My coursework question and first paragraph.

How far does "The Hunger Games' and 'Salt' challenge the stereotypical representations of women in mainstream Hollywood cinema?

The representations of women in films tend to vary; there are many different genres of film which portray females in diverse circumstances influenced by societies expectations of women leading to the diverse female characters throughout Hollywood cinema. I will be focusing on the action genre and how female leads are represented and how it challenges the stereotypical representations in mainstream Hollywood cinema today.  I chose the action genre because female action roles aren't represented as the stereotypical female role. The two texts I will be focusing on within my coursework are 'The Hunger Games' and 'Salt'. The female lead in 'The Hunger Games' is a 16 year old girl called Katniss Everdeen who is sent into The Hunger Games to fight to the death until a lone victor remains. My second text which I am focusing on is 'Salt'. Evelyn Salt, who is the female lead of this film, works for the CIA and gets accused by a defector about being a Russian spy and goes on the run. Both of these roles are very different to the stereotypical female role. First I will discuss whether or not the female body within these two texts are being objectified for the male audience, here I can discuss to what extent Laura Mulvey's theory of The Male Gaze is being used. I will also discuss how much the females rely on men in these two films and how independent they are compared to the stereotypical female. I will also discuss how they think and act compared to the stereotypical female. For my investigation I'll use theories such as Laura Mulvey's, The Male Gaze and also how feminism has an affect on the representations of the two women in my chosen texts.