Gender Representation Essay

    Men and women are represented very differently within the media. Men are supposedly strong, powerful and independent; whereas women are submissive, helpless and purely focus on their looks and being good housewives. Ultimately, female features are reliant on their relationships with men, meaning males are the more powerful sex. According to Jeremy Tunstall's research, women are catagorised into being 1.domestic 2.sexual 3.consumer 4.marital. Meaning they are houswives, sex objects, major consumers and contented mothers.
    Carol Clover also researches into the representation of women in a similar way, but takes time to focus on and relate this to, horror films and how they portray the female sex. I have looked at female characters from three different horror films to see how they are represented and also to see whether any horror films challenge the sterotypical view.
   
    Above is a clip from Wrong Turn, showing a perfect example of Clovers "final girl" stereotype. The girl in the white tank top is the final girl at the end of the film opposed to the other girl in the blue top who is killed. The two women here portray exactly what Carol Clover speaks about in her theory, the final girl is quite manly, independent and strong. Whereas the other girl is more scared and is a sex object earlier on in the movie. The clip here shows the characters jumping from a building, the final girl seems to look after the other and lets her go first, being brave enough to stay in the burning shack until last, before jumping out, powerfully rather than screaming and terrified like the girl in the blue top. Throughout the film, the final girl (Jessie) is shown to be very strong and confident, even when terrible things are happening and her friends are being killed and eaten by cannibals. This goes against the stereotypical damsel in distress emotional wreck that the media often portrays all women as, however Jessie does fit with the type of female that Clover believes is best to be the 'final girl'. The final girl will not be shown having sex in the film or being flirty and ditsy. In Wrong Turn, Jessie is not portrayed in that way at all, however she does seem to form a close bond with the male character in this clip. These two are the strongest characters that make it to the end. Even so, she is not seen as a sex object as the other two female characters are early on in the movie.

    Above is Esther from the horror film "Orphan", I chose to look at this character because she challenges a lot of aspects of the representation of women. She is a young russian orphan - however it turns out that she is in her thirties with a rare growth problem, from a mental hospital. The film is psychological and gorey, the storyline is scary in a psychological sense but there a slasher type killings in the film to add gore. Something that this film challenges about horror is the fact that they use a female as the killer, and also makes us believe that she is a child when in fact she is not. She punishes a family for no reason after they were kind enough to adopt her. however her reason for doing so seemed to be to steal the husband. She tries to sexualise her own character by dressing up and putting make up on, then getting close to the father when he is drunk, trying to seduce him. She plays games to make it look as if the mother is abusing her, to send the father further into her arms. It is another stereotype, that women seduce and are bitchy which is portrayed here. This film challenges codes and conventions of the average horror and adds an unusual twist to the female character.




    Above is the trailer for House Of Wax, the character I have looked at here is played by Paris Hilton. She plays the typical female sex object in this horror, a blonde damsel in distress. She is killed off fairly early on in the film; often this type of female character is killed to punish her for the act of sex. Around two thirds of the way through the trailer it focuses on each main character and shows a few short clips of them. When they show Paris Hilton we see part of the scene where she is killed. She wears a red lace bra under her jacet which hangs off her shoulder and exposes her. When she falls onto the metal grate and a knife comes up through it the camera aims straight at her chest. This supports Laura Mulvey's Male gaze theory. She says that the camera is male and when we see women in films it is as if we are looking through the eyes of the directer, who is generally male. This is done purposely, to interest the male audience. the camera see's her character as a sex object and a sex object only.

    The three female characters that I have looked at in this essay are all portrayed very differently, showing that not one theory alone is correct. Each film challeges a different code or convention of horror movies and also of the representation of women.