way society relates to and views women.
The first chapter introduces how Hollywood films structure and are structured by society, exploring the dialectical relationship between author and audience, and its impact on the images found on-screen. This chapter also seeks to explore theoretical reactions to patriarchal depictions of women, taking Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey’s approach to analysing the structures of the coded image. Clarifying depictions in relation to the gender theories of both Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, and taking de Beauvoir’s notion of otherness, the chapter concludes by establishing that Hollywood films are coded with patriarchal prejudices that the audience may interpret as reflective of reality. Chapter Two further highlights how iconography is used to present patriarchal constructions of reality, whilst also illustrating the complex ways in which action films can undermine the stability of sexist depictions and gender norms. By exploring the concept of the action heroine, Vilém Flusser’s model of the techno-image, and Walter Benjamin’s theories concerning the utopian impulse of the consumer, this chapter demonstrates how Hollywood’s heavy reliance on profits can be unintentionally redemptive for its depiction of women. Chapter Three continues to explore the notion of gender normativity, how a creation of values that distinguishes between acceptable and abnormal can be applied to gender identities, and how, through an examination of Foucault’s social theory of Panopticism, the gender norms that are promoted in Hollywood films act as a form of discipline. Along with this, the chapter seeks to explore the notion of progress regarding Hollywood’s depictions.
In the era of #MeToo, the Weinstein effect, and the Time’s Up movement, in which there is a need for the re-evaluation of gender roles within the film industry, an exploration into the inequality found in Hollywood depictions is both relevant and vital.
This dissertation intends to detail how Hollywood action films repeatedly represent women through a limited, constraining, and ultimately oppressive set of characterisations that serve to make them the Other.[3] It contends that expressions of normativity found Hollywood films have the ability to uphold and inform normative gendered binaries, affecting the way society relates to and views women.
The first chapter introduces how Hollywood films structure and are structured by society, exploring the dialectical relationship between author and audience, and its impact on the images found on-screen. This chapter also seeks to explore theoretical reactions to patriarchal depictions of women, taking Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey’s approach to analysing the structures of the coded image. Clarifying depictions in relation to the gender theories of both Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, and taking de Beauvoir’s notion of otherness, the chapter concludes by establishing that Hollywood films are coded with patriarchal prejudices that the audience may interpret as reflective of reality. Chapter Two further highlights how iconography is used to present patriarchal constructions of reality, whilst also illustrating the complex ways in which action films can undermine the stability of sexist depictions and gender norms. By exploring the concept of the action heroine, Vilém Flusser’s model of the techno-image, and Walter Benjamin’s theories concerning the utopian impulse of the consumer, this chapter demonstrates how Hollywood’s heavy reliance on profits can be unintentionally redemptive for its depiction of women. Chapter Three continues to explore the notion of gender normativity, how a creation of values that distinguishes between acceptable and abnormal can be applied to gender identities, and how, through an examination of Foucault’s social theory of Panopticism, the gender norms that are promoted in Hollywood films act as a form of discipline. Along with this, the chapter seeks to explore the notion of progress regarding Hollywood’s depictions.
In the era of #MeToo, the Weinstein effect, and the Time’s Up movement, in which there is a need for the re-evaluation of gender roles within the film industry, an exploration into the inequality found in Hollywood depictions is both relevant and vital.
Chapter I
Hollywood is an industry where profit, above all, is the primary driving force and guiding principle. This motive necessarily impacts the kinds of films that are produced. Hollywood films must be understood as existing within the context of an industrial capitalist structure, where what is on-screen determines profit.[4] Within this system of film-making, films are treated as commodities that are specifically guided and shaped by a box office mentality. This expression of industry is further demonstrated through the notion of a ‘high concept’ film. A high concept film is one that can be easily pitched with a succinctly stated premise, indicating the demand during production for a marketable theme or plot that can be easily communicated to and comprehended by an audience. Thus, high concept films, which are most projects in Hollywood, are narrated as much by their marketability as by their story.[5] Here we can see how the economic determinants of the film industry naturally change the product, in an attempt to eliminate the uncertainty surrounding box office profits. With society being the source of income for Hollywood, it becomes an economic strategy to intentionally reflect society to ensure that their products are accepted and consumed. Upon recognising the capitalist structure that permeates Hollywood films, and examining gender representations through this lens, it becomes clear that Hollywood films seemingly have to contain ideologies that must maintain a status quo. A high concept narrative is thus often used as a ‘safe’ option to avoid the risk of alienating audiences with convoluted or overly taxing plot exposition, or with social themes that challenge accepted conceptions of identity.
I will set out to illustrate how Hollywood films structure, and are structured by, cultural norms surrounding accepted gender roles and identities. To illustrate how the methods of film production function to perpetuate a perceived status of women through the moving images on-screen, we must explore feminist film theory, using examples from contemporary action films to demonstrate this. The social implications of gender norms are further clarified when applying feminist film theory to the arguments made by both Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, who posit that gender is a culturally informed act of performativity. These arguments serve to clarify, as well as dispute, Hollywood’s ideological configurations of gender as a fixed entity, disrupting the male hegemonic assumption that one party can have control over another as a result of naturally determined roles. In defining the status of women as the Other, I shall take de Beauvoir’s understanding of the concept to outline the unequal ideological relationship between men and women. Beauvoir bases her idea on Hegel’s account of the master-slave relationship. Instead of the terms ‘master’ and ‘slave’, however, she uses the terms ‘Subject’ and ‘Other’- the Subject being the absolute and the Other the inessential, or the subordinate. The situation of women is comparable to the condition of the Hegelian Other in that men, like the Hegelian Master, identify themselves as the Subject, the absolute human type, and, measuring women by this standard, identify them as inferior.[6] The term Othering then describes the action of labelling a person as belonging to an inferior social category defined as the Other.
Discussing the stereotypes of women that saturate classic Hollywood films, Claire Johnson states that the development of stereotypes was not a conscious strategy of oppression, rather a practical method to aid the audience’s comprehension of narrative.[7] Here we can see a method of reflection within the initial origin of the depiction of women on-screen. In order for the historical audience to understand what was happening on-screen, they would have to be presented with intentionally heightened depictions of gender. For Johnston then, the imaging of women in the cinema is a semiotic sign system that relates to the audience’s real-world interpretations of gender: ‘myths governing the cinema are no different from those governing other cultural products: they relate to a standard value system informing all cultural systems in a given society’.[8] Johnston’s diagnosis of the ‘myths’ contained within the images of women seems to confirm that part of the cinematic production process is the replication of societal standards, yet, as the representations of women have historically progressed, the intention of this stereotyping has been replaced. It has become possible for the sign ‘Woman’ to be emptied of its original denotative meaning, and for new meanings and connotations to be superimposed onto the image of woman. Popular films had previously been seen to reproduce reality, audiences equated what they had seen with more or less truthful reflections of the world.[9] Thus, a hijacking of the signs and meanings surrounding women on the screen could go unnoticed, with the audience viewing biased, or mythical, depictions of women as simply a continuation of truthful reflections of reality. It is for this reason, Johnston concludes, that myths surrounding women on-screen represent the major means in which women have been used in film: myth can transmit and transform the ideology of sexism and render it invisible.[10]
Johnston’s work establishes that the characterisation processes of Hollywood have gone from solely heightening reflections of socially established notions of women to constructing particular ideological views of reality. Under this lens, sexist stereotypes of women can be presented as ‘normal’, in a process that naturalises constructed roles. With the structures of Hollywood cinema being analysed as fundamentally patriarchal by Johnston, the fictional creation of ‘Woman’ in the cinema represents the ideological meaning that ‘Woman’ has for men. Women are thus negatively represented exclusively as ‘not-man’.[11] Thus, on-screen representations of women hold culturally reinforced information that the audience receives and identifies with. We can begin to determine how it is through a sign system of this kind that contemporary Hollywood films could be inscribed with the dominant ideologies of a patriarchal nature, in an attempt to encourage the continuation of distinct prescribed sexual differences. The naturalisation of a constructed role that is applied to the sign ‘Woman’ constitutes her as a repressed Other in contrast to the role of man. The concept of the Male Gaze advances this argument, providing an insight into how the operations of film production further the on-screen divide between men and women, and how this process leads to the audience’s active engagement in the othering of the female figure.
