FEMALE MASHERS

Over at the The Chutry Experiment, Chuck Tyron is soliciting cyber help on a paper he’s researching on gender and film mash ups with an interesting inquiry:

I know that slash fiction, for example, is more frequently done by female authors, but I’m wondering if fake trailers are more commonly identified with male producers. The reason I ask is that I see these trailers as participating in the ongoing process of canonization of certain films by well-established directors. Of course, the parody wouldn’t work if audiences were unfamiliar with the original film, so maybe these choices reflect a canon that has already been established.

The responses to the question are as intriguing as the original inquiry, and none more so than Karina Longworth at Newteevee . After “looking for female created and/or female genre-dependent trailer mashups” she admits she was ultimately “disappointed.” So many of the supposedly “female” films set up for parody are ultimately masculinized either through genre or tone.

Two of note are Rocky Queen (a smash up of The Queen with the very male boxing film) and the more famous “Scary Mary Poppins”:

But ultimately, for Longworth, the question remains a good question to ask:

So why do mashups––and, really, all subgenres of comic online videos–tend to skew masculine? Maybe it’s partially indicative of the general paucity of media made for women today; obviously, pop culture parody makers can only mine what the mainstream media gives them to work with. But I also agree with Tryon that a good mashup incorporates a basic affinity for its source, and a lot of the pop culture that is produced expressly for women is often so inherently silly that there’s a sense that it doesn’t need to be subverted, as if the joke is already on anyone who takes it seriously.