Genre and Gender in Popular Film Essay

Male authors and female authors are very similar and very different. The two authors both have a meaning life story to every novel. Both authors express their feelings and frustrations in their stories. Almost every author has a meaning and significance to their story. The two authors use great detail and understanding of their stories. Male authors typically write about freedom, self-seeking adventures and self-instincts. Meanwhile, female authors write about their struggle of freedom and feeling important. There are more contrasts than there are comparisons in male to female authors. The two authors can be very similar and very dissimilar. There are differences between the style, tones and approaches

Social institutions such as that of family, religion, education, economic and political standings, are set standards or patterns of governing within society. In many cases, this is used to rule over others, in matters of wealth and hierarchy. These social institutions are important because they provide some structure for society. However, not all forms of structure are appropriate. Many of these behaviors are used to control

The Screwball comedy is a film genre that found its way onto the screens in the early 1930s and lasted till the early 1940s. They were a consequence of the newly adapted censorship law in 1934 that restricted addressing adult content on screen. They therefore incorporated more comedic and creative ways of symbolizing topics such as sex and homosexuality. Screwball comedies were mainly based on plots that had conflict between social classes as their many premise and always had a happy ending which was almost always marriage. This consistent maintenance of the status quo of marriage is a major aspect of feminism depicted in screwball comedies (Heather 26). While advocating for marriage, screwball comedies highlighted the shift in the

In action movies, many plots contain violent and dangerous scenes. Usually, females cannot burden such dangerous tasks in which even male characters usually get injured (Dargis, 2014). This phenomenon can be attributed to the division of work among females and males. In the long history, males are the ones who join in the army and participate in the war. Females are the ones who prepare supplies at home. Therefore, females seldom join in violent fights. Therefore, the sexualization of action movies is related to the social position of females in history. Fortunately, females are taking more responsibilities from males in action movies. For example, Michelle MacLaren is hired to direct the movie Wonder Woman, which is an action movie with female main characters. This is a breakthrough in the history of action movies and demonstrates a trend of De-sexualization in action movies. Also, female-led action movies like Underworld: Evolution show a direct response to decades of suppression of females in action movies as well as the society (Meslow,

Feminist literary theory assumes that a text is not simply a work of fictional literature that is separated entirely from the physical world. In this lens, the boundaries are non existent. The circumstances of how a work was written influence its criticism and analysis. The location, gender and class of the author and characters are vital to a feminist criticism (Feminist Literary Theory 1) .

Gender and racial identity was a form of discrimination in the world and they were interrelated that fuelling the injustice social phenomenon and problem. For example, women were a particular group and as a symbol showed the social abuses, acts of violence and biggest discrimination based on the sexual difference and racism. The difference of color, race, gender were the big biases not only to deprive of women’s an equal rights education opportunity, health insurance or care, personal credit, but also to help racist and sexist to deny women get the work, food and shelter equality. On the one hand, everyone has their own identity which was the individuals’ psychological relationships to relate social systems. Based on the Repost of Gender and Racial Discrimination which focused on and pointed out there are some barriers to limit women get the rights or empowerment in daily life and advancement in their career, especially the sexuality and racial biases. (Zagreb, Croatia). So, the personal value, socioeconomic status, education attainment, age, ethnic and racial, gender and social class identities were the invisible standards to decide and evaluate women should be got what kind of treatment in their life. Also, people almost preferred to create identity based on the gender and racism in the daily life. because it was a part of self-concept for the kind of person, the color of skin and the

Stereotypes in our society are not uncommon. We come across them every day without realizing it. It is in our human nature to create expectations of the people around us, which could be based upon their ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender or other factors. Stereotypes help us categorize a vast group of people that we may not know anything about, to think that they are smaller and less intimidating. I believe that the blame for these cookie-cutter patterns can lead directly back to the media in every sense of the word. Media is all around us, and affects our opinions and ability to think for ourselves. Whether it’s the latest box office hit or the headlining news, we are getting assumptions from every point of view, which makes it

