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
g
