Science in Feminine. The Construction of the Role of the Female Scientist in Film Discourse

Throughout history, women scientists have been invisibilized and overshadowed in the academic and scientific sphere. Due to sociocultural and political issues, the late access of women to science systems has led to a deep gender gap. In this sense, the media and the visual arts-mainly cinema-have become vehicles of representation that either perpetuate or combat the current imaginaries of inequality. This article aims to analyze the representation of women scientists through cinema, as well as the construction of the public image of women researchers through the cinematic imaginary. For this purpose, we approach the analysis of several films in different historical periods, and in film genres ranging from biopic to science fiction, to analyze the narrative role represented by women scientists: Madame Curie (1943), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Contact (1997), A Dangerous Method (2011) and Madame Curie (2019). Our research seeks to investigate the objective elements that allow us to construct, without prejudice, a narrative through the film screen, about female roles in science, and how the current image of the female scientist has evolved from the classic archetypes, represented in a traditional way in the history of cinema, to a look more in line with the current gender perspective.