The Gender Imbalance In Superhero Film

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Chandler Woo
The Gender Imbalance in Superhero Film
When William M. Marston, creator of fictional heroine Wonder Woman, asked a girl which female superhero she aspired to be, the girl retorted, “Aw, that’s girls stuff! Who wants to be a girl?” And that is the point; just as the young comic enthusiast suggested, our world has become a dominantly patriarchal society, ranking men over women in the social hierarchy. While some might argue that there is more gender equality in our world now than in any other moment in American history, we still find nonetheless in our culture these continually degrading attitudes towards women. Women today are still only represented as icons of male sexual desire and are only viewed as valuable insofar as they …show more content…

British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey published her scholarly article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in 1975, using psychoanalysis to investigate how film has influenced the social perception of women through erotic and sexual images. From a technical, cinematic perspective, female actresses are casted to satisfy the gaze of the audience and of the casted male actors, thus conceptualizing the presence of the male gaze. As Mulvey asserts, “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly” (Mulvey 4). The effect of male gaze has resulted in subjective camera angles that objectify female characters through a male’s perspective. For example, men are presented as a figure in a landscape where spectators can identify and follow the development of their individual stories; on the other hand, women are presented through erotic close-ups of their legs or faces, disturbing the flow of the narrative and becoming perceived as an icon of sexual desire rather than a main character. In Amy Shackelford’s article in Everyday Feminism, “Female Characters in Superhero Films: The Grim Reality,” Shackelford takes a radical feminist approach regarding how the male gaze has impacted the superhero genre film industry. Noting that “’Women’s stories’ are really men’s stories in superhero films” (Shackelford 1), Shackelford argues that all superhero movies revolve around men, and women actually have no character development of their

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