Gender Studies- Exam practice

"The male gaze dominates Hollywood movies". Using the top 5 films of the week, would you agree with this statement?

1. Source Code (12A)



2. Little White Lies (15)



3. Limitless (15)



4. Your Highness (15)



5. Red Riding Hood (12A)



It seems that male gaze still dominates hollywood. It appears that if women are significantly present in a film, they are the object of male gaze. For example, in Your Highness, although Natalie Portman's character is a strong female, she is still sexually objetified by the shot of her stripping off by a lake. The shot is vouyeristic and takes the viewpoint of the two gazing male protagonists. This contrasts with the protgaonist of Red Riding Hood where she doesn't seem to be the object of male gaze, most likely because she is the protagonist and she is represented as young and innocent, rather than a sexual object.

If women aren't an object of male gaze, then they seem to be not present in these films. Both Limitless and Source Code have little attention on women. In Source Code the female protagonist seems to bring little to the plot, other than be a general representation of "normality" as it is the male protagonist who is the changing factor in the film. A Marxist would argue that this brings out hegemonic ideologies about gender; men are the active ones while females are the passive ones.

The only text that doesn't seem to have commented on gender roles is Little White Lies. This might be because it's a foreign film so doesn't contain Hollywood ideologies.