Images of Women Resisting the Tide

Introduction

Cinema is an art that sheds light on the problems, separations and many problems of the age that seem to be impasse since it is an activity that has been active for more than a century. Sometimes it became a partner of great disasters and sufferings, sometimes caused new debates and sometimes caused many events, which pass into oblivion, to become a current issue. The issue of social gender is one of these issues.

The mainstream cinema, which has been shaped by male-dominated discourses and narratives from the beginning, and the issue of how and by which motives the woman, who has been exposed to a masculine view within this cinema sector, is reflected are important. In this sense, each film can produce various truths or mistakes due to the location at which it is positioned and the ideology that feeds it somehow. Also Özdemir says that classical narrative cinema iterates the discourses of social order. Contemporary narrative cinema, on the other hand, dislocates the codes of social order (Özdemir, 2019: 230). Although the existence of women in cinema differs due to the sociological and political changes in the world, it is possible to observe women being presented as a kind of sexual object since the first years.

As a natural consequence of feminist and queer movements in cinema, masculine dominant discourse and point of view has been abraded and especially with the eighties, much more positive character creations have been realized. In this sense, against certain narratives that confine women into certain stereotypes, a large number of films have been made depicting women and LGBTI members as characters who act, desire, produce as they wish and hold out on. In spite of all these positive points of view, even in contemporary cinema, there is still an approach that belittles women and makes them the object of masculine view.

Women, who are owned by a man or depicted on the level of some kind of sexual object, appear also in various media contents out of the cinema today. Within the scope of this study, an evaluation will be carried out based on cinema and films, which break the traditional problematic perspectives, make strong, resistant women appear and swim against the current, will be mentioned. But before that, it would be useful to make a brief assessment of how media tools in general spread dominant cultural and political understandings.