Gender Stereotype
Brief:
-Talk about women in different perspective.
-Group work.
-It could be anything. Posters, booklets, story telling
I care about female equality for a long time, this is why I choose this theme as my interdisciplinary project.
From the study of the website womenandhollywood.com, I found that in 2011, females comprised only 11% of protagonists. However, in 2017, females comprised 24% of sole protagonists, 37% of major characters, and 34% of all speaking characters. It can be seen that the importance of female leaders has been raised in these nine years.
Primary research
A survey to see how people feel about ‘female leaders’ in action movies
In the survey, I wanted to see how people feel about ‘female leaders’ in action movies, and analyse from different perspective. I choose 10 famous action movies with iconic female leader-
Star Wars
Harry Potter
Tomb Rider
Resident Evil
Hunger Game
Avengers
Mad Max
Alien
Wonder Woman
Tomb Rider 2018
From the gender of director, producer and writer, the opinion of people of the age, hairstyle, outfit, bodytype, weapon of choice, eye contact and the colour of the posters of the female leaders in movies. I would like to compare them and find the stereotype.
Analyse the posters
We decided to have a general idea about how people think about female leaders in action movies first, then analyse the posters to see if there is a stereotype. After this research, I found even it is a progress that there are more and more female leaders, the women roles in those movies are still under male gaze. People did not really care, even when they notice it, it is because the woman inside is ‘sexy’ and ‘beautiful’.
Some people believe having a female leaders in movies is a big step for women.
Some still have doubts about whether the female leading roles are feminist icons or symbol of oppression. By analysing poses, colours, eye contact and so on of the females in action movies, could be easier to find answers to this question.
Conclusion
-Most of them are from novels, comics and video games, which the character has to follow the way it was described.
-Audiences of action movies are mostly man.
-Even though there is more female leader in movies, however, they still have a stereotype in it. Most of them are long hair (which is not necessary), wearing body hugging clothes. They are young and fits the athletic of ‘how female should look like’.
The Change of direction
I narrowed it down to compare the characters, with only two movies and the same background, story but different time. This way it could be more simple but more focused. In the end we compared Tomb Raider 2001 and 2018, Wonder Woman 1975 and 2017, make them into posters, to see if maze gaze still effect nowadays action movies even with female leaders.
Poster style
I wanted to make it feels more 'American comic style' to reflect Tomb Raider is a video game and Wonder Woman is a comic book character.
Narrow it down to two movies could be easier to understand and suitable to use posters to communicate with people. Sometimes a research can carry a person away, it is very important to find the main idea, then try to find the direction of the project, and express it as simple and neat as possible.
