Friday, 18 April 2008

What to do

Explore the representations of women in Bond films. Bond films provide a long history of the changing representations of women as supporting characters to a central male protagonist. Typically this role has been as either the "bad girl" who works for the male villain and who falls for James and then helps him (but probably gets killed anyway after sleeping with him). Ideologically, the power of James as a masculine force REPOSITIONS her from morally bad to morally good. Or there is the "Bond girl" or "good girl" who is basically placed by the narrative into a "victim" position/damsel in distress so that Bond can demonstrate his masculinity by rescuing her. Either way these women are not there for any other purpose than to CONNOTE the masculinity fo the protagoist.

This was supposed to have changed with Natalya and Onatopp in Goldeneye (1995) but that film still shows several characteristics of the classic good girl bad girl opposition and its sexist assumptions.

You should do the following:

1. Read around gender reps.
2. Choose 3 films. A classic early very sexist one; Goldeneye as the film where the makers stated they wwere updating the reps of women to reflect a more modern approach; and a very recent one. Explore ther reps of the female. Have things really changed?
3. Choose some clips and explore them in some way with a real audience of men to see their reactions to these changing reps.

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