Laura Mulvey’s theory of the Male Gaze concentrates on ‘the way film reflects, reveals, and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle’.[12] Like Johnston, Mulvey’s theory of the Male Gaze argues that the sign ‘Woman’, the Other to man’s imaginary self, underpins the patriarchal order within cinema. Mulvey contends that Hollywood films offer the spectator erotic pleasure through scopophilia, the pleasure gained from viewing another as an erotic object, which is manifested through filming techniques which maximise the roles of men and reduce the roles of women: ‘unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order’.[13] To enhance visual pleasure for the assumed male audience, the woman’s body is ‘cut up’ into close-ups through framing and editing. The Male Gaze thus works in Hollywood films as an act of voyeurism, objectifying the on-screen woman’s body, turning it into a passive spectacle.[14] A further element of the gaze process is a narcissistic pleasure in which the spectator identifies with his ‘ideal ego’ found in the male movie star. The Male Gaze, which is composed of the look from male characters on-screen, the camera as it focuses on the body of a woman, and the audience, translates the image of a passive female figure into an object of sexual desire, granting the voyeur a position of control over the image on-screen.[15] This gendered ‘active/passive’ divide structures even the films narrative, with the male hero serving to advance the story and the ‘woman-as-image’ serving to disrupt the narrative moment.[16] Here, the sign ‘Woman’ is designed specifically to stimulate a male audience, her appearance coded for visual and erotic impact only, connoting a ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’.[17]
The 2007 science fiction action film Transformers illustrates Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze theory in operation within the contemporary Hollywood action film. The film’s depiction of actress Megan Fox exemplifies the pleasure-driven, voyeuristic intent behind Hollywood film production. A clear demonstration of this intent is featured in a scene in which two protagonists Mikaela (Fox) and Sam (Shia LaBeof) are discussing the mechanics of his car. The camera’s sweeping shots revolve around Fox’s body, halting narrative progression in a demonstration of spectacle over narrative. Here we can identify the first aspect of the gaze. The framing of this shot serves to cut up Fox’s body: the camera spends time focusing on her midriff and chest, emulating Sam’s field of vision, in order to develop erotic visual pleasure for the audience (Fig 1). The fragmentation of Fox indicates a clear sexual objectification, in a process that deems her a spectacle rather than an active agent within the film. This affirms the gendered active/passive division in which men act, and women simply appear, and in which men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at.[18] It is this dynamic which determines real-world relations not only between men and women, but also of women towards themselves. The visual division leads to a woman’s sense of being in herself becoming supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.[19]
Figure 1 sustains the second element of the Male Gaze theory, in which the spectator watching the film automatically, and often unconsciously, identifies with the look of their male on-screen counterpart. As the spectator identifies with the gaze of the male protagonist, their ‘screen surrogate’, the power of the active male protagonist as he controls events in the narrative coincides with the power of the erotic look, ‘both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence’.[20] This sense of control over the female figure is exacerbated by the staging and lighting of the actors within the frame. Fox’s body dominates the foreground of the shot, providing the audience with a centre of interest and drawing their attention directly to her body. The male character’s presence in the darker areas of the frame also acts to shape the way the audience’s gaze is directed towards Fox. Figure 1 demonstrates the use of lead room in the composition of this shot. [21] Lead room, the vacant space in between Sam and Mikaela, is used to add visual weight to a character’s gaze, directing the audience’s own gaze towards the object of Sam’s fascination.[22] Selecting the frame is a fundamental act of film-making, film-makers do so to direct the audience’s attention.[23] This clearly validates Mulvey’s argument that, once seen under a patriarchal structure, every aspect of film production is directed towards nullifying female agency through objectifications that redraw her as the Other. Not only are women written into films stereotypically to convey the unrealistically negative sign of ‘Woman’, as argued by Johnston, but the technical production of a film behind the image determines the relationship the audience has to women both on-screen and off.
Sam’s place as bearer of the look acts to replicate the audience’s own control over what they see, in turning the woman on-screen into a passive object. Sam’s own look is one taken in secret- he, matching the audience, is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation which the female is unaware of. This one-sided observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim mirrors Mulvey’s description of the extremes of scopophilic pleasure that the action cinema, and Hollywood cinema in general, satisfies: ‘it can become fixated into a perversion, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified Other.[24] Sam here characterises the audience’s surreptitious observation that further objectifies and Others the female body in its attempt to have control over it. Transformers illustrates how through particular filmic techniques film-makers attempt to make a spectacle out of women’s bodies, and in doing so assert passivity, as the spectator regards them for pleasure alone, creating the idea that every aspect of them belongs to men- especially their appearance.
Cinematic identifications made by the audience are structured along the lines of a binary difference between men and women. We must examine the sex-gender distinction to illustrate how the prescribed codes of femininity found within Hollywood films serve to Other women. Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal statement ‘One is not born, but becomes, woman’ distinguishes sex from gender.[25] ‘Woman’ here is understood as a conceptual formulation constructed and defined by society, culture and history. Characterisations of femininity that structure what it means to be a woman are not pre-determined, or natural, rather they are prescribed socially. The separation of sex and gender debunks the suggestion that gender, as well as the roles deemed appropriate for certain genders, is prescriptive. This assertion follows the Sartrian claim in which fixed identities of any kind are non-existent: ‘man first of all exists, encounters himself… and defines himself afterwards’.[26] Thus, a person’s essence or personality is not built over a previously designed model, no one has a precise purpose, as it is the person who chooses whether to engage with certain traits or not. Gender identities then, contrasting sex categories, are identities that are acquired rather than anatomically predetermined.
Judith Butler furthers de Beauvoir’s conclusion that sex is the fixed, anatomical, difference between male and female, and that gender is a variable, cultural interpretation of anatomy. She states that it is no longer possible to attribute the values of women to biological necessity, or meaningfully refer to the natural or unnatural gendered behaviour, as ‘all gender is, by definition, unnatural’.[27] Her suggestion that we ‘become’ our gender is a proposal that gender is a process of structuring ourselves: choosing gender is the ‘embodiment of possibilities within a network of deeply entrenched cultural norms’.[28] Cultural norms thus come to have an enormous impact on how we come to identify ourselves and others. Gender identifications, the characteristics deemed ‘manly’ or ‘womanly’, are culturally dependant, not intrinsic parts of anatomy. Butler confirms the fluidity of gender in her assertion that ‘Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceeded; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’.[29] The self is then in an active process of embodying certain cultural possibilities, feeding off cultural norms and their underlying assertions about accepted gender performances.
Here we can determine how the films of the Hollywood industry contribute to the otherness of women in society, through depictions of women that act to maintain the notion of fixed identities and binary gender roles. The mechanisms of Hollywood production delineate a particular definition of women in relation to men, sustaining stereotypical, as well as sexist, characterisations and objectivising gazes that in effect state “this is what it means to be a woman”. Hollywood defies assertions of a sex-gender distinction, instead aiming to eliminate such a fluidity through iconography that is deeply normative and pacifying in an attempt to control traditional beliefs of female identity. Male figures and masculine traits in both historical and contemporary Hollywood films act to discern what the female isn’t, that is, active and powerful. In this sense we can classify the boundaries placed around women in their role as not-man, and definitions of women are only given in the form of what they cannot do and are not. A woman in this ideology cannot be active, strong, or in control, whilst still being a woman. Understanding this, we can draw links to de Beauvoir in her assertion that ‘man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being’, identifying a process of othering.[30] Mirroring Mulvey’s awareness that women must only see themselves reflected through a male’s gaze, identifying themselves not as themselves but as man defines them, de Beauvoir continues: ‘[s]he thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition’.[31] In this sense, through defining masculine characteristics as essential and feminine characteristics inessential, and fixing these gendered characteristics to anatomy, ‘Woman’ (who by this logic can be only feminine) is made the Other. Hollywood, in prolonging biologically fixed gender perceptions and promoting active and passive distinctions between men and women, thus promotes this othering within society.
Ultimately, gender fluidity undermines the classifications placed on women by Hollywood to preserve the perceived naturally determined roles, and male hegemony over women. Here we can re-identify the dialectical relationship that Hollywood and society have- Hollywood must conform to the cultural norms that it has come to install and prolong. Hollywood’s declarations of what it is to be a woman become actualised in the acceptance and performance of the roles prescribed by the patriarchy. Representations of the world in Hollywood films are the work of men, described from their own point of view, which, de Beauvoir asserts, ‘they confound with absolute truth’.[32] At this juncture we have established that Hollywood films are cultural products that are informed by audiences, in so far as they need to be representative of cultural norms to make a profit, and that they serve to inform, in that the representations of women on screen are coded with patriarchal prejudices that the audience may interpret as reflective of reality. The next chapter will further examine the mobilisations of Hollywood to disrupt the notion of gender fluidity, and how those mobilisations can unintentionally serve to undermine agendas within the Hollywood film industry.
Figure 1 sustains the second element of the Male Gaze theory, in which the spectator watching the film automatically, and often unconsciously, identifies with the look of their male on-screen counterpart. As the spectator identifies with the gaze of the male protagonist, their ‘screen surrogate’, the power of the active male protagonist as he controls events in the narrative coincides with the power of the erotic look, ‘both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence’.[20] This sense of control over the female figure is exacerbated by the staging and lighting of the actors within the frame. Fox’s body dominates the foreground of the shot, providing the audience with a centre of interest and drawing their attention directly to her body. The male character’s presence in the darker areas of the frame also acts to shape the way the audience’s gaze is directed towards Fox. Figure 1 demonstrates the use of lead room in the composition of this shot. [21] Lead room, the vacant space in between Sam and Mikaela, is used to add visual weight to a character’s gaze, directing the audience’s own gaze towards the object of Sam’s fascination.[22] Selecting the frame is a fundamental act of film-making, film-makers do so to direct the audience’s attention.[23] This clearly validates Mulvey’s argument that, once seen under a patriarchal structure, every aspect of film production is directed towards nullifying female agency through objectifications that redraw her as the Other. Not only are women written into films stereotypically to convey the unrealistically negative sign of ‘Woman’, as argued by Johnston, but the technical production of a film behind the image determines the relationship the audience has to women both on-screen and off.
Sam’s place as bearer of the look acts to replicate the audience’s own control over what they see, in turning the woman on-screen into a passive object. Sam’s own look is one taken in secret- he, matching the audience, is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation which the female is unaware of. This one-sided observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim mirrors Mulvey’s description of the extremes of scopophilic pleasure that the action cinema, and Hollywood cinema in general, satisfies: ‘it can become fixated into a perversion, whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified Other.[24] Sam here characterises the audience’s surreptitious observation that further objectifies and Others the female body in its attempt to have control over it. Transformers illustrates how through particular filmic techniques film-makers attempt to make a spectacle out of women’s bodies, and in doing so assert passivity, as the spectator regards them for pleasure alone, creating the idea that every aspect of them belongs to men- especially their appearance.
