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