"This Is a Forced Feminist Agenda" : IMDb users and their understanding of feminism negotiated in the reviews of superheroine films

Abstract: The thesis examines how users of the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) negotiate feminism in their reviews of four superheroine films – Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, Birds of Prey: The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, and Wonder Woman 1984. By combining critical discourse analysis with methods of corpus linguists, this corpus-based study of over 18,000 reviews analyses the frequency of the topic of feminism in the reviews, words and topics associated with it and the way the reviewers reflect broader mediated discourse over the four films, and the role of IMDb as a space for these reviews. The findings show that feminism is still understood as an anti-male movement where female-led films are shielded from criticism by the mainstream media by the virtue of the lead’s gender, the superheroines are criticised for being overpowered particularly where they have no equal male supporting character and that perceived feminist messaging is usually written off as a forced political agenda or as an insincere cash grab made by corporates which effectively use feminism for promotion. It also reveals IMDb as a highly polarised platform where the users leaving 1- and 10-star reviews are generalized as representatives of different sides of the political spectrum (antifeminist vs feminist, conservative vs liberal) regardless of the actual content of the review.