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

该奖学金的目的是使用统计工具来探索好莱坞主流电影中的性别偏见。与去年同期相比，有一致的证据表明，在流行电影中，女性只占三分之一的有声角色。此外，关于后女性主义的学术研究强调了分析的必要性，这些分析超越了对叙事中存在的“强烈女性角色”的讨论，并从女性角色与叙事中其他角色的关系位置的角度来考虑女性角色的存在。如果没有这种关系焦点，辩论仍然局限于赋权的个人主义概念，这些概念使女性的叙事去政治化，从而经常忽视好莱坞的叙事是如何将女性角色与男性隔离开来，并剥夺女性获得集体赋权的机会。考虑到#MeToo运动已经并将继续掀起的浪潮，这个问题的重要性比以往任何时候都更加明显，这一运动既突显了好莱坞与性别和权力有关的严重根深蒂固的问题，也突显了来自女性声音和集体而不是个人的故事的激进潜力。该奖学金将建立在我博士研究的平台上，以产生一些出版物和研究成果，这些出版物和研究成果将我的新数据中关于大片电影中对话的性别分布的关键发现和论点传播给不同的观众。特别是，我的目标是使用新兴的统计工具，包括关系事件模型和多变量网络数据的基于熵的方法，来分析这些叙述中的性别互动模式。这些工具让我们不仅可以探索女性说话的次数，而且还可以探讨她们与其他女性交谈的频率、她们谈论的内容以及她们的对话是通过什么机制和模式来描述的。除了这些目标，我的目标是探索好莱坞电影的这些发现如何与英国电影业的背景相关联，英国电影业也迫切需要进行量化研究，以解决该行业持续存在的各种具有代表性的不平等现象，尽管多年来一直在进行“多元化讨论”，并努力解决这些失衡问题。

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.