Exploring the marginalisation of women in popular cinema using quantitative network tools

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The aim of this fellowship is to use statistical tools to explore the gender biases in mainstream Hollywood cinema. There is consistent year-on-year evidence that women occupy only one in three speaking roles in popular cinema. Moreover, scholarship on post-feminism has highlighted the need for analyses which move beyond discussion of the presence of a "strong female character" within a narrative, and consider the presence of female characters in the context of their relational positioning among the other characters in the narrative. Without this relational focus, debates remain limited to individualistic notions of empowerment that depoliticise women's narratives, and thus frequently overlook how Hollywood narratives isolate female characters amongst men and deny women opportunities for collective empowerment. The importance of this issue is clearer than ever given the waves that the #MeToo movement has made and continues to make, a movement which has highlighted both the severe ingrained issues related to gender and power in Hollywood, as well as the radical potential that comes from female voices and stories that are collective rather than individual. The fellowship will build on the platform of my doctoral research in order to produce a number of publications and research outputs which will disseminate key findings and arguments from my novel data on the gendered distribution of dialogue in blockbuster cinema to diverse audiences. In particular, I aim to use emerging statistical tools including relational event models and entropy-based approaches to multivariate network data to analyse gendered patterns of interaction in these narratives. These tools allow us to explore questions surrounding not only how much women speak, but also how often they speak with other women, what they speak about, and by what mechanisms and patterns their dialogue is characterised. Alongside these goals, I aim to explore how these findings from Hollywood cinema can be related to the context of the UK film industry, where there is also a strong need for quantitative research addressing the various representational inequalities that persist in the sector despite years of "diversity talk" and efforts at addressing these imbalances.