Critical Media Studies, 3rd Edition

8Feminist Analysis

KEY CONCEPTS

• ESSENTIALISM
• FEMINISM
• GENDER
• GLASS CEILING
• INTERSECTIONALITY
• PATRIARCHY
• POSTFEMINISM
• SEX
• SEXISM
• STEREOTYPE

In May 2016, the trailer for Ghostbusters: Answer the Call became the most disliked film trailer on YouTube, accruing approximately 800 000 downvotes from the site’s users.¹ This disdain for the trailer mirrored much more explicit criticism of the film that had begun circulating online years before its July 2016 release. Some fans of the original Ghostbusters (1984) expressed disgust that anyone would attempt to update the classic they loved, and some cinemagoers more broadly lamented that Hollywood would release yet another reimaging in a summer already full of franchise remakes, spinoffs, and sequels. Writing for the Los Angeles Times soon after the film’s premiere, however, Rebecca Keegan noted what she believed was the overwhelming motivation behind the backlash: “The chief objection was that the busting of ghosts ought to be a strictly male pursuit.”² While the 1984 film features four men as a team of paranormal investigators who rid New York of bothersome spirits, the 2016 version presents a largely identical plot with the exception that the team is made up of four women instead.

The rather pointed online hostility to an all‐female cast in Answer the Call indexes concerns at the heart of Feminist analysis. Feminist scholars concentrate on the ways in which the biological categories of male and female intersect with cultural expectations ...