Gender Images in Hollywood Films
Gender Images in Hollywood Films
This special section of Replika is devoted to gender-oriented film theory and criticism. The articles included are mostly written in the early 1990s and are focusing on the changing patterns of gender roles as portrayed in mainstream Hollywood feature films. Further concerns of the articles are the representations of male and female bodies and identities, and the way the pictures handle the Other, be it human or non-human. The close textual readings of such different features as Alien, Blade Runner, Pretty Woman, Sleeping with the Enemy and others will hopefully give some clues for the Hungarian readers regarding the main thematical and methodological concerns of contemporary western film criticism. This selection is a part of a larger project titled “Popular Film Reader”, which is to be published next year, in order to stimulate film education in Hungary.
Stephen Prince’s article – using the method of quantitative content analysis – reveals that male and female roles in feature length XXX-rated films are not that different as expected. Caputi’s contribution is based on the idea of reading Pretty Woman and Sleeping with the Enemy as subsequent stages of the same narrative. Stephen Neale deals with the issues of difference between male and female, (wo)man and machine, and human and non-human in two postmodern cult classics, Alien and Blade Runner. Finally, the article by Miklos Hadas follows the transition patterns of leading male heroes in Academy Awarded pictures from 1986 to 1994.