What are some good examples of movies that have helped to challenge gender or racial stereotypes?

Ali: Fear Eats Your Soul (1974) is one of the best movies about racism. Period. Certainly it is Rainer Fassbinder's best movie, shockingly beautiful and honest in its portrait of racism. Broken Blossoms (1919) directed by D.W. Griffith Sorry for going historical on everyone here but this film was daring for its day. It tells a love story between a Chen (Chinese) and Lucy and their difficult journey in London.

Harold and Kumar helped to bring Asians into leading roles in mainstream films. Many films by Judd Apatow have impacted popular conceptions of masculinity. And penises.

In its own way,  "Naked Prey"  produced and starring Cornel Wilde  portrayed African tribesmen as intelligent and comprehensible  human beings. The warriors were portrayed as men  not   total subhuman savages.

Orlando http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107756/. Tilda Swinton plays nobleman Orlando, who doesn't age and who changes sex during the film.

Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Aliens. She essentially paved the way for the action heroine role with Ripley.

In order to tackle the question: “what are some good examples of movies that have helped to challenge (gender or) racial stereotypes?”, it is important to look at how film and particularly race within film functions. Hollywood is historically very white and continues to overwhelmingly portray life as white, instead of representing life the way that it actually looks, which is much more complex. Renowned race scholars, Vera and Gordon (2003) posit, “films are a part of a broader project that leads us to misrecognize the nature of the racial divide in which Americans live” (2). While historically, race has been an issue within American cinema, I argue that today, it continues to be a problem and that while certain films appear to be making a change, they are not sufficient in fully challenging the race dynamics in this country. In the early days of film, black actors were not even allowed to portray themselves. After white actors relinquished the “black” roles, African American actors struggled to break the stereotypes that had already been set in place. It resulted in a struggle in which black actors battled against these stereotypes in effort to “create rich, stimulating, diverse characters” (Bogle, 1989; 5). Even today, all actors of color, not just black actors, fight to represent themselves positively and without stereotypes in film. Desmond and Emirbayer (2010) maintain that not only do people of color appear less in television commercials today, but that when they do appear they are cast in stereotypical ways. In addition, shows with all-white or majority-white casts tend to experience great success. Often, shows with majority white casts tend to feature people of color, but in derogatory ways, such as having them play low-status roles like homeless people or janitors. This is incredibly dangerous, as four studies in 2009 found that “people who watched shows that featured negative non-verbal behavior toward blacks became more prejudiced themselves” and was especially true when people didn’t realize that the behavior was negative (Smith, 2012). When we see people of color in film or television being treated badly, it actually increases our tendency to be racist. New genres, such as African-American or Latino films, have been created to try to equalize the amount of roles that are available for actors of color. bell hooks (1996), however warns about the dangers of creating films like this, as they tend to be marketed and categorized as being about “black” or “Latino” life. Here lies a seemingly paradoxical problem: how to we create roles for actors of color that do not reinforce stereotypes and do not market themselves as being accurate portrayals of “ethnic” life. One person answered that Crash did a good job of tackling prejudice. Films like Crashare often lauded for their boldness in tackling tough issues like race. What Crash specifically fails to recognize, however, is that racism is not merely a series of racist feelings or words, but that it is an overall system. It also suggests that racism affects everyone equally, when in reality, people of color are affected much differently by racism than whites (Desmond and Emirbayer, 2010). In order to tackle racist stereotypes, we need to recognize that racism is made up of interpersonal as well as systemic components.             To directly answer your question, I feel that parts that are written without race in mind tend to be the best way to combat racial stereotypes. My expertise is more in Theatre, but I have found that plays that are usually done with white actors but are cast with actors of color tend to help break down racial stereotypes. True, in a perfect world, writers would be able to create parts for people of color that celebrate their race, without making their race the focal point of the piece. For now, however, casting people of color in roles that simply portray the characters as multi-dimensional is the best way to tackle racial stereotypes. Thank you for allowing me to answer this question as part of an assignment for Dr. Danielle Dirks' Race and Ethnicity in American Society class taught at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA.   References Bogle, Donald. 1989. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. USA: Continuum International Publishing Group Desmond, Matthew and Mustafa Emirbayer. 2010. Racial Domination, Racial Progress. New York: McGraw Hill. Hooks, Bell. 1996. Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies. USA: Psychology Press.  Smith, Jeremy Adam. 2012. Your Brain on White People. Salon. April 29. Vera, Andrew and Hernan Gordon. 2003. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. USA: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Brokeback Mountain

I don't know how many will agree with me, but Planet of the Apes can be read as an allegory about race. The Apes look an awful lot like hairy black and brown people. The humans are white-skinned. The story gets its shock value from role reversal of course. The Apes behave like rapacious europeans exploiting and killing their primitive and defenseless neighbors. What if black and brown-skinned people were able to treat European settlers with the same brutality they experienced historically? What if they thought about whites with the same contempt, disdain and superciliousness that white racists at one time routinely expressed towards non-whites? Read in this way, it is a clever way to raise awareness of just how brutal and inhumanly some of our ancestors behaved towards others.