Women & Film (Some Brief Initial Ideas)

Women & Film

Brief Initial Proposal Ideas

• Something that compares the way female directors & male directors represent female heroines in film.
• Female empowerment – representation of women in power
• Do male directors sexualise female heroine’s more than female directors?
• Are female stereotypes only constructed by male directors?
• Is a woman only empowered when she’s acting like a man?
• BUT who makes the assumptions of how a man is supposed to act?
• Distinguishing between Sex & Gender representation of women
• The effect of glamorous, Hollywood actresses on western, teenage girls?
  
  Potential Texts for analysis…

Male Directors

• The Devil Wears Prada (David Frankel)
• Mean Girls (Mark Waters – empowered as a woman/ using feminine attributes to manipulate men)
• Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003 Joseph McGinty Nichol)
• Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West 2001)

Female Directors

• What Women Want (Nancy Meyers – is it a true representation of what women want/ what do women want?)
• Bridget Jones’ Diary (Sharon Maguire – heroine who isn’t perfect/ Hollywood beauty)
• Bend it Like Beckham (Gurinda Chadha – compare the representation on 2 women
  of different cultures)

Difference between ‘sex’ & ‘gender’…

• Sex is the biological & physical division of people into male & female
• Gender is a culturally formed, set of assumptions based around a persons sex
  e.g. ‘It’s a boy!’ = surrounded by baby blue clothes, train sets & cars
  OR Women bear children – Therefore they should stay at home and bring them up à ‘Its only natural’.

Post-feminism…

• Suggests that we are now ‘beyond’ the need to struggle for gender equality.
• Young women are now said to take fro granted the respect & equal pay etc struggled for them by earlier feminists

“It’s OK to enjoy shopping and wearing lipstick”

• Points to the pleasure of ‘trying on’ identities
  & the need to REREAD a woman’s sexualised appearance as not necessarily subordinating her to men.
• How satisfying is ‘girl power’ media images of female ‘empowerment’
• Charlie’s Angel’s remake or Lara Croft?
• How far do they fit with what is sketched as ‘post feminist’?

Feminist Quotes

“Feminist theory aims to understand the nature of inequality and focuses on gender politics, power relations and sexuality.”

“Speaking for women requires a feminine language that accepts the multiplicities of languages.”