Gendering the Genderless

Abstract

This bachelor thesis examines how the film Blade Runner 2049 (2017) projects Western gender norms onto the film's characters. The focus is on how the artificial intelligences are gendered despite being technological systems such as humanoids and holograms. The purpose is to see how and if artificial characters are assigned gender and thus see what norms exist in our world today, what makes a man masculine and what makes a woman feminine. By studying the position of the characters in the film – how they behave and how they are portrayed – I can get an overview of which character traits are applied to which gender. The results show that the characters who are more artificial than human show clear tendencies to be bound to gender norms while the characters who are human have the possibility to break these stereotypes.