Abstract

Superhero cinema requires the engagement of the audience to be successful and to ensure its continuation. It contributes the establishment of the public pedagogy of our societies, informing what ideologies are intrinsic to the understanding of our common realities and normalizing patterns of conduct. Movie posters from superhero films depicting women have, however, been changed from representations based on the accommodation of male fantasies – thus generally sexualizing the female body – to depictions more attuned to female audiences’ expectations. This research aims to investigate the way these movie posters have been received by a group of nine women from Fortaleza, Brazil, trying to answer the question: how much representation have these women felt from these movie posters over the past few years? It brings about several points of tension since Brazil is a society where patterns of beauty are exported throughout the world. Being consumers of popular culture, and having their everyday lives impacted by these cultural products, the research participants discuss how superhero cinema in the last decade or so has been transformed by the advent of the release of Wonder Woman (2017), with results that defend the movie as a turning point in superhero cinema, but also open unexpected discussions about other products as somewhat responsible for such change. In order to do so, they have been invited to take part in a private conversation while discussing movie posters curated in a virtual exhibit with over sixty images positioned chronologically, with the goal of assessing their relationality with those posters, their take on each of them and how they understood the studios’ decision in promoting each movie the way it came to be. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, the research was the result of a conversation that includes visual anthropology, public pedagogy, sociology, women studies, feminist cinema and media studies.