Cinematic identifications made by the audience are structured along the lines of a binary difference between men and women. We must examine the sex-gender distinction to illustrate how the prescribed codes of femininity found within Hollywood films serve to Other women. Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal statement ‘One is not born, but becomes, woman’ distinguishes sex from gender.[25] ‘Woman’ here is understood as a conceptual formulation constructed and defined by society, culture and history. Characterisations of femininity that structure what it means to be a woman are not pre-determined, or natural, rather they are prescribed socially. The separation of sex and gender debunks the suggestion that gender, as well as the roles deemed appropriate for certain genders, is prescriptive. This assertion follows the Sartrian claim in which fixed identities of any kind are non-existent: ‘man first of all exists, encounters himself… and defines himself afterwards’.[26] Thus, a person’s essence or personality is not built over a previously designed model, no one has a precise purpose, as it is the person who chooses whether to engage with certain traits or not. Gender identities then, contrasting sex categories, are identities that are acquired rather than anatomically predetermined.
Judith Butler furthers de Beauvoir’s conclusion that sex is the fixed, anatomical, difference between male and female, and that gender is a variable, cultural interpretation of anatomy. She states that it is no longer possible to attribute the values of women to biological necessity, or meaningfully refer to the natural or unnatural gendered behaviour, as ‘all gender is, by definition, unnatural’.[27] Her suggestion that we ‘become’ our gender is a proposal that gender is a process of structuring ourselves: choosing gender is the ‘embodiment of possibilities within a network of deeply entrenched cultural norms’.[28] Cultural norms thus come to have an enormous impact on how we come to identify ourselves and others. Gender identifications, the characteristics deemed ‘manly’ or ‘womanly’, are culturally dependant, not intrinsic parts of anatomy. Butler confirms the fluidity of gender in her assertion that ‘Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceeded; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’.[29] The self is then in an active process of embodying certain cultural possibilities, feeding off cultural norms and their underlying assertions about accepted gender performances.
Here we can determine how the films of the Hollywood industry contribute to the otherness of women in society, through depictions of women that act to maintain the notion of fixed identities and binary gender roles. The mechanisms of Hollywood production delineate a particular definition of women in relation to men, sustaining stereotypical, as well as sexist, characterisations and objectivising gazes that in effect state “this is what it means to be a woman”. Hollywood defies assertions of a sex-gender distinction, instead aiming to eliminate such a fluidity through iconography that is deeply normative and pacifying in an attempt to control traditional beliefs of female identity. Male figures and masculine traits in both historical and contemporary Hollywood films act to discern what the female isn’t, that is, active and powerful. In this sense we can classify the boundaries placed around women in their role as not-man, and definitions of women are only given in the form of what they cannot do and are not. A woman in this ideology cannot be active, strong, or in control, whilst still being a woman. Understanding this, we can draw links to de Beauvoir in her assertion that ‘man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being’, identifying a process of othering.[30] Mirroring Mulvey’s awareness that women must only see themselves reflected through a male’s gaze, identifying themselves not as themselves but as man defines them, de Beauvoir continues: ‘[s]he thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition’.[31] In this sense, through defining masculine characteristics as essential and feminine characteristics inessential, and fixing these gendered characteristics to anatomy, ‘Woman’ (who by this logic can be only feminine) is made the Other. Hollywood, in prolonging biologically fixed gender perceptions and promoting active and passive distinctions between men and women, thus promotes this othering within society.
Ultimately, gender fluidity undermines the classifications placed on women by Hollywood to preserve the perceived naturally determined roles, and male hegemony over women. Here we can re-identify the dialectical relationship that Hollywood and society have- Hollywood must conform to the cultural norms that it has come to install and prolong. Hollywood’s declarations of what it is to be a woman become actualised in the acceptance and performance of the roles prescribed by the patriarchy. Representations of the world in Hollywood films are the work of men, described from their own point of view, which, de Beauvoir asserts, ‘they confound with absolute truth’.[32] At this juncture we have established that Hollywood films are cultural products that are informed by audiences, in so far as they need to be representative of cultural norms to make a profit, and that they serve to inform, in that the representations of women on screen are coded with patriarchal prejudices that the audience may interpret as reflective of reality. The next chapter will further examine the mobilisations of Hollywood to disrupt the notion of gender fluidity, and how those mobilisations can unintentionally serve to undermine agendas within the Hollywood film industry.
Chapter II
As established in the first chapter, women in Hollywood films are staged and blocked for the purpose of male, heteronormative, erotic contemplation and pleasure. Stereotypical depictions and socially defined characterisations of gender identities act to present a sexual imbalance that has a large influence on how women are viewed by others off-screen, and how women view and construct their own identities. This chapter intends to further highlight how iconography is used for the purpose of putting forward patriarchal constructions of reality. Meaning is created in film through the image, especially in the action genre. The film’s narrative provides context for the images on-screen, but within the action cinema, narrative and spectacle are bound up together so that the enactment of spectacle has overtaken narrative, and action cinema is as much concerned with visual pleasure as with narrative development.[33] Thus, we can identify that the action cinema offers a prime example of how films can promote norms that Other women through deployments of iconography. This chapter also aims to illustrate the complex ways in which action films can undermine the stability of sexist depictions and gender norms. By exploring the concept of the action heroine, Vilém Flusser’s model of the techno-image, and Walter Benjamin’s theories concerning the utopian impulse of the consumer, this chapter intends to demonstrate how Hollywood’s heavy reliance on profits, and varying audience reception, can be unintentionally redemptive for its depiction of women.
Vilém Flusser’s writing concerning the cultural shift from text being the main markers of ideology to images illustrates how the image marks a new age in how information can be perceived by a reader. As paintings and other such pre-technical images openly reveal that they were created, or ‘codified’, by a human, and can be easily decoded, the viewer is able to interpret what they see as signs of what the painter intended. Photographs, the first of Flusser’s ‘techno-images’, which also include films, cannot be so easily perceived.[34] For Flusser, techno-images are not only reproductive images, as pre-technical images are, but are a dominant cultural technique through which reality is constituted and understood.[35] Thomas Kuhn’s conception of a paradigm shift, which outlines a process in which a quantity of existing problems within one system of thought result in the abandonment of that system, to be replaced by a new model, serves as a metaphor for Flusser’s description of technological revolutions.[36] This can be seen in Flusser’s assertion that the invention of photography, thus the invention of the techno-image, ‘constitutes a break in history that can only be understood in comparison to that other historical break constituted by the invention of linear writing’.[37] Here we can understand that the image has overtaken linear writing in the way meaning is transported to the viewer, with Flusser interpreting the techno-image as a ‘meta-code of texts’ rather than as a mimetic image aiming for objectivity.[38]
Flusser’s perception of films as carriers of cultural meaning in which reality is understood, reaffirms the dialectical relationship between Hollywood and its audience: ‘[t]he new media can turn images into carriers of meaning and transform people into designers of meaning in a participatory process’.[39] Images then have the possibility to encourage many more interpretations than both text and pre-technical images. This notion of a participatory process involving the audience certainly reflects the Male Gaze, in which the audience internalises the Male Gaze irrespective of gender. However, Flusser’s theory also helps understanding of how Hollywood films can fail to influence perceptions of women. Terming the audience ‘designers of meaning’ suggests that the audience’s interpretation of what they see has equal, or even greater importance than the author’s intention for the meaning that the image holds. This suggestion by Flusser illustrates the audience’s power in deciding what the image means to them, and how their perception of reality is constructed through the image. Thus, the nature of the image can work against the intentionally coded messages held within the film.
Following on from Flusser’s conclusions, we can see that filmic images have the capacity to surpass traditional means of conveying information due to the diversity of the audience’s interpretation. The coded imagery in films is available and legible to many interpreters whose responses are themselves part of a film’s textuality and form.[40] The audience member’s perspective is brought to bear on a film’s images, often meaning that the audience does not respond in a way that filmmakers expect. Walter emphasises the communal nature of the ideologies held within filmic images. Benjamin suggests that of all the arts, film is the one without an ‘aura’, without a singular human creative vision, emulating Flusser’s assertion that techno-images are a meta-code of texts. Cinema thus holds the possibility, more than any other artform, of engaging an audience in a social and cultural discourse, a mass engagement in meaning.[41] Here we can see that both Flusser and Benjamin emphasise cinema’s dialectical relationship with society, one that engages its audience in a participatory process which, crucially, opens up the possibility for radically different interpretations.
The 1986 science fiction action sequel Aliens presents iconography and characterisations that seem to displace the traditional images of gendered binaries as active or passive within Hollywood cinema. However, the possibility of a cinematic inversion of this kind is achieved despite the film-maker’s attempts to diminish the status of its lead character. As such, Aliens demonstrates a Hollywood film’s ability to work against patriarchal intent through a mobilisation of its audience’s desires. Seen as a reaction to its time, the film’s action heroine protagonist Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) represents Hollywood’s response of some kind to feminism, emerging from a changing political context in which images of gendered identity were being called into question, another indication of the industry’s reliance on viewing trends.[42] At the same time, Ripley provides an interesting instance of the ways in which image-makers have dealt with the ‘problem’ of the action heroine, in a deployment of traditional configurations of motherhood.
