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The Women of Full Metal Jacket In Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket", it is difficult to determine the role that women play simply because of the glaring lack of female characters. In total, only three women actually appear in the movie, and two of those are prostitutes; the third isn't revealed as a woman until the final 10 minutes of the film, and none of them are given names. In fact, until the sniper's gender is …

…when he makes the decision to shoot her one final time he has significant difficultly coming to grips with shooting a woman. In this way, the sniper once again demonstrates the power of her gender by forcing Joker, a self-described killer, to hesitate. Thus we can see that by making the sniper a female, Kubrick effectively utilizes her gender as a method of reversing the power roles established early in the movie and continued throughout.