My post today seeks to publicise unashamedly the work I have done with my students in the Masters’ Degree in Advanced English Studies at my university, the Autònoma of Barcelona. Last week I had the great pleasure of seeing finally online the e-book Gender in 21st Century SF Cinema: 50 Titles, which can be downloaded for free from https://ddd.uab.cat/record/206282. We even had a presentation at Llibreria Gigamesh (together with that of my recent book Ocho cuentos góticos: Entre el papel y la pantalla), which can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_XdiT4k1sg . I’ll divide my post, then, in two parts: one dealing with the logistics of setting the e-book in motion, editing and publishing it, and the other one dealing with the main findings in our research. By the way, this is my sixth e-book with students. Here is the complete list:
2019: Gender in 21st Century Cinema: 50 Titles, https://ddd.uab.cat/record/206282
2018: Gender and Feminism: The Students’ View, Vol 2. https://ddd.uab.cat/record/129180
2016: Reading SF Short Fiction: 50 Titles, https://ddd.uab.cat/record/163528
2015: Gender and Feminism: The Students’ View, https://ddd.uab.cat/record/129180
2014: Charming and Bewitching: Considering the Harry Potter Series https://ddd.uab.cat/record/122987
2014: Addictive and Wonderful: The Experience of Reading the Harry Potter Series, https://ddd.uab.cat/record/118225
The most successful one in terms of downloads so far is Reading SF Short Fiction: 50 Titles, now past the 6300 mark. This is nothing in comparison to the millions of clicks a video posted by the most popular YouTubers gets but it’s infinitely much more than any academic publication gets in the Humanities. For this is what the e-books are: academic publications (in English Studies).
I came across the idea of the e-book quite by chance, when I taught the monographic course on Harry Potter in 2013-14. I put then together two volumes, one with the students’ short essays on their experience of reading Rowling’s series, the other with their papers. Progressively, I have transformed my BA and MA electives into project-oriented teaching (or learning) experiences, to the point that I’m beginning to think of students’ exercises written only for my eyes as a waste of time (excuse me!).
What I mean is that since, anyway, I need to correct and mark plenty of these exercises, I’d rather invest my time into texts (or even videos) that can be published online. This gives my teaching and their learning more sense, since we are both producing practical work in cultural communication which has, besides, the advantage of training students professionally. We must, of course, teach students to produce different academic exercises at each level of their studies, but why not aim at producing texts that do have potential impact beyond the classroom? Online publication, as I have learned, is at first a scary proposition but it eventually boosts students’ self-confidence, which should be, I think, one of our main aims as teachers, and as researchers training future researchers.
So, what have I done in the case of Gender in 21st Century Cinema: 50 Titles? Well, to begin with, imagine the final result: an e-book composed of 50 factsheets, each one dealing with how gender is represented in an English-language science-fiction film. As a researcher I specialise in Gender and in SF, which explains the combination of both fields. It’s the first time I have taught a monographic course on cinema, but I have written extensively about this narrative medium which, besides, I do want to defend from the onslaught of the series everyone is watching these days.
Each factsheet contains some information about the film’s cast and crew, other similar films, and the main awards reaped. Next comes a plot summary (150-200 words), and then the main bulk of analysis: a consideration of the most salient gender issues (300/400 words), followed by the description of a relevant scene (150 words). The factsheet is completed by quotations from three other sources (reviews, academic articles, etc) and links to IMDB, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, and Wikipedia.
The e-book is a Word document turned into a .pdf, nothing fancy about it. Yet, I have made an effort to teach myself how to produce a nice cover, and to give the factsheets a look as attractive as possible. My students use a template that I have myself produced but, inevitably, when I sit down to edit the final text, I always realize that I should have chosen another type, or size, or style… You name it!! Next time, I’ll run some more print tests before I pass the template onto my students. If you’re thinking of editing an e-book with your students, then, here is a warning: work on the template for as long as it takes (it will save time later), give your students very clear instructions (ditto) and be ready to invest many hours in editing.
I have used for the 50 factsheets (a total of 72000 words, including my own preface) about 65 hours, with 45 to 75 minutes per factsheet. Why so long? Because I checked every source the students quoted from and because I edited their texts in depth. You must also warn them about this: students’ English might not be solid enough to be published online without raising criticism and diverting attention from the content of their work. So, I have indeed smoothed out any problems, corrected errors, etc. I would have done that anyway to mark their papers, though I have certainly used more time in editing than I use in marking. On the other hand, I have used most of our classroom time for students to present a preliminary version of their factsheets (each of the eight students was responsible for six films, and thus six factsheets). The time I have not needed to prepare lectures is the extra time I have invested in the e-book. Yes, very clever of me!