Figure 2 demonstrates how virtually all aspects of the Mise en scène are coded and designed to signify the female: womb-like interiors, fallopian tube corridors, small claustrophobic spaces, indicate that the central point of horror is concerned with the process of motherhood and birth.[43] This scene features the first shot of the Alien queen, the camera travelling along its birthing tube to reveal a monstrous creature. The initial standoff between the alien queen and Ripley, holding her surrogate child Newt (Rebecca Jorden) is one of strange mutual recognition, not just of the power each other has to destroy the other, but also the motherly role they have each adopted.[44] This scene in particular explicitly demonstrates the fiercely maternal aspects of Ripley’s character, her motivations originating not from her own will to survive, but from a need to protect her child. Ripley’s ‘feminisation’ is completed by the discovery of Newt; her new-found maternal instinct demonstrates how Aliens posits a traditional construction of sexual difference, in which the strong solo female hero must also possess enough traditionally womanly roles to compensate for her active role.[45] Like many 1980’s action stars who fight, at least in part, to get a child, wife, or lover back, Ripley fights to recover her lost daughter. In doing so she creates an impromptu heteronormative ideal family by involving a male soldier ‘Hicks’. Thus, the film’s emphasis on the family as ideologically appropriate will allow Ripley to justifiably express aggression and strength, making her the first Regan era female hero and a model for those to come.[46]
The positioning of a woman at the centre of the action narrative generates theoretical problems for, and poses a threat to, the patriarchal sign system that underpins the Hollywood industry. With the active/passive binary that inscribes traditional Hollywood films being conceptually abolished by the figure of the action heroine, Hollywood must find a way to curtail their impact on the patriarchal status-quo. Consequently, the application of the sign ‘Mother’ to Weaver’s character, pinning her motivations around her new status as a mother, acts to reduce her threat. Ripley now signifies a more ‘acceptable’ form and shape of a woman in the eyes of Hollywood. Ripley’s motherly features, in their appeal to traditional values, are more reassuring, non-threatening signs, that signify the acceptable- what has come to be understood as the ‘normal’ woman. Here we can see how Hollywood attempts to appease audience trends and calls for progressive depictions whilst simultaneously attempting to quash the risk to the established image of women in its capacity to further blur gender boundaries and identifications. Even while positing Ripley as the hard-bodied hero, Aliens effectively draws Ripley back into the fold of the patriarchal structure where she will protect traditional principles, the heterosexual family, John Wayne masculinity, and the sacred cow of motherhood.[47] Thus, although Aliens’ use of the action heroine seems to be a progressive step forward for representations of gender roles, the film is coded with signs and meanings that attempt to diminish the potentially anarchic power of the central character.
Nevertheless, the same imagery that inscribes Ripley as a mother ultimately contains aspects that undermine the overriding cultural narrative of Hollywood films, in the utopian glimpses contained within them. At the most fundamental level, cinematic images of women who wield guns, and who take control of cars, computers and other technologies that have symbolised both power and freedom within Hollywood’s world, mobilise a symbolically transgressive iconography.[48] Despite an attempt to utilise the safer social connotations of motherhood to lessen the impact of such transgressive iconography, the widely reproduced, highly marketed images of Ripley that designate her as the active, driving force on-screen obscures the initial intention and derails the conventional notion that women either are or should be represented exclusively through codes of passive ‘femininity’. Ripley’s status as both mother and soldier (Fig 2), contradicts the traditionally perceived role of women as ‘damsels in distress’, as well as the critical suggestion that the action heroine is ‘really a man’, defying attempts to secure the logic of a binary in which the terms ‘male’ and ‘masculine’ or ‘female’ and feminine’ are locked together.[49] The fluidity that Ripley embodies encourages audience interpretations that complicate the intent of the authors of the image. In a process that replicates Flusser’s assertions on the diversity of engagements with the techno-image that in turn come to define what the image means more than what was coded into that image, Ripley is able to defy binaries by possessing characterises that are traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine. The possibility for audiences to understand Ripley as doing so possesses a challenge to the gendered Hollywood system that seeks to make women the Other.
Figure 2 also acts to reframe Hollywood films as products in a capitalist structure, illustrating how the marketing of a film can impact the images on-screen, and how the abstractions of those images for promotional use can further damage and undermine the goal of maintaining a patriarchal status quo. As discussed in the previous chapter, an emphasis on marketability within film production extends itself to the stylistic choices made during production. The qualities of the advertising image- the physical perfection, the attempt to sell not only a product but a lifestyle, are ingrained in the composition of shots for Hollywood films.[50] Wyatt details that the Hollywood blockbusters appropriate advertising aesthetics when creating moments that work against the developing story, in which the camera lingers over an object, or a subject, seeking to encourage the audience’s appreciation for the film’s formal composition.[51] Thus, the same camera movements that structure the Male Gaze, in which the woman-as-image serves to disrupt the narrative moment, are themselves structured by capitalist modes of thinking, further illustrating how the objectifications of the image of women are the result of the commercial foundations of Hollywood production. Instances of spectacle such as these feed into Hollywood marketing strategies. Figure 2 is an example of a key image being abstracted from the film. The image, an instance of spectacle over narrative which is replicated through advertising materials, can be seen as an expression of the most commercial elements of the Hollywood film; the image of Ripley holding her surrogate daughter Newt in one hand and a rifle in the other was reprinted as a promotional poster, along with the hyper-masculine allusions made by tagline ‘This Time It’s War’ (Fig 3), during the film’s highly publicised cinema release.[52]
Nevertheless, the same imagery that inscribes Ripley as a mother ultimately contains aspects that undermine the overriding cultural narrative of Hollywood films, in the utopian glimpses contained within them. At the most fundamental level, cinematic images of women who wield guns, and who take control of cars, computers and other technologies that have symbolised both power and freedom within Hollywood’s world, mobilise a symbolically transgressive iconography.[48] Despite an attempt to utilise the safer social connotations of motherhood to lessen the impact of such transgressive iconography, the widely reproduced, highly marketed images of Ripley that designate her as the active, driving force on-screen obscures the initial intention and derails the conventional notion that women either are or should be represented exclusively through codes of passive ‘femininity’. Ripley’s status as both mother and soldier (Fig 2), contradicts the traditionally perceived role of women as ‘damsels in distress’, as well as the critical suggestion that the action heroine is ‘really a man’, defying attempts to secure the logic of a binary in which the terms ‘male’ and ‘masculine’ or ‘female’ and feminine’ are locked together.[49] The fluidity that Ripley embodies encourages audience interpretations that complicate the intent of the authors of the image. In a process that replicates Flusser’s assertions on the diversity of engagements with the techno-image that in turn come to define what the image means more than what was coded into that image, Ripley is able to defy binaries by possessing characterises that are traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine. The possibility for audiences to understand Ripley as doing so possesses a challenge to the gendered Hollywood system that seeks to make women the Other.
Figure 2 also acts to reframe Hollywood films as products in a capitalist structure, illustrating how the marketing of a film can impact the images on-screen, and how the abstractions of those images for promotional use can further damage and undermine the goal of maintaining a patriarchal status quo. As discussed in the previous chapter, an emphasis on marketability within film production extends itself to the stylistic choices made during production. The qualities of the advertising image- the physical perfection, the attempt to sell not only a product but a lifestyle, are ingrained in the composition of shots for Hollywood films.[50] Wyatt details that the Hollywood blockbusters appropriate advertising aesthetics when creating moments that work against the developing story, in which the camera lingers over an object, or a subject, seeking to encourage the audience’s appreciation for the film’s formal composition.[51] Thus, the same camera movements that structure the Male Gaze, in which the woman-as-image serves to disrupt the narrative moment, are themselves structured by capitalist modes of thinking, further illustrating how the objectifications of the image of women are the result of the commercial foundations of Hollywood production. Instances of spectacle such as these feed into Hollywood marketing strategies. Figure 2 is an example of a key image being abstracted from the film. The image, an instance of spectacle over narrative which is replicated through advertising materials, can be seen as an expression of the most commercial elements of the Hollywood film; the image of Ripley holding her surrogate daughter Newt in one hand and a rifle in the other was reprinted as a promotional poster, along with the hyper-masculine allusions made by tagline ‘This Time It’s War’ (Fig 3), during the film’s highly publicised cinema release.[52]
Walter Benjamin’s conception of the utopian impulse of the consumer that drives market change clarifies how a reliance on spectacle in the marketplace can, in combination with Flusser’s theories, come to undo the use of coded otherness within the Hollywood film. In delineating the collective consumer response to commodities, Benjamin suggests that new modes of consumerism colonise our consciousness, conjuring up different mental ‘images’ that alter our relationship with, and responses to, the world. He states: ‘[t]hese images are wish images; in them the collective seeks to both overcome and transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organisation of production’.[53] At the same time as consciousness is colonised by the commodity, consciousness responds to the utopian side of community production, holding open a space for genuine response to the presentation of commodified desires; the impulse for accepting the commodity is the actual wish to see dreams fulfilled.[54] The product shapes and determines the consumer, in that the consumer sees themselves reflected in the brand whilst advertisements tempt prospective consumers through enticing representations of lifestyle. All advertising that inhabits the unconscious collective imagination is messianic in this sense, offering glimpses of a utopian potential that comes as the direct result of the consumption of a product. Products are not just commodities in wish images, adverts make a promise of entrance into world of meaning and practice that extends much further than consuming a product.[55]
The Hollywood industry’s clear cohesion with consumerism, in the appropriation of advertising style, leads to responses of this kind to the spectacles on-screen. As established by both Mulvey’s theory of the gaze and Flusser’s techno-images, the audience plays a participatory role in the images they view. ‘At the same time’ Benjamin continues, ‘what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated- which includes, however, the recent past’.[56] Here Benjamin details how changes in trend are a form of social progression, a conscious movement away from the past, a position that once again echoes Kuhn’s conception of paradigm shifts. Wish images in the collective consciousness work to undermine the current paradigm they are operating in, engaging in that paradigm’s dismissal in their promises of a future utopia: ‘[e]very epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself and unfolds it’.[57]
We can, therefore, determine how the market-mentality of Hollywood comes to disrupt its patriarchal intentions. In relying heavily on audience trends, having to shape its products to entice a mass audience, Hollywood must present glimpses of ‘something better’ to escape into, something to wish for that is then promised in the purchase of the product. These utopian images contradict structures of thought that seek to subdue and pacify the active status of women. All images of this kind induce us to dream of a classless society without exploitation- in the case of Aliens, highly marketed images (Fig. 3) that encapsulate Ripley’s fluidity and transgressive status present utopian glimpses of an alternative to the traditionally fixed gender identifications.[58] Both Benjamin and Flusser’s contentions once more indicate the fluctuating balance of power between the image makers and their audience. External factors that contribute to changes in the zeitgeist, such as the feminist movement(s) are met with apparent changes in the films we see. As soon as an audience demands and trends change, Hollywood is forced to change with it, or at least, appear to change. Hollywood films must always surpass themselves in order to maximise profit, offering more radical utopian glimpses each time in order to keep up with audience trends. These utopian glimpses, although used for marketing, permeate the film as well, containing within in them revolutionary the potential to undermine the current paradigm in showing what it is not, and what it has the power to be. Thus, Aliens cannot be considered the perfect feminist film, as its motivations are not revolutionary in nature. Nevertheless, hidden within its images are shards of redemption.
