Avatar: a Film at the Center of the Feminine Other

Abstract

This study analyzes James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar from the perspective of the feminine other through deconstruction. In the movie, nature and the Na'vi people are depicted as feminine, while modern man and the science, technology, and military power he represents are portrayed as masculine. Although it critiques the colonialist structure of modernity, the film's narrative structure and character portrayals indicate that it reproduces the superiority of Western-centered ideology and the masculine mind. The study analyzes how the film's narrative and character representations implicitly support masculine centrism. The analysis reveals how nature and marginalized cultures are romanticized and presented in the film and how the notion that the feminine can only survive by adopting masculine traits is processed in the subtext. Grounded in a conceptual and theoretical framework, this research focuses on the sustainability of the patriarchal capitalist system and gender politics while critically examining how cinema reconstructs ideological structures through the narratives in the film.