How do the representations of gender and sexuality differ in Tomb Raider from the screenings we’ve seen before? Or do you see little change? Do theories of gender and sexuality in film and TV fit this video-game influenced text? (You can also apply this question to the Lara Croft machinima we’ll watch in class on Thursday.)

The reading explored gender and sexuality in video game representation and video game experience, suggesting that the Lara Croft video game franchise might offer, to a limited degree at least, new representations of active female power, and of male identification with a female avatar. Do these shifts in gender representation and engagement also manifest in the film versions of video games? Is Lara Croft in the movie Tomb Raider as potentially empowering as game-Lara Croft? Or is she still a disempowered spectacle, to-be-looked-at, as in the scenario originally described by Laura Mulvey?

How are the negotiations of gender in the Lara Croft game series recreated or transformed when adapted to film in Tomb Raider? For example, how does this preoccupation with the female stunting body & desire to know discussed by Kennedy manifest in the film (or does it not?) What about the fetishization of the digital powerful female, the highlighting of the construction of femininity and gender? And how about questions of transgender identification? Is Lara still equally available for male and female engagement?

How do either or both of these texts render masculinity? What models of masculinity are on display? Who do you think is the imagined viewer? How is the imagined viewer interpellated into the text? How might we understand these two media texts in relation to Mulvey? To Cohan? To Consalvo?

For Scorpio Rising specifically–how might we interpret this film in terms of Foucault’s notions of ethics and technologies of self? How does the film combine music and image to imagine (new/revised) ways in which masculinity might “be played” (in the Foucaultian sense..)? And how can we understand this film as recontextualizing popular imagery in much the same way Piepmeir discusses the work of zines?

What visions of masculinity does The Matrix offer? And what visions of femininity? (How) do the representations of masculinity and femininity in The Matrix form a larger gendered system, and is that system heteronormative?

Who is to-be-looked at in The Matrix? Who controls the gaze? Is power derived from seeing/looking, being seen/spectacle, or from something else entirely?

What role does gendered identification and cross-gendered identification play in your experience of The Matrix? Do you recognize representations of gender fluidity on screen, in male or female characters, and if so, how does this gender fluidity impact your experience of the film and engagement with the characters? Is there a return to gendered norms at the film’s conclusion? (I.e. as we discussed in class, how might we apply the Clover to The Matrix?)

As Irene Karras suggests, can we read Buffy as the “final girl for 3rd wave feminism”? By the close of the series, does this title still apply? Or is third wave feminism manifest through other characters in addition to/beyond Buffy?

Where/with whom can we locate abject horror/emotion? Where/with whom can we locate gender power?

How does fantasy work to express societal/cultural changes that might be taboo otherwise?

What models of masculinity are offered?

How does Buffy as a model of (third wave) feminism differ from the leads of Gossip Girl?

Consider the two Gossip Girl episodes screened in class in relation to any of the following topics:

(You can just stick to one, or combine two if you see interconnections)

The Male Gaze
The Female Gaze
To-Be-Looked-At-ness
Female (as) spectacle
Male (as) spectacle
Female spectacle as power vs. the threat of the unseen female
The gaze as power vs. the look as desire
The woman’s look (at the male monster) as recognition of affinity with the monster
The possibilities of more fluid identification, or identification with characters who do not align with the viewer’s gender, race, or sexuality (i.e. Ask yourself: who do you identify with as you view? Does your identification line up along lines of gender, race, or sexuality?)

I’d also be interested to hear your compare Gossip Girl with Rebecca along any of these lines.

What room is there for the female spectator in Rebecca? How about for the male spectator? Who is offered as an ego ideal? Who holds power in the narrative? Who is punished and how?

Whose gaze do you identify with? Does your interpellation/identification shift over the course of the film?

Do you find yourself taking up a voyeuristic position as you watch this film? Is this voyeuristic position ever rendered problematic or uncomfortable?