The Hollywood industry’s clear cohesion with consumerism, in the appropriation of advertising style, leads to responses of this kind to the spectacles on-screen. As established by both Mulvey’s theory of the gaze and Flusser’s techno-images, the audience plays a participatory role in the images they view. ‘At the same time’ Benjamin continues, ‘what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated- which includes, however, the recent past’.[56] Here Benjamin details how changes in trend are a form of social progression, a conscious movement away from the past, a position that once again echoes Kuhn’s conception of paradigm shifts. Wish images in the collective consciousness work to undermine the current paradigm they are operating in, engaging in that paradigm’s dismissal in their promises of a future utopia: ‘[e]very epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself and unfolds it’.[57]
We can, therefore, determine how the market-mentality of Hollywood comes to disrupt its patriarchal intentions. In relying heavily on audience trends, having to shape its products to entice a mass audience, Hollywood must present glimpses of ‘something better’ to escape into, something to wish for that is then promised in the purchase of the product. These utopian images contradict structures of thought that seek to subdue and pacify the active status of women. All images of this kind induce us to dream of a classless society without exploitation- in the case of Aliens, highly marketed images (Fig. 3) that encapsulate Ripley’s fluidity and transgressive status present utopian glimpses of an alternative to the traditionally fixed gender identifications.[58] Both Benjamin and Flusser’s contentions once more indicate the fluctuating balance of power between the image makers and their audience. External factors that contribute to changes in the zeitgeist, such as the feminist movement(s) are met with apparent changes in the films we see. As soon as an audience demands and trends change, Hollywood is forced to change with it, or at least, appear to change. Hollywood films must always surpass themselves in order to maximise profit, offering more radical utopian glimpses each time in order to keep up with audience trends. These utopian glimpses, although used for marketing, permeate the film as well, containing within in them revolutionary the potential to undermine the current paradigm in showing what it is not, and what it has the power to be. Thus, Aliens cannot be considered the perfect feminist film, as its motivations are not revolutionary in nature. Nevertheless, hidden within its images are shards of redemption.
Chapter III
As both of the previous chapters have sought to outline in their analyses, images and iconographies of women mobilised by the Hollywood film industry are put in place to subdue and supress abnormal gender performances, and to attempt to construct a sense of naturally fixed sex-gender identities. Those fixed identities are characterised by patriarchal notions of natural heteronormativity, in which images of women signify objects of desire for- and are thought only in relation to- men. In such instances, the use of spectacle is employed as a means to pacify female characters on-screen, designating them the position of bearer of the look, rather than an active agent. A view of gender as both fixed and heteronormative seeks to privilege and sanction individuals based on presumed binaries of gender and sexuality, preserving the belief that gender identities are tied to anatomy. As a meaning-making system, heteronormativity defines and enforces beliefs on what expressions of gender are ‘normal’ in everyday life.[59] Under a patriarchal system of thought, norms ultimately translate as the hegemony of men and the otherness of women. While the previous chapter offered positions on the how films that operate under such systems of thought can involuntarily undermine and overcome the prevailing paradigm of ideology, this chapter intends to set out the consequences of the gender norms that Hollywood is promoting, as well as examine the ethical validity of the means in which such norms within a society are a form of societal discipline. We shall engage with Foucault’s notions on the theory of Panopticism to clarify how through the production of norms and standardisations, contemporary society is regulated. This will be used to further clarify the importance of media on shaping our subjectivities, and how this is maintained through internalisation and self-regulation as a means of control. This chapter also examines whether notion of progress can be applied to Hollywood, analysing a recent film in which progressive depictions are intentioned.
Firstly, we must examine the importance gender performativity and heteronormativity within the lived experience of society, in both their acceptable states, and those states which are considered deviant. The norms governing gender-appropriate behaviour widely serve as personal standards for judging the gender adequacy of the self and others, adequacy in a gender role is a major component in one’s self-evaluation.[60] One’s gender identity is thus critical in discerning one’s place in society, and serves as an integral part of social interaction. In western cultures, traditional gender norms are presumed to be ‘natural’, whereby those who are assigned to the male sex category at birth are to behave in masculine ways, and those who are assigned to the female sex category at birth are to behave in feminine ways.[61] Understanding, as we have previously established, that gender is a performative act- a series of external repetitive performances rather than a naturally assumed fixed entity, helps us understand the degree in which social convention comes to impact our self-identity.[62] As Butler clarifies: ‘The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural relations…neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies.[63] We can identify that gender performances are consciously created, not tied to anatomy as socially entrenched norms assert, yet are continually informed by societal norms. Gender ‘deviance’ can therefore be understood as behaviour that violates the norms for gender-appropriate behaviour: deviant performances of gender occur when there is a ‘mismatch’ between gendered behaviour and biology.[64]
Performing one’s gender wrong according to social norms initiates punishments that are both obvious and indirect, whereas performing it well provides the false reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender.[65] In almost all societies, gender is a significant form of stratification. It is a critical factor in structuring the opportunities and life chances individuals face, and strongly influences the roles they play within social institutions.[66] Gender performances that are considered abnormal therefore become viable sources of ostracism, thus, society punishes or marginalises those who fail to perform the illusions of gender essentialism. Media accounts of the murders of transgender people demonstrate the violent repercussions that can stem from biology-based conceptions of gender; in the case of such extreme punishments for gender norm violations, the positioning of transwomen as ‘sexual dangers’, dangerous due to their ‘unnatural’ violation of gender essentialism, is used to justify violence.[67] Condemnation such as this for deviant gender performance is inextricably tied to the performance of sexuality; deviant gender performances run against presumed norms about heterosexuality.[68] Normative conceptions of gender are tied to heterosexual ideals, with complementary genders (man and woman) being socially privileged- men and women’s assumed embodied distinctions are widely held to require particular relationships with one another.[69] Atypical gender performances then also undermine presumed norms about heterosexuality: those who are biologically female should behave and identify as ‘feminine’, ‘woman’ and ‘heterosexual’. Heterosexuality is a taken for granted norm that is presumed in social interactions and can have severe repercussions.[70] The depictions of women in film subscribe to this compulsory heteronormativity, objectifying through a gaze that presumes a male audience.
As Butler explains, this system of compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed through the ‘cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with ‘natural’ appearances and ‘natural’ heterosexual dispositions’.[71] Thus, gender norms are contended to be fixed, intrinsic, innate qualities, with heteronormativity rendered as a foundational aspect of biologically-based determinations of gender. We can here determine how Hollywood depictions of men and women replicate western norms, also validating the notions of assumed heterosexuality in the objectifications which deny the active status of women on-screen. Gender norms outside of the cinema impact not only bodily identifications, in which our identification and relationship to others is predicated on our interpretation of their gender performance, but gender norms being tied to nature has immediate consequences that are both punitive and regulatory. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing further demonstrates the extent to which appearances and performances of gender alter the way people relate to and consider women, and how this reliance on image impacts the way we treat people as objects. Understanding this, we can determine how the look acts to discriminate against others, and how it can ultimately be transformed into a form of self-discipline.
Ways of Seeing serves to illustrate how the external demonstration of gender performance made by women, and the treatment that results from that, can lead to an internalisation of gender norms. Detailing how a woman’s presentation of her gender normality effects how she is viewed by society, Berger states: ‘[m]en survey women before treating them. Consequently, how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated’.[72] We have seen how the performance of one’s gendered self in compliance or non-compliance to gender norms impacts on how others treat you, now Berger clarifies how it is necessary for such performances to be continuously mediated: ‘A woman must constantly watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself…. [f]rom earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually’.[73] This claim confirms Butler’s earlier assertion that gender is a surface performance that presents itself as a stylised repetition of acts. This is furthered in Berger’s suggestion that there is an extra dimension of prescriptivism to acting one’s gender. A woman must continually act out their gender performance, for the benefit of those who survey her. To acquire some control over this process, a woman must interiorise this gaze, to shape her external appearance in a way that demonstrates how she would prefer to be viewed, and inevitably, treated. Here we can begin to understand the pressures involved with gender performances; a woman must maintain surveillance of herself to ensure that she is correctly presenting herself as she would like.
Crucially, Berger’s theory makes the claim that the part of a woman that surveys herself does so while assuming a male identity: ‘the surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. She thus turns herself into an object- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight’.[74] Berger here reveals that the norms that are deeply rooted within culture come to occupy the interior self. As the assumed observer of women is male, in line with the presumed complementary match of heteronormativity, women internalise a Male Gaze that objectifies their own body. The acceptance and appropriation of the Male Gaze can thus be seen as a defence mechanism. However, upon seeing themselves as an object of vision, the position of passivity that is placed upon woman by an external gaze is accepted in its internalisation. As a person’s demonstration of their own gender can be met with either acceptance or punishment, a woman’s demonstration of herself can come at a cost, thus, her own surveillance of herself is vital. What was initially thought of as a way of self-preservation has developed in a way that it now permeates how women view themselves, no longer an active agent, but one dedicated to correctly performing gender norms. Consequently, the existence of persuasive social pressures surrounding heteronormativity and gender norms leads to a form of compliance that serves to make women other themselves; by adopting a gaze and relating to themselves as ‘a sight’, they are reducing their own essence to the service of others, the service of ‘normality’.
