scholarly journals Depictions of Female Protagonists in Digital Games: A Narrative Analysis of 2013 DICE Award-Winning Digital Games

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 843-860 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mildred F. Perreault ◽  
Gregory Pearson Perreault ◽  
Joy Jenkins ◽  
Ariel Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Women's Stories

Digital games historically hold a spotty record on gender depictions. The lack of depth in female characters has long been the norm; however, an increasing number of female protagonists are headlining games. This study used narrative theory to examine depictions of four female protagonists in four 2013 Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain Award-Winning Digital Games: The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, and Beyond: Two Souls. Studying these media depictions provides context for how women’s stories are recorded in society. Stereotype subversions largely occur within familiar game narratives, and the female protagonists were still largely limited and defined by male figures in the games.

scholarly journals Depicting Women Through Transitivity Choices: A Comparative Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-59
Author(s):  
Tazanfal Tehseem ◽  
Humera Iqbal ◽  
Saba Zulfiqar
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Systemic Functional Linguistics ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Female Authors

The study aims at depicting how male and female authors portray female characters and how their core ideologies and social influences affect these depictions. This study is based on the feminist stylistic approach, proposed by Sara Mills (1995), embedded with the literary theory of feminism. It is an overlapping field that has its roots in critical discourse analysis. This stance is significant as it allows to critically look at the substance to uncover the ideology related to women. From a feminist stylistic perspective, the notion of presenting the distorted image of the female entity is associated with male authors leading to the point that female authors portray female characters positively as compared to their male counterparts. By employing Halliday’s transitivity framework (2004) in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an analytic tool, the utterances of the female protagonists from both the novels: The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, have been analysed into the process, participants and circumstances. Social influence, mostly in the form of male domination, on ideologies and linguistic choices in the depiction of women in both the writers’ work has been found on almost equal grounds.

scholarly journals Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society: Female Protest against Patriarchy

NUTA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
Arjun Dev Bhatta
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Patriarchal Power ◽  
The Voice

This study explores social relationship between male and female in Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Pillars of Society”. The first part of the study analyzes a sexist society in which male characters subjugate females through their hegemonic power. The female characters appear meek, submissive and voiceless. The second part of this study examines the revolutionary role of the female characters who raise their voice against all-pervasive patriarchal power. They protest against male formulated institutions which have kept women voiceless and marginalized. Being dissatisfied with the defenders of patriarchal status quo, Ibsen’s female protagonists come to the fore to challenge prevailing social conviction about femininity and domesticity. They lead a crusade to establish their position and identity as human beings equal to men. In this play, the female characters Lona, Martha and Dina hold a revolutionary banner to protest against male domination of female. In their constant struggle, they win while the male characters become loser. This study analyses the voice of these leading female characters in the light of feminist theory proposed by scholars such as Kete Millett and Sylvia Walby.

Naruse, Mikio (1905–1969)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Neville Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Urban Poverty ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Film Genre ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Japanese Film ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Outside Money

Naruse Mikio was a popular and critically renowned Japanese film director who was active from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s. He completed eighty-nine films, of which sixty-seven survive. From a poor family and raised by his sisters, he began work as a prop assistant at Shochiku studios at the age of fifteen, where he would direct his first film ten years later. Beginning with slapstick comedies, Naruse’s interest in urban poverty and strong, if ill-fated female characters drew him to the josei-eiga (woman’s film) genre. By the mid-1930s he had moved to PCL (Photo-Chemical Laboratories, later incorporated into Toho Studios), where he would work for the following three decades, undertaking additional projects at Shintoho and Daiei. While his prewar silent pictures display early experimentation with voice-over, flashbacks, and montage sequences, his work in sound and later widescreen and color is characterized by exacting mise-en-scène, and quick unrelenting cuts following performers’ gestures and expressions. Naruse’s modernist economy of style moves at the pace of urban life, thrusting his female protagonists (often Takamine Hideko, who starred in seventeen of the director’s best-known films) into the financialization of interpersonal relationships, whereby yearning for love outside money and family is dulled by having to survive the daily hardships of patriarchal society and monetary debt.

scholarly journals Intrepid or Invisible? Female Characters in Catalan Children’s and Young Adult Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-205
Author(s):  
Xavier Mínguez-López
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists

This article analyses 95 children’s and young adult literature works written originally in Catalan and published between 2002 and 2006. They are representative of all age groups present in this genre. This analysis focuses on the presence or absence of female characters, and on their treatment and reception, both in terms of prominence and the transmission of stereotypes. The results of this review show a dichotomy between the scarcity of female protagonists and their extreme audacity.

scholarly journals Normative Model Of New-Woman: A Discourse Of Ten Female Protagonists Of Urdu TV Drama Serials (2010-2019)

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Saleem Abbas ◽  
Firasat Jabeen ◽  
Muhammad Askari
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Representation ◽  
Normative Model ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Predominant Form ◽  
Cultural Conservatism

