The dominance of the male gaze in Hollywood Films

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: The way in which media systems reflect our social environment and specifically how they represent and disseminate gender role models and have a lasting effect on the construction of identity is of long-standing interest both in Gender Studies and in the literary and the visual arts. In order to examine in particular the representation of women in the visual art of popular cinema, The Dominance of the Male Gaze in Hollywood Films will thus focus on the image of women in mainstream Hollywood films. Although media and specifically television and films are often considered to act „largely as a social mirror”, films in fact often distort social reality and continue to reflect traditional stereotypical gender constructions. In fact, these traditional gender images are not simply mirrors of real life, but also ideological signifiers: In many mainstream films that pretend to depict reality a time lag separates true social circumstances from the film reality the movie produces. Consequently, this time lag also manifest in filmic representations of gender roles means for the women’s movement that feminists have hardly been able to enact new images of women outside the patriarchal context of popular films or change female stereotypes and incorporate feminist thought into mainstream films. Thus, mainstream films do not propagate an image of emancipated women, quite the reverse: women are subordinate objects of the male gaze. This general assumption has led to this thesis, which will deal with the question of whether Hollywood films, as representative of mainstream culture, still disseminate patriarchal images of women dominated by the male gaze even though feminist thought has been part of our society for some decades now. Located at the intersection of Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, and Gender Studies, this thesis will mainly follow the theoretical approach of the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey who developed the concept of the male gaze in her essay „Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Mulvey’s concept shall contribute to the analysis of the thesis that the images of women in Hollywood films still correspond to conservative patriarchal stereotypes. Within the scope of this still valid thesis, one of the major restrictions was to narrow down the film analysis to merely Hollywood film production. The reason for this restriction is first of all that Hollywood films, representative of popular taste, are globally [...]