Kvinnlig sexualitet i film : En multimodal kritisk diskursanalys av filmen Poor Things

The success of the 2023 film Poor Things left critics divided as to its portrayal of its central female character, with some praising its boldness and others questioning the approprietness of the story and its dealings with its main characters sexual awakening and explorations. Following this debate, this paper examines the film as a case study for representation of female sexuality in cinema. Grounded in a theoretical framework constructed from Hall’s (1997a; 1997b) representational concept, Foucault’s discursive theory as well as Gill’s (2007; 2017) approach to postfeminist media, this paper conducts a multi modal critical discourse analysis of five pivotal sequences to further explore the underlying discursive assumptions and understandings that shapes the films representation of female sexuality. The study finds that the film assumes an ambivalent approach to female sexuality, at times advocating for women’s rights to their own sexuality and at times undermining such advocacy by a lack of insight into the complexity that is free choice under a patriarchal system, as well as through its focus on male influence on female sexuality and the influence of sexuality on other aspects of a woman’s life. So too does its minimal acknowledgment of Bellas young mental age complicate matters, as it brings into question the legitimacy of the portrayal as representative of female sexuality over children’s sexuality. This representation is found to mirror other postfeminist media, placing it in a wider discursive field which is defined by such quandary.