1) Traditional films often portrayed rigid gender roles that reinforced social norms, with men playing active roles and women playing more passive roles as objects of the male gaze. 2) Theories like Mulvey's male gaze argue that cinema is structured to please the male viewer through scopophilic objectification of women and identification with male protagonists. 3) Films in later decades like Aliens, Terminator II, and Thelma and Louise challenged these stereotypes by portraying women in more active, physically strong roles traditionally reserved for men. However, women were still sometimes sexualized or their empowerment came at the cost of traditional femininity.

1. Practices of Looking Recap
• What is the difference between seeing and looking?
• What is social constructivism?
• Why is context important to the understanding of an image?
• What is an ideology?
• What is a denotation?
• What is a connotation?
• What are signs made up of?
• What is a signifier?
• What is the signified?

2. GENDER IN FILM
MEN Women
• Play active roles which • Play passive roles
drive the narrative • Objects for the male
• Physically and mentally gaze
strong • Produced to gratify
• Outnumbered females male viewers
• Allowed to look or ‘gaze’ at • Bearers of children
women • In need of protection
• Looking is an active • Not independent – in
undertaking need of male support
• Dominant
• Protectors
Mulvey: ‘Women, in any fully human form, have almost
completely been left out of film…’

3. Traditional Film
• On screen: clearly defined roles mimicking and enforcing social
norms
• Women, did women things, men did men things…
• Molly Haskell argues that dominant ideology required women to
marry and bear children. ‘This stigma becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy’.

4. Women as Image
Man as Bearer of the Look
THE GAZE
• Theory created by Laura Mulvey in 1970s
• Argued that… ‘In a world ordered by sexual imbalance,
pleasure in looking has split between active / male and
passive / female.’
• Men looked at women who were styled accordingly.

5. The Gaze
• Spectators then, whether male or female, adopted an
active male position.
• This meant women had to view films secondarily and from
the view point of a male.
• Like this:

6. The Gaze
• Jonathan Schroeder (1998), ‘to gaze implies more than
to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of
power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the
gaze.’.
• So, because the gaze is predominantly male, it reaffirms
gender roles, male as the dominant sex.
• Check out these two music videos and consider the
differences between the two:

7. The Gaze
• Although it may appear that ‘gazing’ is merely looking at
someone, it signifies a relationship of power in which the
holder of the gaze is superior to the object of the gaze.
• Revolves around Freud’s theories regarding the pleasures
of looking. Scopophillia and Voyeurism
• According to Mulvey, there are two cinematic processes
work together in a cinematic text:
1. Voyeuristic objectification of female characters
2. Narcisisstic identification of Male charcaters
• As a result of these two processes, the audience is
masculinised

8. Gender!
Judith Butler
• Wrote a book called Gender Trouble which argued that:
‘gender should be seen as a fluid variable which shifts and
changes in different contexts and at different times.’
• She argues that sex (male, female) is seen to cause
gender (masculine, feminine) which is seen to cause
desire (towards the other gender).
• Butler's approach is basically to smash the supposed links
between these, so that gender and desire are flexible,
free-floating and not 'caused' by other stable factors.

9. Gender Performance
Judith Butler
• She also argues that we all put on a gender performance
• This requires a firm understanding of how to ‘do’ gender
• So, a man would have to perform what asked to act like a
female.
• However, they subconsciously have to perform being
male too – Think about the stereotypical things guys and
gals do…
• Now think of this in filmic terms…

10. 1980s Muscle Culture
• The 1980s was a time when masculinity was overtly
displayed, most obviously through the action genre
• Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)
• Kick Boxer (1989)
• Predator (1987)
• Lethal Weapon (1987)
• Die Hard (1988)
• The Terminator (1988)
• Lethal Weapon (1987)
• Predator (1987)
• Women were void from these films
and when they did appear, they were
simply motivation for men…

11. Action Quotes…
. Jeffery Brown: ‘…the muscular male body has
become the genre’s central trade mark…’
. Jeffery Brown: ‘All that was required of an actress
was an innocently sexual appearance and a ready
scream.’
. Yvonne Tasker: ‘…an almost exclusively male space,
in which issues to do with sexuality and gendered
identity can be worked out over the body…’
. Yvonne Tasker: ‘… women are hysterical figures who
need to be rescued or protected…’

12. ALEINS (1986)
• Ripley, played by
Sigourney Weaver
challenged cultural
norms
• Strong and relatively
dominant
• Active
• Dominant
• However, she is still
arguably a sexual
object

13. Guess the Link
JAMES CAMERON
A E R
L N A
I S M
B
Jeanine Basinger: ‘Putting women in traditional male
O
action roles, without changing their psychology, is just
cinematic cross-dressing…’

14. The Final Girl…
• Carol Clover
• The final girls is a the
woman who is left at the
end of a horror movie.
• Sexually unavailable /
virgins
• Becomes macsulinised by
adopting phallic symbols
• Sometimes have
ambiguous names
(Sidney)
• Clover argues that men
are able to cheer the final
girl, purely because they
are coded as male.

15. The 1990s
• Films in the 90s responded to the general stereotypical
depictions of genders.
• Reaction against films from the 1980s.
• Aliens had allowed women to adopt a new role in film.
• Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis in Thelma and Louise
(1991)
• Linda Hamilton in Terminator II (1992)
• Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs (1991)
• Yvonne Tasker: 'defined by a quality of "musculinity" and
enactment of a muscular masculinity involving a display
of power and strength over the body of the female
performer.’

16. Terminator I & II
• In The Terminator, Sarah In Terminator II,
Connors adopted the she has changed
stereotypical female action both mantally and
actress… physically…

17. Susan Jeffords
‘This new Sarah Connors looks like the mercenary she
has trained to be through all the intervening years,
wearing military fatigues, toting heavy weapons and
having a mission to perform. As final proof, of her new
hard character she even forgets to love her son we are
witness to how Sarah ignores her son for most of the
film. The excuse that she’s concentrating on keeping him
alive puts her in direct competition for the Terminator’s
role, and body And while she is focussing on being a
super-soldier, the Terminator is working on being a
better mom, listening to and playing with the son that
Sarah hardly notices for all the weapons she’s carrying.’
Analyse this clip…

18. Guns ‘n’ Muscles
. Susan Bordo: ‘…muscles have chiefly sybolised and
continue to symbolise masculine power as physical
strength, frequently operating as a means of coding the
naturalness of sexual difference.’
. Laurie Schulze: Social attitudes towards female
bodybuilders – ‘just trying to be men’ accused of being
lesbians.
. Jeffery Brown: ‘Sarah Connors (Linda Hamilton) was,
according to New York magazine, ‘the power body: arms
and shoulders packed with muscle, the straight thick
waist, the boys hips, no ass, the bosom so small it
doesn’t require a bra and arms with rivers of veins rising
above the muscle’’