If Easy Rider was about a woman...
Ruth Hottell states "With the alienated and alienating Mona, the film disrupts the classical structure of the look and narrative because she refuses that place culturally assigned to the woman." (692) Although Easy Rider and Vagabond are both road movies in the sense that main characters are on the road and behaving in ways that are outside societal norms, the movies are entirely different because of the way gender is portrayed in each of the films. Wyatt and Billy are men on a trip and this journey is filmed and viewed from the male point of view. If one of these characters was female the movie would not be substantially changed because the male gaze would still be the dominate of framework for understanding the movie. We see an example of this predominate male gaze in a movie about a woman on the road, Girl on a Motorcycle. Rebecca spends the whole movie being dominated by both on and off screen male presences. Vagabond is different because Mona exists outside the male gaze. Although Easy Rider and Vagabond are both movies about the search for particular types of freedom only Vagabond continues this search for freedom into the act of making the film itself.