Beyond the modern film critic: an analysis of film paratexts and their relation to postfeminism

Abstract

This paper examines how female superheroes are depicted in primary film paratexts – their posters – in their solo movies that have been released in theaters in the past four years, namely, Wonder Woman (2017), Captain Marvel (2019), Dark Phoenix (2019), Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020). The goal is to understand the relationship between postfeminism and the paratexts. Semiotics and iconography are applied to the posters of the movies found on the official Instagram accounts of the films in order deconstruct the meaning of the multimodal discourses present. The analysis of fourteen posters shows that there are postfeminist tropes present in the posters and that they are examples of femvertising too. This study draws attention to how postfeminist values are used by popular culture paratexts, and it is intended to inspire broader research into this area.