"I think women can do anything": Postfeminist Sensibilities and the Male Gaze in Charlie's Angels (2019).

Abstract

This article considers Mulvey's male gaze in today's postfeminist media culture in the latest remake of Charlie's Angels. Male gaze is analyzed as form, as production ecology, and as narrative. Since the inception of Charlie's Angels in the 1970s, the TV and feature film franchise has tried to balance feminist concerns with notions of femininity, in more and less successful ways. Although the 2000 remake of Charlie's Angels could be considered as an exemplar of objectifying and sexualizing women, the 2019 film barely presents such instances. Instead, it offers a male gaze directed at a female audience and internalized as a measure of success for its female protagonists and the implied female audience. Through practices of othering, and by placing male characters in morally inferior positions, the female audience is presented with hegemonic conceptions of white, middle-class femininity as an ideal that female viewers can and should aspire to be.