Recently I’ve been struggling to get myself motivated to do anything.
So I apologize for the huge lapse in posts, to those of you who expressed interest in my project so far. I suppose, when you can hardly push yourself to do the exact type of research you want to devote your life to, it opens your eyes to just how real the hold of your depression and anxiety is on your ability to function.
I adore my program, as well as the material I’m studying this semester. That makes it so much more upsetting to know I’m not devoting the amount of time I should be to studying it.
Anyway, I didn’t come to write a post to complain about my current mental state, I came here to bounce some ideas I’ve been having off you all.
In my last post I mentioned how the executive producer of The Taking of Deborah Logan appreciated my comment about their progressive choice in putting all women in all main roles. From now having gone to more seminars of Representations of Race, Class, & Gender in the Media, I am now having second thoughts on how positive that is for society.
Progression is needed and the end goal is that media representations reflect a real equality existing in society. However, I’m beginning to recognize that forms of media portraying an unrealistically progressive reality actually hinder – rather than motivate – real societal progress.
Representations are created as products and then, when used, act as tools to reproduce or resist dominant social relations. So in this case [The Taking of Deborah Logan‘s unrealistic representations of gender progress], the dominantly held social relations [of larger movie production associations] are creating a sensationalized utopia of gender progress.
In doing so, they reproduce real experiences of subtle/overt sexism – they do not resist them.
Think of it like if you broke an arm, and you went to a doctor. What if that doctor dulled purely the symptoms of that broken arm, yet tried to tell you your arm was now not broken any longer? Sure you may be presently soothed by the lack of pain but you still have a serious injury needing to be addressed otherwise.
In that same sense, using all women characters in every main role does not reduce real inequality, it masks it, and therefore has the potential to harm real social progress through that appeasement.
So to answer an obvious question: What’s a better alternative?
I believe the best alternative would be including complex female characters who don’t unrealistically dominate every role of representational society, but who linguistically and actively address the current state of social relations in our society today. In doing so we aren’t pretending inequality does not exist [think: colorblindness], and therefore have the potential to open up conversations of further social change that needs to occur by the agency of their critical representations.
Thoughts?
foundfootagefemale 