Foucault’s theory of Panopticism helps to clarify the structures of power behind normative societal values. In documenting how norms and standardisations produce states of discipline, Foucault examines Jeremy Bentham’s architectural concept of the Panopticon- his proposal for the ideal prison. Bentham’s prison is described as a circular building with a central watchtower. Around this are cells that make the prisoner visible to anyone looking from within the watchtower, but from within the cell it is impossible to see into the tower, or to see into any other cell. In this way, a guard may watch from the tower, but the inhabitants of the prison will never know if they are being watched or not.[75] The system of power within Bentham’s prison, for Foucault, represents the major way in which societies are regulated and disciplined. The prisoners know that if they acted in a way that the guard could punish, they did so in the knowledge that at any time, they could be spotted. The effect is that prisoners become self-regulating, constantly vigilant over their own behaviour.[76] Even if they are not being observed, the prisoners must still survey themselves, as they have no way of knowing. The Panopticon for Foucault thus acts as a microcosm for the modern society, an apparatus of power and control that ‘can be exercised continuously in the very foundations of society’.[77]
The Panopticon both automates and de-individualises the functioning of power, especially as it doesn’t matter who is in the tower, or even if there is anyone there at all. The unequal gaze that characterises this form of power turns every prisoner into an object of information, never a subject in communication.[78] As Foucault details, in order for the prevailing leaders in any society to maintain order ‘there is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze… which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer’.[79] Thus within a society that exerts discipline through Panopticism, there are regulations, norms and classifications, and there are penalties for the disobedience of those norms. However, the enforcement of these norms rests not with the state, but with the individual in the internalisation of their own constraints. The major effect of the Panopticon’s structure, where the continuous threat of surveillance carries the continuous threat of punishment, is to ‘induce in the inmate a sense of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’.[80] Within western society, the power of the unequal gaze is experienced in the existence of pervasive social pressures to be more normal. Because of these pressures, each person distances themselves from the undesirable margins of society through their exterior presentations of normal behaviour. It is self-surveillance and self-coercion of this kind which has one of the strongest influences in perpetuating a social structure which functions around such norms.[81]
Foucault’s conception of Panopticism, and its presence within society as a form of power and control, serves as a clear demonstration of the function of gender norms within contemporary society. Through Berger’s work, we can see that the same articulations of power that govern Bentham’s prison run through gender norms; Foucault’s gaze here doubles as the Male Gaze, this seemingly inescapable gaze turning every woman into an object of information for the regard of men, in Berger’s words ‘a sight’. The existence of norms that differentiate between socially acceptable and socially abnormal, and the list of repercussions is enough to decentralise discipline within society. Women take on the role of man, just as the prisoner takes on the role of prison guard by regulating their own actions, ensuring that notions of biologically-determined sex roles and gender performances are maintained. Thus, we can see how norms are put in place as a form of disciplinary control to prop-up systems such as the patriarchy, which seeks to perpetuate a social structure that favours the dominance of men. The self-regulation of women results in the construction of submissive bodies, they can be ‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’ in any way the patriarchy determines, by shifting the classifications around desired normality.[82] Most Hollywood films then, in their constant presentation of gender norms, act to reinforce those norms.
Thus, we have discussed how the presentation of women within Hollywood films act to promote harmful gender norms. We have also discussed how action films with female stars have previously sought to naturalise (and neutralise) their depiction of women. Yet to establish whether the concept of progression can be applied to representations of women in the action cinema, and to understand whether gender norms can be contested intentionally, we must examine recent contemporary Hollywood action film that is contested to intentionally contain progressive gender politics.
Firstly, we must examine the importance gender performativity and heteronormativity within the lived experience of society, in both their acceptable states, and those states which are considered deviant. The norms governing gender-appropriate behaviour widely serve as personal standards for judging the gender adequacy of the self and others, adequacy in a gender role is a major component in one’s self-evaluation.[60] One’s gender identity is thus critical in discerning one’s place in society, and serves as an integral part of social interaction. In western cultures, traditional gender norms are presumed to be ‘natural’, whereby those who are assigned to the male sex category at birth are to behave in masculine ways, and those who are assigned to the female sex category at birth are to behave in feminine ways.[61] Understanding, as we have previously established, that gender is a performative act- a series of external repetitive performances rather than a naturally assumed fixed entity, helps us understand the degree in which social convention comes to impact our self-identity.[62] As Butler clarifies: ‘The body is not passively scripted with cultural codes, as if it were a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given cultural relations…neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies.[63] We can identify that gender performances are consciously created, not tied to anatomy as socially entrenched norms assert, yet are continually informed by societal norms. Gender ‘deviance’ can therefore be understood as behaviour that violates the norms for gender-appropriate behaviour: deviant performances of gender occur when there is a ‘mismatch’ between gendered behaviour and biology.[64]
Performing one’s gender wrong according to social norms initiates punishments that are both obvious and indirect, whereas performing it well provides the false reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender.[65] In almost all societies, gender is a significant form of stratification. It is a critical factor in structuring the opportunities and life chances individuals face, and strongly influences the roles they play within social institutions.[66] Gender performances that are considered abnormal therefore become viable sources of ostracism, thus, society punishes or marginalises those who fail to perform the illusions of gender essentialism. Media accounts of the murders of transgender people demonstrate the violent repercussions that can stem from biology-based conceptions of gender; in the case of such extreme punishments for gender norm violations, the positioning of transwomen as ‘sexual dangers’, dangerous due to their ‘unnatural’ violation of gender essentialism, is used to justify violence.[67] Condemnation such as this for deviant gender performance is inextricably tied to the performance of sexuality; deviant gender performances run against presumed norms about heterosexuality.[68] Normative conceptions of gender are tied to heterosexual ideals, with complementary genders (man and woman) being socially privileged- men and women’s assumed embodied distinctions are widely held to require particular relationships with one another.[69] Atypical gender performances then also undermine presumed norms about heterosexuality: those who are biologically female should behave and identify as ‘feminine’, ‘woman’ and ‘heterosexual’. Heterosexuality is a taken for granted norm that is presumed in social interactions and can have severe repercussions.[70] The depictions of women in film subscribe to this compulsory heteronormativity, objectifying through a gaze that presumes a male audience.
As Butler explains, this system of compulsory heterosexuality is reproduced and concealed through the ‘cultivation of bodies into discrete sexes with ‘natural’ appearances and ‘natural’ heterosexual dispositions’.[71] Thus, gender norms are contended to be fixed, intrinsic, innate qualities, with heteronormativity rendered as a foundational aspect of biologically-based determinations of gender. We can here determine how Hollywood depictions of men and women replicate western norms, also validating the notions of assumed heterosexuality in the objectifications which deny the active status of women on-screen. Gender norms outside of the cinema impact not only bodily identifications, in which our identification and relationship to others is predicated on our interpretation of their gender performance, but gender norms being tied to nature has immediate consequences that are both punitive and regulatory. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing further demonstrates the extent to which appearances and performances of gender alter the way people relate to and consider women, and how this reliance on image impacts the way we treat people as objects. Understanding this, we can determine how the look acts to discriminate against others, and how it can ultimately be transformed into a form of self-discipline.
Ways of Seeing serves to illustrate how the external demonstration of gender performance made by women, and the treatment that results from that, can lead to an internalisation of gender norms. Detailing how a woman’s presentation of her gender normality effects how she is viewed by society, Berger states: ‘[m]en survey women before treating them. Consequently, how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated’.[72] We have seen how the performance of one’s gendered self in compliance or non-compliance to gender norms impacts on how others treat you, now Berger clarifies how it is necessary for such performances to be continuously mediated: ‘A woman must constantly watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself…. [f]rom earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually’.[73] This claim confirms Butler’s earlier assertion that gender is a surface performance that presents itself as a stylised repetition of acts. This is furthered in Berger’s suggestion that there is an extra dimension of prescriptivism to acting one’s gender. A woman must continually act out their gender performance, for the benefit of those who survey her. To acquire some control over this process, a woman must interiorise this gaze, to shape her external appearance in a way that demonstrates how she would prefer to be viewed, and inevitably, treated. Here we can begin to understand the pressures involved with gender performances; a woman must maintain surveillance of herself to ensure that she is correctly presenting herself as she would like.
Crucially, Berger’s theory makes the claim that the part of a woman that surveys herself does so while assuming a male identity: ‘the surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. She thus turns herself into an object- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight’.[74] Berger here reveals that the norms that are deeply rooted within culture come to occupy the interior self. As the assumed observer of women is male, in line with the presumed complementary match of heteronormativity, women internalise a Male Gaze that objectifies their own body. The acceptance and appropriation of the Male Gaze can thus be seen as a defence mechanism. However, upon seeing themselves as an object of vision, the position of passivity that is placed upon woman by an external gaze is accepted in its internalisation. As a person’s demonstration of their own gender can be met with either acceptance or punishment, a woman’s demonstration of herself can come at a cost, thus, her own surveillance of herself is vital. What was initially thought of as a way of self-preservation has developed in a way that it now permeates how women view themselves, no longer an active agent, but one dedicated to correctly performing gender norms. Consequently, the existence of persuasive social pressures surrounding heteronormativity and gender norms leads to a form of compliance that serves to make women other themselves; by adopting a gaze and relating to themselves as ‘a sight’, they are reducing their own essence to the service of others, the service of ‘normality’.
