A gender flip or gender swap is a technique in fiction in which characters are portrayed as a different gender from the one as which they were originally written. [1] It is commonly used in movie remakes or reboots. [2]
According to The Guardian , one of the most high profile examples of this is the 2016 remake of the 1984 movie Ghostbusters , which featured a female ensemble instead of the original movie's male one. [2] The 2016 movie received significant backlash, with its trailer video becoming the most disliked in YouTube history. [3] [4] David Sims wrote in The Atlantic that the subtext of much of the criticism of the movie was that "the idea of a female cast taking up the mantle of a very male film series is just somehow wrong", [5] and the response has elsewhere been described as sexist and misogynistic. [6] [2] The website Vox described it as "a sequel to Gamergate". [7]
In 2018, Amanda Hess wrote in the New York Times that in the two years since the Ghostbusters remake, this concept had progressed from being a "one-off stunt" into a genre of its own, citing Ocean's 8 as just one example of three such movies that summer alone. [8] Other 2010s examples include Overboard , The Hustle, and Life of the Party. [1]
Despite the prominence of the idea in movies of the 2010s, the concept dates from much earlier. Radio Times critic Emma Simmonds gives the example of 1939's His Girl Friday , adapted from 1928 Broadway play The Front Page , in which the gender of character Hildy Johnson is switched from male to female. [9]
The gender swap technique is also used in media other than film. The 2024 concept album Warriors , based on a 1979 action film, took inspiration from Gamergate to reimagine the story’s central gang as women. [10] Lin-Manuel Miranda has said the gender swap was central to him being able to write a compelling narrative for his adaption. [10] The album's co-writer, Eisa Davis, characterized the flip as a revolutionary and a feminist act, given the movie's overtones she described as "misogynist, homophobic". [11]
Emine Saner, writing in The Guardian , said that the phenomenon of gender-swap reboots seems like a positive, as it leads to more women in blockbuster movies, but may have downsides, such as being a safe place for studios to use female talent without taking a risk on original female-centric stories. [2]
