Real or not real? : exploring gender in Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games Trilogy

Abstract

[Abstract] My Masters final project deals with issues of gender in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. I analyse the main three characters—Katniss Everdeen, Gale Hawthorne and Peeta Mellark—following Judith Butler’s theories of gender proposed in Gender Trouble (1990) and Undoing Gender (2004), as well as other theories about feminism and masculinity. The aims of my project are, on the one hand, to demonstrate that the saga re-examines and re-defines traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity; and, on the other, that the portrayal of the aforementioned characters proves that The Hunger Games saga evidences that gender is neither fixed nor pre-established by questioning the legitimacy of gender stereotypes and roles.