Primary Research

Based on Terminator 2 and Fantastic 4. How females take protagonist position and the extent to which they are still represented as "feminine". How Terminator 2 is in fact perhaps a mroe radical rep of femininity than more recent films. You agree that, theoretically, we might assume that men will prefer the reps of the more recent film, and women the reps of the older film. Investigate whether this is in fact the case, bu working with two small audience groups - one male and one female.

Refining your research

So you have decided to do Action movies/sci fi. That's good - these are interesting genres because the core audience is supposed to be male and so we might expect representations of gender to be stereotypically sexis - damsels in distress for the male hero to rescue or sex objects. Is this the case? You are going to focus on Fantastic Four and two others. You now have the Gauntlett chapters to begin reading, and the authors Yvonne Tasker and Sherrie A Inness have written books on women in the genre. Photocopy relevant chapters for your research.
Sean

Your first ideas

Women and Film.
You say "are real representations given?" - The problem with this is that NO MEDIA REPRESENTATION IS REAL - it is a REPRESENTATION. So you need to reformulate what you mean. Also, you cannot possibly do all of cinema - all genres, countries, historical periods, etc. So you have to narrow your range right at the beginning. I would suggest, if you are interested in this area, you pick a traditional "male" genre, such as the action movie, and explore representations of women within that genre. What is your favourite genre, or a genre you watch a lot of films in?

If you decide to do this, you should choose a few central texts (recent ones) and see if the representations reinfoce stereotypes of and ideological assumptions about gender, or if they challenge them. So the first thing to do is to research about gender representations generally, then about reps within your chosen genre. For primary research you could explore how audience members respond to the gender reps on offer within your central texts.

Start your reading with Chapters 3 and 4 in Media Gender and Identity by David Gauntlett.

You have to decide quickly now!

Sean