Research practice

The article is written by Stephen Harper and it first appeared in Jump Cut in Spring 2007. 

The article features Harper's views towards how race, gender and sexuality is represented in both Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse.

I decided to choose this article because I enjoyed how Stephen chose to analyse how women and race were represented in a video game adaptation. I thought this was unusual  because often in violent video games, women are very sexualised as the main demographic are teenage boys. 

Firstly, Stephen compares Resident Evil, both 'narratively and genetically' to Aliens (1986), Night of the Living Dead (1990), Predator (1987) and even Die Hard (1988). The diverse range of genre displayed by Harper in this extract demonstrates how hard it is to put Resident Evil into a specific genre. He then goes on to say that 'it eschews the moral and intellectual sophistry of much recent action and science fiction cinema, such as that of the Matrix films.' 

Through promotion, the producers used the sexuality of Milla Jovovich, dressed in a cocktail dress and 'wielding an enormous weapon' to try to attract male audience members into paying to watch the movie. In the background, Michelle Rodriguez can be seen posing behind Jovovich. Harper describes this as 'exemplifying the film's hierarchical structuring of racial identity'. This not only demonstrates the movies ideologies when it comes to race as the white female is seen to be the most important person but Milla's sexuality is both being challenged and emphasised with the juxtaposition of the enormous gun with the cocktail dress. As both the characters are represented as being strong -both in the film and the promotional texts- Harper describes them as both being 'presented as hypersexualised spectacles'. 

This being said, Harper does provide some insight into the sexualisation of the characters, using a quote from Jovovich herself "I just love to do those gratuitous nudity scenes."