Young Adults' Perception of Homosexual Characters in the Film Call Me by Your Name

Lee, Heng Yew (2022) Young Adults' Perception of Homosexual Characters in the Film Call Me by Your Name. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Call Me by Your Name which was released in 2017 aims to portray the homosexual characters in another spotlight which differs from traditional portrayal of homosexual characters and its stereotypes. This research aims to determine how the portrayal of homosexual characters is in Call Me by Your Name and how young adults perceive the characters in the film. In this research, the researcher will look into past journals and articles and also conduct in-depth interviews with young adults in Malaysia to gather their opinion and data. The in-depth interviews collected will be used to analyze how the film portrayed the homosexual characters and how the respondents perceived the gays in the film as relatable to life experiences of gay people in Malaysia. Queer theory and parasocial interaction theory will be used to analyze the respondents’ answer. The result obtained shows that the portrayal of gay men in the film is representative of the majority of gay men with little stereotypes identified in mainstream media. The film setting is also rather different from the Asian culture hence, the responses gathered tell the significant difference in the portrayal in the film as it is set in a Western setting. However, Malaysian youth shows a positive perception toward the gay characters in the film and in real life, this signifies a positive youth-led progression in fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in Malaysia. Limitation of the studies includes several factors such as small sample size and the cultural differences of liberalism in western countries compared to the Asian context which is rather conservative. In the future, researchers could look into the wider spectrum of the queer umbrella and gather more races representative for a more accurate data and analysis.