A sociocultural analysis of the gender and racial representations in films offering a vision of the future of humanity

Motion pictures help us to make sense of the everyday experiences of gender, aging, race, and disability. Social mobility, the impact of social change, the establishing of social order are all recurring themes in films. Films are able to serve as a proxy for culture at large in its dialectical relation to reality. A content analysis of one hundred films which depict the future of Earth was completed in order to study the representations of the genre's characters. The most pertinent question in the study of films is to ask, 'who is represented?' while keeping in mind that those not represented are absent by the choice of the dominant film industry. While the White male is over-represented on the screen, Hispanics, Asians, Blacks, White women, people with disabilities, and children are under-represented and negatively stereotyped or worse, omitted from view altogether.