Foucault’s theory of Panopticism helps to clarify the structures of power behind normative societal values. In documenting how norms and standardisations produce states of discipline, Foucault examines Jeremy Bentham’s architectural concept of the Panopticon- his proposal for the ideal prison. Bentham’s prison is described as a circular building with a central watchtower. Around this are cells that make the prisoner visible to anyone looking from within the watchtower, but from within the cell it is impossible to see into the tower, or to see into any other cell. In this way, a guard may watch from the tower, but the inhabitants of the prison will never know if they are being watched or not.[75] The system of power within Bentham’s prison, for Foucault, represents the major way in which societies are regulated and disciplined. The prisoners know that if they acted in a way that the guard could punish, they did so in the knowledge that at any time, they could be spotted. The effect is that prisoners become self-regulating, constantly vigilant over their own behaviour.[76] Even if they are not being observed, the prisoners must still survey themselves, as they have no way of knowing. The Panopticon for Foucault thus acts as a microcosm for the modern society, an apparatus of power and control that ‘can be exercised continuously in the very foundations of society’.[77]
The Panopticon both automates and de-individualises the functioning of power, especially as it doesn’t matter who is in the tower, or even if there is anyone there at all. The unequal gaze that characterises this form of power turns every prisoner into an object of information, never a subject in communication.[78] As Foucault details, in order for the prevailing leaders in any society to maintain order ‘there is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze… which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer’.[79] Thus within a society that exerts discipline through Panopticism, there are regulations, norms and classifications, and there are penalties for the disobedience of those norms. However, the enforcement of these norms rests not with the state, but with the individual in the internalisation of their own constraints. The major effect of the Panopticon’s structure, where the continuous threat of surveillance carries the continuous threat of punishment, is to ‘induce in the inmate a sense of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’.[80] Within western society, the power of the unequal gaze is experienced in the existence of pervasive social pressures to be more normal. Because of these pressures, each person distances themselves from the undesirable margins of society through their exterior presentations of normal behaviour. It is self-surveillance and self-coercion of this kind which has one of the strongest influences in perpetuating a social structure which functions around such norms.[81]
Foucault’s conception of Panopticism, and its presence within society as a form of power and control, serves as a clear demonstration of the function of gender norms within contemporary society. Through Berger’s work, we can see that the same articulations of power that govern Bentham’s prison run through gender norms; Foucault’s gaze here doubles as the Male Gaze, this seemingly inescapable gaze turning every woman into an object of information for the regard of men, in Berger’s words ‘a sight’. The existence of norms that differentiate between socially acceptable and socially abnormal, and the list of repercussions is enough to decentralise discipline within society. Women take on the role of man, just as the prisoner takes on the role of prison guard by regulating their own actions, ensuring that notions of biologically-determined sex roles and gender performances are maintained. Thus, we can see how norms are put in place as a form of disciplinary control to prop-up systems such as the patriarchy, which seeks to perpetuate a social structure that favours the dominance of men. The self-regulation of women results in the construction of submissive bodies, they can be ‘subjected, used, transformed and improved’ in any way the patriarchy determines, by shifting the classifications around desired normality.[82] Most Hollywood films then, in their constant presentation of gender norms, act to reinforce those norms.
Thus, we have discussed how the presentation of women within Hollywood films act to promote harmful gender norms. We have also discussed how action films with female stars have previously sought to naturalise (and neutralise) their depiction of women. Yet to establish whether the concept of progression can be applied to representations of women in the action cinema, and to understand whether gender norms can be contested intentionally, we must examine recent contemporary Hollywood action film that is contested to intentionally contain progressive gender politics.
The 2015 post-apocalyptic action film Mad Max: Fury Road is the fourth instalment of the Mad Max franchise. As Darin Payne has noted, fans of the action genre in the 1980’s would be right to place the character of Max Rockatansky alongside other masculine action heroes, as he battles villains and survives through brawn and physical endurance.[83] Previous incarnations of Mad Max represented a fantasy of masculine power, feared primarily for male consumption.[84] In the most recent film, Max (Tom Hardy) however becomes a secondary figure within the narrative,. Max is drawn into assisting Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a woman who is on the run from the film’s principle antagonist Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). The film’s central character becomes Furiosa.[85] Fury Road then, has been argued to be a ‘filmic exercise in ideological disarticulation and the remaking of social relations, particularly around gender’.[86] In creating a world in which men are neither the primary agents of change, nor the exclusive heroes or decision makers, Furiosa stands as an action heroine who disturbs both the inscribing of passivity onto female bodies, and depictions of a binary model of gender. Unlike the active/passive assignments discussed by Laura Mulvey in relation to the classic Hollywood film, in which the male figure advances the narrative and the female functions as spectacle, Furiosa operates as both. She controls the action, having more lines than the titular Max, while at the same time, the scenes in the film which rely on spectacle exhibit Furiosa as an active force, rather than a passive object subjected to the Male Gaze.
In one scene (Fig 4) Max hands a rifle to Furiosa after missing twice; she then successfully takes the shot. This gesture, whereby a male character on-screen acknowledges his female counterpart’s superior skill, is atypical in a genre where women are typically relegated to the role of sidekick or object of desire.[87] The film’s depiction of the relationship between the two protagonists acts to deliberately disrupt gendered divide within the Hollywood narrative where the male hero serves to advance the story and the woman-as-image serving solely to disrupt the narrative moment. Fury Road signifies an inversion of the typical male action hero, and passive female accessory, to the extent that the character of Max features as a sidekick in his own film. This inversion is even more accentuated considering Max is a character who had previously been tied with hegemonic masculine ideals. Max continues to exhibit traditional masculinity insofar as he is strong and determined, but so too does Furiosa, arguably the film’s real protagonist.[88]
Like Ripley and other action heroines before her, images of Furiosa playing an active role within the film once again illustrates how action heroines mobilise symbolically transgressive iconography against the conventional notion that women should be represented exclusively through codes of passive femininity, in line with biologically- based determinations of gender norms. Furiosa’s status as a heroine has been called into question however, her depiction leading to the suggestion that Furiosa has ‘de-gendered herself into a sort of eunuch warrior’.[89] The claim that Furiosa displays only masculine characteristics carries with it the suggestion that the only way a woman can become this film’s active force is through an erasure of feminine features in favour of manliness- affirming the active/passive division between men and women. Nevertheless, such assertions play into the logic of normative gender assumptions, reaffirming the notion of a binary in which the terms ‘male’ and ‘masculine’ or ‘female’ and feminine’ are locked together. The female action hero’s qualities of strength and determination, and most particularly her labour and the body that enacts it, crucially mark her out as ‘unfeminine’.[90] It is precisely that it is the female body expressing an ‘unfeminine’ gender identity that marks a subversion of the patriarchal depictions of the sexes. Images that display Furiosa’s adoption of masculine traits disrupt the notion that women should be portrayed exclusively through codes of femininity, which are formulated to be passive, and her superseding of the titular character in both spectacle and narrative marks her out to be a transgressive figure in the Hollywood film industry.
Mad Max: Fury Road thus works to intentionally complicate longstanding gender norms of the Hollywood blockbuster, certifying that to some extent at least the Hollywood film industry is coming to terms with its audience’s challenges to its patriarchal depictions of women. Fury Road is a clear example of Hollywood presenting glimpses of ‘something better’. The utopianism contained within the film however is not achieved despite the film-makers intentions, rather it was actively constructed. We have seen that Hollywood’s role in replicating and manufacturing norms acts as a means of social discipline, dispersing a form of power and control that coerces people to behave in accordance with fixed identities, and hierarchical relations between men and women. Those fixed identities are characterised by patriarchal notions of natural and compulsory heterosexuality, which is not only tied into conceptions, ideas, and acts of sexuality, but it is rather viewed as a foundational structure in society and culture.[91] The perception of natural heterosexuality is encompassed by gender essentialism, a key determiner in the social stratification of western society. The revolutionary potential that is contained in the emancipatory politics of films such as Fury Road has the capability to destabilise gender norms that come to effect depictions of women on-screen and be affected by them. Fury Road also acts to validate arguments made in chapter two which suggest that the dialectical relationship between society and Hollywood is weighted heavily on the side of audience expectation and aspiration. Fury Road exemplifies the market-mentality of Hollywood coming to disrupt its own patriarchal intentions. Operating under a capitalist structure, Hollywood must necessarily be in tune with the masses and the politics they will or will not support with their consumer spending habits. Fury Road then symbolises an indicator of change, a paradigm shift, one which is paradoxically contributed to out of necessity by the main source of patriarchal depictions of otherness, the Hollywood film industry.
Conclusions
In light of this exploration into the role that Hollywood action films play in contributing to the Othering of women in contemporary society, it has become clear that such films are cultural products in which the representations of women on-screen are typically coded with patriarchal prejudices. Deployments of spectacle in a genre that relies heavily on spectacle over narrative aestheticize the female body, catering for a gaze that heavily objectifies and represses the activity of women on-screen. We have seen that such a panoptic gaze is found to be present in the norms that fundamentally structure our relationships to others. Flusser’s conception of the paradigm shift from the written word to the techno-image demonstrates that in western society, the way we think of ourselves is now mediated through the image. As such, Hollywood’s wide reach ensures that we use images within films to construct our subjective identities. Thus, images which posit women as passive bearers of meaning- as sights rather than active meaning makers- define them as the objectified Other, to justify control and domination over the female body.
Images of the female heroine as mother, an image that emphasises her womanhood, come into conflict with images of her as the transgressive action hero. Mobilisations of motherhood made by Hollywood to disrupt the notion of gender role fluidity, indicate how dangerous such notions are to the status quo that Hollywood seeks to maintain. The belief that gender is tied to essential characteristics of biology structures social hierarchies which advantage men as well as heterosexual-based conceptions of a gender order. Through associating this position with nature, laying the foundation for norms that sort people into the distinct categories of normal and abnormal, gender essentialism can thus manifest otherness within society. Refutations of gender essentialism can be found dispersed within the images of mainstream Hollywood films both intentionally and unintentionally, serving to undermine patriarchal agendas within the Hollywood film industry.