This paper examines the normative model of ‘new woman’ (Dutoya 2018) in Pakistani dramas from the perspective of gender, class, and culture. TV drama is a predominant form of entertainment in Pakistani media. In early Urdu dramas, female characters are infrequently depicted in a progressive way but now, educated, independent, and urban middle-class women can generally be observed in lead and supporting roles. Along with a shift of female representation in Pakistani Urdu dramas, the study discusses the construction of a Pakistani normative model of ‘new womanhood.’ Through a qualitative content analysis of ten female protagonists from Pakistani Urdu TV dramas of last decade (2010 through 2019), I argue that Dutoya’s socially permissible model of ‘new woman’ can be noticed in the majority of contemporary Urdu dramas. In other words, female protagonists are portrayed with diverse attributes of modesty and modernity. I further argue that the idea of ‘new woman’ is not a new phenomenon for the Pakistani society. Unlike a colonial idea of ‘super wife’ and Victorian concept of ‘super woman,’ my assertion is that Pakistani version of ‘new woman’ is a response to western wave of feminism, religious orthodoxy at home, and cultural conservatism prevalent in Pakistan.

scholarly journals Anita Desai’s Fire on the Mountain: Divulgence of Characters

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Arindam Patra
Keyword(s):  
Young Lady ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Anita Desai ◽  
Research Article ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Academy Award

British Guardian Prize winner and thrice nominated for Booker Prize, famous Indian novelist writing in English Anita Desai’s Sahitya Academy Award winning one of the masterpieces Fire on the Mountain published in1977. The book focuses on an elderly widow’s isolation and loneliness as it tells the story of Nanda Kaul who lives in Kasauli and leads a solitary existence. The old lady, Nanda lives alone in a colonial house on a slope. She gives nobody a chance to interfere with her secluded life. She had spent numerous years thinking about her husband, their kids, and numerous grandkids. She has turned into a loner and remains confined from everybody including an incredible grandkid. This is her circumstance until the point that the colossal grandkid touches base on her doorstep. Raka,a young girl who is wiped out and is as withdrawn as Nanda. The child lives in her very own kind of disconnection as she withdraws into a universe of inward dream where she makes undertakings of pursuing snakes, creatures, and phantoms in the serene slopes that encompass her and her incredible grandma. The old lady sees that both of them share things for all intents and purpose however that a noteworthy distinction exists also. Nanda has been a solitary person while the young lady was naturally introduced to that sort of presence. Nanda gradually starts to need to be a piece of the kid's life and needs to impart her reality to her. Her endeavours, be that as it may, seem, by all accounts, to be futile. Her awesome granddaughter will give nobody a chance to enter her life. Nanda is not debilitated and endeavours to associate with the child by imparting stories to her. Anita Desai talks of her writing as simply ‘stories,’ and of herself as a ‘storyteller’. In this very simple way she has beautifully painted the female characters and their sufferings in the novel Fire on the Mountain which is the focused area of this research article.

“Trust no one”: Narrative Complexity and Character Opacity in Damages

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Michael Butter
Keyword(s):  
Female Characters ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Withholding Information

Abstract This article analyzes the first season of Damages (2007) as an early example of the representation of ‘difficult’ women on television. More specifically, I investigate the relationship between the show’s character conception and its complex narration. I argue that all the major male and female characters on the show are ‘difficult’ in the sense that the audience experiences close alignment but troubled allegiance to them. However, the two female protagonists – top-notch lawyer Patty Hewes and her young and initially idealistic associate Ellen Parsons – are also opaque characters about whose thoughts and plans the audience is largely left in the dark. This opacity is mirrored and enhanced by the narration, which constantly teases the audience by withholding information about the plot, suggests inferences that then turn out to be wrong, and generally provides far more insight into the male characters than into the female characters.

scholarly journals ‘I was a Girl of my Time’: A feminist literary analysis of representations of time and gender in selected contemporary South African fiction by women

Literator ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Murray
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
South African ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
And Gender

This article offers a feminist literary analysis of selected contemporary South African texts by women writers in order to explore how they represent female characters’ engagement with conventional understandings of time and its chronological and linear progression. These engagements are represented as being particularly fraught for women characters as they find themselves constrained by various temporally located constructions of femininity even as they attempt to heed the temporally dislocated voices of gendered trauma that consistently speak through their bodies. In this article, my focus will be on Bridget Pitt’s novel, Notes from the Lost Property Department (2015), Elleke Boehmer’s The Shouting in the Dark (2015) and Mohale Mashigo’s The Yearning (2016). Despite frequent references to the importance of temporality in making sense of the experiences of the female protagonists, there has been a dearth of scholarly attention to the complexities of the intersections between gender, time and trauma in contemporary South African fiction by women. While gender violence and trauma are topics that have received extensive critical scrutiny in South African literary studies, this article demonstrates that the inclusion of temporality in the analytical framework enables a richer and more nuanced reading of the experiences of the female characters in the selected texts.

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