This study investigates the representation of gender and sexuality in Brazilian popular comedies. Due to its responsiveness to contemporary trends, popular cinema is a privileged locus for the analysis of social and cultural change. Comedy, in particular, is a fecund corpus for the study of power relations due to its ambivalent relation with the hegemonic power. While inherently relying on the status quo, comedy constantly pushes the boundaries of the socially acceptable; by transgressing and therefore expanding the boundaries of traditional gender representations, new models of femininity and masculinity emerge in these films in line with the changes of their time. This argument is supported by the close analysis of ten influential films spread across the three most prominent cycles of Brazilian popular cinema history: the chanchada in the 1950s, the pornochanchada in the 1970s and the Globochanchada in the 2000s. In the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's theorisation on the carnivalesque, and with the support of psychoanalytical theory, this study demonstrates that times of profound economic and political change call for a revision of gender models, and that comedy has been the preferred genre for Brazilian directors to provide a means of addressing, and coping with, the new demands on femininity and masculinity.

The film Monster (USA, 2003) is based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, the Florida prostitute who was one of the few documented female serial killers in the United States. The scriptwriter and director of the film, Patty Jenkins, surprisingly centered the film on a love story, instead of assuming the role of judge or advocate towards the actions of Wuornos. After a flash back sequence that recreates the childhood of Lee (Charlize Theron), the film opens as Lee meets Selby (Christina Ricci), a young and immature lesbian in a bar. Lee responds very rudely and defensively to the clumsy flirtation of Selby, as she does not think of herself as gay and her life as a prostitute has made her very hostile towards society. However, Lee opens up to Selby, as she perceives her as her last chance to find Love. Patty Jenkins cinematically evokes Lee’s hopelessness and despair before meeting Selby in order to emphasize the importance of this same-sex relationship. For Lee, Selby is the innocent child that she has to protect and save, a symbol of the child she once was herself. Inspired, she goes out to work on the highway to earn money for their first date, and a client beats her unconscious, ties her up, rapes her with a tyre iron and pours petrol over her. Fearing for her life, Lee shoots him, and then takes his car and wallet. As her relationship with Selby develops, she enters into the role of provider and protector. After her brutal encounter, she is scared of the streets and makes an attempt to go straight. However, 3 in her attempt to look for a proper job she encounters social rejection and brutalization. Pressurized by her new girlfriend to provide money, Lee goes back to prostitution. However, her last traumatic experience with the rapist john makes her believe that all her clients might turn out to be abusive, which provokes in her a desire for revenge and killing. Unable to stop, she robs her victims to provide for her girlfriend and believes that she can identify which clients deserve to die. After the killing of an innocent man, she is turned over to the police by Selby. Monster is not about sensationalism, but rather portrays the intimate tragic story of a human being who became a serial killer, due to a combination of bad social and personal pathologies. The Meaning of the Form: The aim of this thesis is to explore the representation of women and aggression in Patty Jenkins’ film Monster. I will argue that, while the female characters in Monster do not escape the conventional portrayal of women within the dominant Hollywood cinema, their portrayal does nonetheless create a ‘non-normative’ representation. By exploiting the classical narrative and a particular model of representation of women, Jenkins creates a cinematic text which attacks the patriarchal principles grounding the model. Therefore, the main argument of this thesis will be that Jenkins uses the Hollywood system of narration and representation of women in order to subvert and criticize it. Ultimately she is using the film as means to critique the patriarchal violence within American society itself. In order to substantiate my argument, I will first look at the conventional representation of women in fiction-film genre1, and will then investigate how the performance of aggression is constructed within the film. The film represents aggression as a social phenomenon that develops into a pathological behavior. By establishing the history of the general phenomenon of female aggression, I will examine its specific representation in my film case study Monster. Although the film introduces different female characters that each have their particular expression of aggression and representation, the primary focus of analysis will be Lee, the main character of the film.

This study analyzes the representation of women and modernization in Tunisian society by looking at Tunisian films produced in Tunisia after 1980. Study aims to develop a new concept to understand modernization process of women in a non-western, Muslim, and North African society through representations in films. Women&rsquo / s modernization process has been analyzed through the qualitative analyses of five Tunisian films by focusing on conceptualization of women issue as one of the main elements of Tunisian modernization. More presicely, the study examines stages of women&rsquo / s modernization on the one side, and representation of this process in films on the other. In conclusion, I argue that examining written literature alone is not enough to understand women&rsquo / s modernization process in a non-western society. Expansion of modernization is not rapid and equal in the Tunisian society. If taking place in the public sphere, having a paid job and having education are taken as the indicators of women&rsquo / s modernization, it is seen that lower class women face with problems in every stage of Tunisian modernization. At that point, attending to visual sources like cinema which has the ability to reflect the society can give us convenient information about this process.

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In this study I have compared the two movies Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2006) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) in regards to their visual identity and female representation. The first of these films is the latest version of Blade Runner, a movie which have undergone an unusual amount of editing and therefore exists in multiple iterations. The latter of the two is a direct sequel, released 35 years after the original version of Blade Runner. I have done a thorough account of the respective plot, visual characteristics and of how the women are portrayed whitin each film. Due to a comparison of these I have been able to outline some interesting themes in regards to how both films incoporate themes of commersialisation of the female form, although in varying degrees. This is sometime undermined by the films problematic portrayal of some of these characters. I have also been able to observe a shift in regards to how the films portray a futuristic Los Angeles. Rather than mixing noir-inspired, believable locales with elements typical of science fiction, Blade Runner 2049 portrays the future as more coherent and stylistic. Some scenes in Blade Runner 2049 consists of only a few tones of a single colour, such as blue, grey and orange, a stylistic choice Blade Runner: The Final Cut does not use.