District 9: An Analysis of Gender, Race, and Sexuality

This paper involves discovering how the award-winning film, District 9, directed by Neil Blomkamp, utilizes character roles, casting, and plot development to demonstrate inequalities present among South African society. The goal is to illustrate the gender disparities and stereotypes perpetuated by the characters and plot of this film as a fundamental role in forming this piece as a social commentary on the subtle defamation of both women and members of the queer community in South African and Intra-African culture. Analyzing the characters and importance of those characters, this paper highlights the dichotomy of the roles that women of color and Caucasian women are cast in. The film also creates an obvious narrative in the difference of the personality types that women within the film take on, in comparison to those of men. The paper features detailed scene analysis, and inferential investigation on the choices of the director on how the categorization of gender, race, and sexuality is portrayed. The most obvious commonality between the relation of gender, sexuality, and race within the film is that they are subjected to axes of inequality throughout the course of the film. The messages conveyed by the narrative, relative to the topics discussed, is that the perplexing and complex reality existing a part of the film is applicable to our own society