The Hollywood film industry is reliant on consumer spending habits, leaving the possibility open for progressive gender politics to infiltrate the images we see on screen. This, in combination with the uncontrollable nature of audience readings of film text, demonstrates how the underpinning logics of Hollywood’s depiction of women can be overturned. As the impacts of the #MeToo and Times Up movements continue to resonate in the entertainment industry and beyond, this investigation marks how far we still must go, yet, my work demonstrates the limits of Hollywood’s contribution to the otherness of women in society, leaving room for more constructive approaches to Hollywood cinema.
In light of this exploration into the role that Hollywood action films play in contributing to the Othering of women in contemporary society, it has become clear that such films are cultural products in which the representations of women on-screen are typically coded with patriarchal prejudices. Deployments of spectacle in a genre that relies heavily on spectacle over narrative aestheticize the female body, catering for a gaze that heavily objectifies and represses the activity of women on-screen. We have seen that such a panoptic gaze is found to be present in the norms that fundamentally structure our relationships to others. Flusser’s conception of the paradigm shift from the written word to the techno-image demonstrates that in western society, the way we think of ourselves is now mediated through the image. As such, Hollywood’s wide reach ensures that we use images within films to construct our subjective identities. Thus, images which posit women as passive bearers of meaning- as sights rather than active meaning makers- define them as the objectified Other, to justify control and domination over the female body.
Images of the female heroine as mother, an image that emphasises her womanhood, come into conflict with images of her as the transgressive action hero. Mobilisations of motherhood made by Hollywood to disrupt the notion of gender role fluidity, indicate how dangerous such notions are to the status quo that Hollywood seeks to maintain. The belief that gender is tied to essential characteristics of biology structures social hierarchies which advantage men as well as heterosexual-based conceptions of a gender order. Through associating this position with nature, laying the foundation for norms that sort people into the distinct categories of normal and abnormal, gender essentialism can thus manifest otherness within society. Refutations of gender essentialism can be found dispersed within the images of mainstream Hollywood films both intentionally and unintentionally, serving to undermine patriarchal agendas within the Hollywood film industry.
The Hollywood film industry is reliant on consumer spending habits, leaving the possibility open for progressive gender politics to infiltrate the images we see on screen. This, in combination with the uncontrollable nature of audience readings of film text, demonstrates how the underpinning logics of Hollywood’s depiction of women can be overturned. As the impacts of the #MeToo and Times Up movements continue to resonate in the entertainment industry and beyond, this investigation marks how far we still must go, yet, my work demonstrates the limits of Hollywood’s contribution to the otherness of women in society, leaving room for more constructive approaches to Hollywood cinema.
[1] Janet Wasko, How Hollywood Works, (London: Sage, 2003) pp.3-4
[2] Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994) pp.8-20
[3] Debra Bergoffen, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/beauvoir/> [Accessed 02/04/19]
[4] Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. by Sue Thornham, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) pp.31-32
[5] Ibid., p. 32
[6] Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory, (London: Arnold, 1997) p.12
[7] Johnston, p.32
[8] Anneke Smelik, ‘Feminist Film Theory’, in The Cinema Book, ed. by Pam Cook (London: British Film Institute, 2007) pp.491-504
[9] Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. by Patricia Erens (USA: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 28
[10] Ibid. p. 33
[11] Anneke Smelik, ‘Gaze’, in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016), pp. 1–2
[12] Anneke Smelik, And The Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory, (London: Palgrave, 2001) pp.7-11
[13] McCabe, p.30
[14] Mulvey p.33
[15] Stacy L. Smith and others, Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT & Disability from 2007 to 2017, (Research Report) (2018) <http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inequality-in-1100-popular-films.pdf> [accessed 7 May 2019]
[16] In referencing Hollywood, I am referring to the American film industry rather than a geographical location.
[17] Noël Carroll, ‘The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol: 48 (4) (1990), p. 349
[18] John Berger, ‘Ways of Seeing’, in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. by Amelia Jones (New York, 2010), p. 50
[19] Ibid., p.49
[20] Mulvey, p.34
[21] Or looking room / nose room.
[22] Blain Brown, Cinematography: Theory and Practice: Image-making for Cinematographers and Directors, (New York: Routledge, 2016) p.27
[23] Ibid., p.4
[24] Mulvey, p.31
[25] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Trans. by Constance Borde and Shelia Malovany-Chevallier (London: Vintage, 2009) p.293
[26] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, (London: Methuen, 2007) pp.29-30
[27] Judith Butler, ‘Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex’, Yale French Studies, 72 (1986), p.35
[28] Ibid, p.37
[29] Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, Vol.40 Issue 4 (1988) p.519
[30] de Beauvoir, p.5
[31] Ibid., p.159
[32] Ibid. p.166
[33] Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1993) p.6
[34] Vilém Flusser, ‘Towards a Theory of Techno-Imagination’, Philosophy of Photography, Vol.2 Issue 2 (2012), p.195
[35] Claudia Becker, ‘Image/Thinking’, Philosophy of Photography, Vol.2 Issue 2 (2012 ) p. 251
[36] Andreas Ströhl, ‘Introduction’ , Writings, ed. by Andreas Ströhl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) p. xiii
[37] Flusser, ‘Towards a Theory of Techno-Imagination’, p.195
[38] Anke Finger, Rainer Guldin and Gustavo Bernardo, Vilém Flusser: An Introduction, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) pp. xxi-xxii
[39] Flusser, ‘Images in the New Media’, in Writings, ed. by Andreas Ströhl, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p.74
[40] Robert P. Kolker, ‘The Film Text and Film Form’, in The Oxford Guide To Film Studies, ed. by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (New York:, 1998), pp. 11–24
[41] Ibid.,p. 13
[42] Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p.15
[43] Sue Thornham, Passionate Detatchments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory, (London: Arnold, 1997) p.104
[44] Thomas Caldwell, ‘“Aliens”: Mothers, Monsters and Marines’, Screen Education, Vol.59 (2010) pp. 125-30
[45] Catherine Constable, ‘Becoming the Monster’s Mother: Morphologies of Identity in the Alien Series’, in Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, ed. by Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 173–20
[46] Ximena. Gallardo C. and C. Jason. Smith, Alien Woman: The Making of Lt. Ellen Ripley, (New York: Continuum, 2004) pp.62-115
[47] Gallardo C. Ximena and C. Jason Smith, p.67
[48] Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p.132
[49] Ibid.
[50] Wyatt, p.26
[51] Wyatt, p.2
[52] Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, p.3
[53] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (London: Harvard University Press, 1999) p.4
[54] Esther Leslie, ‘Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project’, Radical Philosophy, (2000) <http://www.aughty.org/pdf/benjamin_arcades.pdf> [accessed 26 April 2019] p.5
[55] William Large and Alan Bradshaw, ‘Know It While You Have It: The Ontological Condition of a Cancelled Advertisement’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol.47 Issue 1 (2016) pp.72-8
[56] Benjamin, p.4
[57] Ibid., p.13
[58] Large and Bradshaw, p.76
[59] Russell, T. B., McGuire, J. K., & Russell, S. T., ‘Heteronormativity, School climates, and Perceived Safety for Gender Nonconforming Peers’, Journal of Adolescence, 35 (2012) p.188
[60] Joseph Harry, ‘Parasuicide, Gender, and Gender Deviance’, Journal of Health and Social Behaviour, Vol.24.Issue 4 (1983) p.130 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2136401> [Accessed 04/05/19]
[61] Meredith G.F Worthen and Danielle Dirks, ‘Gender and Deviance’, in The Handbook of Deviance, ed. by Erich Goode, (John Wiley & Sons, 2015) p.279
[62] Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, p.519
[63] Ibid., p.526
[64] Worthen and Dirks, p.279
[65] Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, p.528
[66] Anthony Giddens, Sociology, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001) p.112
[67] Laurel Westbrook, ‘Doing Gender, Determining Gender: Transgender People, Gender Panics, and the Maintenance of the Sex/Gender/Sexuality System’, Gender & Society, Vol.28.Issue 1 (2014), p.47
[68] Worthen and Dirks, p.280
[69] Westbrook, p.37
[70] Worthen and Dirks, p.280
[71] Butler, p.524
[72] Berger, p.49
[73] Ibid.
[74] Ibid., p.50
[75] Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro, How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, (London: Pluto Press, 2011) p.129
[76] Wendy Stainton Rogers, Social Psychology, (Maidenhead, Berkshire, England: McGraw Hill Open University Press, 2011) p.75
[77] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (Penguin Books, 1979) p.208
[78] Ibid., p. 200
[79] Michel Foucault and Colin Gordon, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, (Brighton, Sussex : Harvester Press, 1980) p.155
[80] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.201
[81] Ruth Butler, ‘A Break from the Norm: Exploring the Experiences of Queer Crips’, in Constructing Gendered Bodies, ed. by Kathryn Backett-Milburn and Linda McKie (London: Palgrave, 2001) p.227
[82] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.136
[83] Darin Payne, ‘Shifting Gears and Paradigms at the Movies: Masculinity, Automobility, and the Rhetorical Dimensions of Mad Max: Fury Road’, Studies in Popular Culture (Popular Culture Association in the South, 2017), p.111
[84] Alexis de Coning, ‘Recouping Masculinity: Men’s Rights Activists’ Responses to Mad Max: Fury Road’, Feminist Media Studies, Vol.16.Issue 1 (2016), p. 175
[85] Kyle Baratt, ‘Mad Max: Fury Road - Challenging Narrative and Gender Presentation in the Action Genre’, Media Education Journal, 2017, p.3 <https://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/11759> [accessed 5 May 2019]
[86] Payne, p.107
[87] de Coning, p.17
[88] Ibid.
[89] Payne, p. 122
[90] Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema, (London: Routledge, 1998) p.69
[91] Marcus Herz and Thomas Johansson, ‘The Normativity of the Concept of Heteronormativity’, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol.62.Issue 8 (2015), p.4
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