The rising threat of ‘Gender swap’ remakes

Mainstream films are being constantly challenged by ever changing social powers to offer new narratives beyond the homo-social interactions of the hegemonic groups. This has pushed Hollywood to remake popular classics with an (all) female recast. But are gender swap remakes a solution to the problem of representation of women in films? This paper delves into a deep analysis of three contemporary gender swap films i.e., What Women Want (2019), Ocean’s 8 (2018) and Ghostbusters (2016). The analysis co-relates gender schema and gender performativity to understand how the swapping in these films establishes a dissonance between sex and performance (as well as the sex and gender) and thus propagating a perverted gender essentialism. The earliest departures from gender essentialist stereotypes could already be seen in the emergence of ‘action heroines’ in the late 1980’s and ‘90s (such as Ripley played by Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, 1986). These representations did not merely respond to rising demands and subsequent attempts at rectifying gendered roles on screen but also revealed the arbitrariness of gender related associations of the viewer and the fluidity of these practices. However, this paper argues that the current trends of gender swap remakes could be mere extensions of gender essentialism rather than attempts to dismantle essentialist stereotypes. It seeks to understand how deceivingly remedying representations could beguilingly perform deconstruction of gender (and essentialism) and offer a placebo or an illusionary quick fix so the emerging social powers can be transformed into a new demographic of consumers. Furthermore, since these trends are arising in the technocratic Hollywood cinema, this article also includes analysis of capitalist realism and inquires whether parodical representations in gender swap films hold the potential to effectively disrupt the dominant discourse/narratives and the situates performativity (of and within the socioeconomic structures) and interpassitivity (as a concept intertwined with the performativity) as possible explanations for the disparate phenomenon of essentialism perpetuated in these gender swap films.