Popular Romance and Its Theoretical Consequences

• In Event: 287 - Regular Session. Cultural Studies

Abstract

In a previous paper, we analyzed a group of over 400 romantic dramas and comedies released during a recent fifteen year period (2000-2014). We coded the lovers in each of these films on a series of eight masculine and feminine stereotypes, including attributes like rationality and emotionality. That analysis found that women in romantic comedies display far more stereotypically feminine behaviors than do men. In the romantic dramas, however, men, particularly younger men, displayed both stereotypically masculine and feminine behaviors but this was not true for women, who only scored high on the behaviors and motives associated with femininity.
In the present analysis, we extend our focus to a smaller set of very popular romance films. We ask whether highly popular romance films like My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), Hitch (2005), or Silver Linings Playbook (2012) present the ideal of romance in a significantly different manner than do those films that attract smaller audiences. We selected from the total sample those 50 films that sold the most tickets and then compared the gender stereotypes found in the larger sample with those in the smaller sample of highly popular films. We found that these stereotypical differences reported in the earlier paper are also present – but more emphatically – in the sample of popular films. We conclude from this analysis that the reproduction of gender stereotypes is facilitated through the implicit notions found particularly in the popular films concerning the natural foundations of the behavioral differences between men and women.

Authors

• Arialle Kaye Crabtree, University of Georgia

• Bryan Christopher Cannon, University of Georgia

• James J. Dowd, University of Georgia