Of course, I would never ever set out to produce an e-book about 50 films I didn’t know, and here’s the other piece of advice: don’t embark students in projects about areas you’re not 100% familiar with. In the case of Gender in 21st Century Cinema: 50 Titles the difficulty for me was selecting only 50 films, for I had a list of more than 100 possible candidates. The other difficulty was hitting on a good method to give each student a set of films they could be interested in. I made the list in summer, prior to meeting the students and it was only once I met them (quite briefly, over coffee in the MA’s presentation in September) that I decided to give each one specific titles. I operated quite blindly, I must say, but I seem to have made only one error, quickly corrected by two students’ swapping films. In another project I have allowed students to choose freely what they want to work on, but this means that the ones that take long to make up their mind might end up discussing movies they are not interested in at all. In any case, what I’m saying is that I simply got lucky this time! We’ll see next time around.
The purpose of Gender in 21st Century Cinema: 50 Titles and of the MA course on Gender Studies of which it is a product was finding out whether there is an evolution in the representation of gender issues in current Anglophone cinema. The focus on SF was justified on the grounds that since it is mostly set in the future (not always) this genre is an excellent lab to test out new ideas about genre – do recall that SF also stands for speculative fiction. Rather than name the 50 films chosen I’ll invite you, of course, to download the e-book (https://ddd.uab.cat/record/206282) and you will see what we found, namely, that there has been no significant evolution.
The path trodden by SF cinema between A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Annihilation (2018) might appear to be progressive; after all, Alex Garland’s Annihilation has an (almost) all-female cast. Yet, this is not a choice that is attractive to all audiences; in fact, its most recalcitrant misogynistic segment is now ‘defeminising’ films, that is to say, producing cuts in which all female characters are erased. The smaller films can risk being more daring than the summer blockbusters but, in the end, whether major or minor SF films are in the hands of male directors and screen writers (there are, however, many women producers). Please, note that I’m here speaking about the difficulties to see more female characters on the cinema screen. The representation of LGTBI+ characters is entirely missing with few exceptions (very, very few and still in secondary roles).
The picture of the present and of the future we have collectively discussed in class is bleak. We are still being told again and again the same story about a heroic man who needs to prove himself. If a strong female character appears (and she’s fast becoming a stereotype), she is isolated from other women and never, in any case, a more prominent hero than the man. We have also noticed that many male characters only stand out as caring parents in the absence of a mother (a pattern you may observe in Signs) or do their job briefly before going away for good (Tom Cruise in War of the Worlds). It takes a major world-wide crisis, like an alien invasion for these men to react. And speaking of Cruise, it’s funny to see that he and Scarlett Johansson contribute star value to the many films they lead in radically different ways: he embodies the confusion of contemporary men (see The Edge of Tomorrow), she women’s alienness whether as human (Lucy) or literally alien (Under the Skin). We have noticed, in short, that with no more diversity among those producing, writing and directing films we will endlessly repeat the same stories, even in films that look beautiful and spectacular and that do have women in key roles (Gravity, Interstellar). We didn’t make any great discovery, though we more or less agreed that Jyn Erson in Rogue One is possibly our favourite hero. But do consider the kind of story she is involved in.
One thing is certain: the impatience of audiences and reviewers with how gender is misrepresented on the cinema screen is growing, and much more so since 2017, when the #MeToo movement began. Reviews written in the 2000s carry fewer comments on gender than those of the 2010s; the more recent the film, the less willing audiences are to condone missteps in gender representation (except the ‘defeminisers’!). My students, indeed, grew more and more annoyed with the clichés and the stereotypes as the course advanced and they identified in each newer film the same old problems. It is our hope, then, that Gender in 21st Century Cinema: 50 Titles –a certainly anti-patriarchal, feminist volume– increases that annoyance by raising awareness about the errors that can be easily corrected and about the pressing need to find new stories and new storytellers. And this is practically universal, for the e-book’s authors come from Spain (Ainhoa Goicoechea Ortiz, Alexandra Camp Martínez, Alba Sepúlveda Rodríguez-Marín) but also Turkey (Merve Barbal), the United States (Meghan Henderson) and China (Jiadong Zhang, Shuyuen He and Alvin Ng, from Hong Kong).
My thanks to them for having followed me into this adventure. I hope it has been as gratifying for them as it has been for me. And I do hope that if you read Gender in 21st Century Cinema: 50 Titles you find much to enjoy–though not necessarily in how the SF films which many of us love so deeply (mis)represent gender.
I publish a post once a week (follow @SaraMartinUAB). Comments are very welcome! Download the yearly volumes from: http://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328. My web: http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/