The Nominees for the Best Performance of Gender Are... »

Women performers and the characters they played for us on screen didn’t just complacently inhabit gender; they flaunted, overturned, redescribed or revolted against it…

‘Masculinity’ and ‘femininity,’ these performances show, fall along a much longer line of traits and gestures, and also vary according to the actor/character’s race and class and their moment in culture and history…

Each choice of gesture and facial expression, each piece of clothing we select or avoid, signifies a step towards or away from the traditional expectations of what a man or a woman should do. […] all of our daily actions are coded with gendered meaning.

Because the movies magnify all those choices, they offer a wonderful laboratory for observing gender performance at work.