Gender Roles In The Film Monster '

The 2003 film Monster focuses on the life of Aileen Lee Wuoros (played by Charlize Theron) between the late 80’s and early 90’s. Aileen was a lesbian and became a prostitute in order to take care of her self and her partner Selby (last name ). In one her encounter with a clients, she was beaten, raped and …. Aileen was arrested and executed for the murder of . NARRATION)
This paper will explore how the film Monster (2003) represents the concept of gender, power and space through the connections of gender roles, sexuality and class to Female killers. Gender roles are crucial to the idea of the “bad women”; women who kill are performing fundamental gender role disobedience in committing crime. The predetermined role of a woman within a patriarchy society influences the justification of the female aggressiveness and monstrosity. This predetermined notion of women is as a result of what Judith Butler’s (1990) refers to as Gender performativity; ‘Gender is performative…an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, positioned through gendered stylization of the body’ (p. 15). In other words, what a society define as roles of a woman and man is continually reinforced by cultural and social construction. On one hand, Men are… …show more content…
As such, women are more likely to get negative reactions when they commit murder compare to their male counterpart (Evans, 2012), which Lloyd (1995) asserts that it is because these women considered to have broken the social norms that perceive women as less violent (as cited in Snider, 2003, p.355). The film Monster show the audience, a background story of Aileen in order to provide the rationalizations as to what could have driven her to such gender role disobedience. The film suggests that rape, lesbianism, joblessness, homelessness and domestic abuse are all argument used to aid societal fears surrounding women who