The Transition Of Female Images In American Science Fiction Films: 1970s-2010s

American science fiction films have appealed to a broad audience since its birth.As the genre was primarily targeted at male audiences,it often focused on masculinity and treated women characters as marginal sidekicks.Many times,Hollywood sci-fi films portrayed women from an exotic lens and used their bodies to attract potential male audiences.The situation was subject to change in the 1970 s in response to the surge of feminism movement and changing social circumstances.Female roles in the sci-fi genre were gradually endowed with more screen time and character subtlety.They could gain so much power that they might stand side by side with male characters,demonstrating technological dexterity,intelligence,and determination.Today’s sci-fi films,through more diverse images of women,respond to the awakening of women’s consciousness in real life.But since the new century,the transformation of female images in sci-fi films has some incompleteness due to the demands of commercial films,which cannot shake the foundation of the male-dominated society.Today’s sci-fi films meet the deep psychological demands of female audience’s self-realization,and at the same time,they implicitly cater to the purpose of male’s desire to watch and peep.The filmmakers’ pursuit of increasing viewing and box-office sales ultimately made the film an entertaining and fast-moving piece of culture in the guise of science fiction.Therefore,the road of self-construction and self-expression of female images in sci-fi films still has a long way to go.This thesis mainly analyzes the changes of the female images in the early sci-fi movies to the present sci-fi movies,and in this way,discusses the main factors of these changes.This thesis is mainly composed of four parts.The first part reviews the relevant studies in the academic world,the status quo of the study of female images in sci-fi films,the feminist studies in mass media,and the relevant methods of criticism of feminist film theory.The second part will be focused on the analysis of female characters in the early sci-fi films and the characteristics of these bold and intelligent female characters,and to take the series film Alien(Scott 1979)as an example to analyze the symbol characteristics of the female characters in the film.The third part focuses on the analysis of the characteristics of the diversified expression of female consciousness in today’s sci-fi films,and the status quo that the female images in today’s sci-fi films cannot get rid of the control of the patriarchal consciousness.And take The Avengers: The End Game(Russo 2019)as an example to analyze the characteristics of the female characters in today’s science fiction movies.The fourth part mainly analyzes the factors that cause the changes of female images in sci-fi films from three aspects: the influence of male gaze,the influence of audience’s attitude and preference,and the biased expression of feminism.