Throughout motion picture history, women have experienced more transition in their roles, as a result of changing societal norms, than any other class. At first, both society and the movie industry preached that women should be dependent on men and remain in the home, in order to guarantee stability in the community and the family. As time passed and attitudes changed, women were beginning to be depicted as strong willed, independent minded characters, who were eager to break away from convention. The genre of the crime film represents such a change in the roles handed to women. Two films that can be contrasted, in order to support this view, are: The Public Enemy by William Wellman (1931) and Bonnie

There are a number of aims that feminist literary theory fights for. One is teaching readers to see things from a woman character’s point of view in a written work, as many readers are not taught inherently how to do so. Another is to help find lost works that were either not published due to being written by women, or works that were hidden for years under a male’s name, despite having been authored by women. Still another aim is to expand libraries and school book lists to include more work written by women (Gillespie). Though feminist literary theory has been challenged for being political, it is important to follow through with this work so an accurate version of history is portrayed, and so generations to come will

In contemporary film women's roles in films have varied quiet considerably between genres, geographical placement, and between

Gilbert and Gubar’s suggestion is no less than building a female language by tactically maneuvering the existing conventions of patriarchal language through women writers’ own practices and the practices of their foremothers. Under the disguise of patriarchal discourse, women writers are telling stories of their own – one may deem it as women’s duplicity. Two of the typical maneuverings are palimpsest and parody. As Gilbert and Gubar put it: “women from Jane Austen and Mary Shelley to Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson produced literary works that are in some sense palimpsestic, works those surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning.” (Gilbert & Gubar, 73) Taking the double bind of stereotypical female figures for example, the split between the innocent, quiet, selfless, good women (“mother goddess, merciful dispensers of salvation, female symbols of justice”) and the vicious, evil women (“witches, evil eye, menstrual pollution, castrating mothers”) is a male construction that women writer can never escape. Rather than demolishing the binary, women writers redefine themselves by travelling between the two extremes through “alternately defining themselves as angel-women or as monster-women” (Gilbert & Gubar, 44) and through “creating dark doubles for themselves and their heroines” (Gilbert & Gubar, 79). In so doing, they simultaneously

‘Portrayal of women in literature is heavily influenced by the social and cultural views of its context, but it is the author’s view that matters most’

Between the years of 1937 and 1960,LIFE underwent changes involving the portrayal of the genders. In popular literature, stereotypes and views of certain subjects are often displayed for future study. In the case of gender differences, advertisements and articles yield the best portrayal of gender stereotyping of the time. The following issues of LIFE magazine were used in this paper: January-February 1937, January-February 1945, January-February 1952, and January-February 1960. At the end of the Great Depression in 1937, women had a very simple stereotype in the popular media. They were portrayed as staying home, cleaning, cooking, and mothering. The only pictures of

Since the 1940’s, movies have predominately portrayed women as sex symbols. Beginning in the 1940’s and continuing though the 1980’s, women did not have major roles in movies. When they did have a leading role the women was either pretreated as unintelligent and beautiful, or as conniving and beautiful: But she was always beautiful. Before the 1990’s, men alone, wrote and directed all the movies, and the movies were written for men. In comparison, movies of the 90’s are not only written and directed by women, but leading roles are also held by older and unattractive women. In this paper I will show the variations and growth of women’s roles in movies from the 1940’s though the 1990’s.

In society, women are often perceived as the weaker sex, both physically and mentally. In modern times women have leveled the playing field between men and women, and feminism is a highly discussed topic, but for years, women faced discrimination and prejudice both in life and in the workplace, due to their sex. This way of thinking flooded into the world of film. In their works, the authors of each of the various sources address the limitations and liberations of women both on and off the screen in nineteenth century Film and Cinema. Not every source is completely filled with information related to the research topic, but they do cover and analyze many of the same points from different perspectives. Prominent points addressed in each