Abstract

LAGUARDA, Paula. Cinema and gender studies: Image, representation and ideology. Notes for a critical approach. Aljaba [online]. 2006, vol.10, pp.141-156. ISSN 1669-5704.

Cinema, as a producer of images, representations, meanings and ideologies, seems to be an optimum territory for tracing the way in which subjectivities had been constructed, sinces the popularization of this technique on the early decades of XX century to the present day. In this sense, cinema provides gender studies with a source of prime order to analyse socially dominant representations about female and male, and the characteristics assigned to each other; such as the interaction between gender category and other like class, ethnicity, nation, domesticity, education, sexuality and age. This article approaches critically to the main theoretical lines that had conected cinema and feminism, and to the possibilities it offers to gender studies, by allowing simultaneous research on textual aspects (discoursive, narrative elements and resources of cinematographic language) and contextual aspects (regarding cinema both as a cultural industry and a manifestation of popular culture).

Keywords : Cinema; Gender; Representations; Ideology.