3
However, there are a number of key issues that most would agree are central for feminism: the
presence of women in central roles in a variety of genres; broadening the acceptable age-range and
looks for women on screen from the present narrow strictures to women of various ages, sizes,
sexualities, races, and appearances; and allowing women to assume roles of equal status to those held
by men. Our discussion seeks to focus on these and highlight how they have been treated in the most
popular mainstream films. There has, of course, over the last several decades, been a proliferation of
feminist films, most of them independently made, or made out of the U.S. But here we confine our
concern to the way feminist ideas appear or don
=
t appear in Hollywood films
B
we feel this is an
important question given the enormous impact of these films worldwide.
1
Next, as sociologists, we worried about method: how to address an issue as broad as films of
the 90’s, or of any era, or making any generalizations about film at all. Hollywood produces so many
films per year that our paper could hardly deal with even one year of films. What years were most
important to treat? How to decide which films were most salient vis-a-vis feminism and its issues?
How to avoid the more common practice in film criticism of extreme in-depth discussion of only one
or two films, which one can always find to illustrate a particular theoretical point? How to refrain
from falling into a scientistic trap of superficially treating hundreds of film with a mere content
analysis, thereby saying nothing interpretively interesting at all? We felt that assessing feminism
=
s
meanings was so complex that neither the focus on a few films nor a broad superficial analysis of a
large sample would be effective for addressing our initial question.
Defining our mission as assessing the current state of feminist impact on Hollywood films,
we decided to narrow our focus by concentrating on films of the most recent past decade. Once this
decision was made, we had to confront the formidable problem of selecting films from the many
which had been produced throughout the decade. We decided on a list of the ten most popular films
made each year, broadening our discussion of the final year we consider (2001) to a list of one
hundred and twenty (see Appendix). This allowed us to treat a wider variety of genres, and to include
Convention