...women had to do certain things throughout their lives. It was expect that men would be the ones that had to work, while their wives had to stay home to take care of the house, the kids, bills, etc. Over time, these gender roles have changed. Females now take on tasks that only men were supposed to do. Gender roles appear in places that one wouldn’t expect: Disney movies. Disney movies do a great job at showing how gender roles were portrayed at the time the movie came out. Most notably, in these movies, males fulfill a certain appearance stereotype (tall, muscular, handsome, etc.). The same stereotype applies to females as well (makeup, being slim, posture, etc.). In Disney movies, the male protagonist is almost always good-looking, muscular, tall, etc. An example of this is Prince Eric from the Little Mermaid movie. In the movie, he’s tall, light-skinned, muscular, and handsome. He’s almost “perfect”. In the essay ....Happily Ever After (Or What Fairy Tales teach Girls about being Women) Alice Neikirk states “the hero, often a prince, is generally described as brave and handsome.” Over time, the appearance of the male protagonists have changed. For example, Flynn Rider from Tangled is just a slim, not very muscular, semi- handsome guy. He’s average compared to princes from other Disney movies (like Prince Eric, Hercules, It seems only the rich princes are the muscular good-looking types, especially when compared to princes like Aladdin. He’s from the Middle East and is still good-...
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...By watching YouTube videos, television shows, movies, or any form of news, it is obvious that what we should be thinking of women today (obtain authority, become a successful business woman, getting paid equal to men), is extremely different to how women are portrayed in the media. Todays women in the media are sexualized, they provide unrealistic expectations, and there are undeniable stereotypes. To begin, women are exceedingly sexualized in the media. Pornographic pictures of women are a huge component of media today, which leads to the objectification of women. By having these women viewed as sexual objects, the main reason why marketing companies do this is to attract men, and to have other women looking up to the advertised women as a role model. A good example is the Calvin Klein commercials, where women are seen as sexualized (making other women jealous and wanting to be like them) and sexually attracting men (if they buy this product they will get the girls). Another example is the MTV channel. The women on this channel will arouse sexual fantasies, but the less seductive more modest female singers barely get...
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...Media is a powerful agent when it comes to entertaining children. It influences the youth in our society that they have to act gender appropriate, and act a way that the youth are socialized to learn. Media uses the gender socialization to their advantage just as how Disney production does. Movies like Cinderella, Snow White Disney movies target particularly the youth and their thinking as well as putting ideas into their head about what is to be proper man and proper women. Growing up, a lot of young children love to watch Disney movies, but they don’t realize that they are affecting them. Young girls look up to the different princesses hoping that one day when they grow up, they will meet their prince charming the way Cinderella met as...
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...Every little girl wants to feel beautiful. She dresses up in sparkly costumes and stumbles around in her mother’s high heels because this is what has been ingrained in her mind as beautiful from her favorite Disney movies. From infancy to adulthood, we cherish the princess movies that we feel connected to. We all wanted to be part of Ariel’s world or be rescued from Maleficent’s evil grasp. However, we never question the value of these Disney Princesses influence on young girls. Are these princesses setting a good example for the aspirations of today’s children? The grasp of Disney Princesses reaches incredible lengths. They’re international symbols that are recognizable all over the world, but perhaps they are not the best role models to idolize. Disney Princesses do not represent positive icons for young girls because they glamorize unrealistic concepts of beauty and promote naïve life choices. Disney released its first Disney princess film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, in 1937. Since its release, Disney has created twenty-three other animated Disney films that could be considered princesses. These princesses bring in billions of dollars of revenue through Disneyworld merchandise, attractions, characters, and movies (Disney...
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...Vračević Željka University of Banjaluka Faculty of Philology English Language and Literature REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMININITY IN DISNEY CARTOON PRODUCTION: An Analysis of Selected Examples The purpose of this essay is to explore how media, especially Disney cartoons, affect gender, particularly young girls and how the representations of females within the media affect the viewers through stereotypes or ideals to live up too. THE INTRODUCTION (the explanation of media influences and basic notions of women representations in Disney Production) A good deal of feminist writing in the field of culture has been concerned with the representations of gender and of women in particular, and it is claimed that these representations of females reflected male attitudes and constituted misrepresentations of “real women”. Meehan (1983) analyzed the stereotypes into which women are commonly cast on television and the analysis showed that “good women” are, or are expected to be submissive, domesticated and home-centered while “bad women” are rebellious and independent. She concludes that “American viewers have spent more than three decades watching male heroes and their adventures, muddied visions of boyhood adolescence repete with illusions of women as witches, bitches, mothers and imps “. All researches about the media influence give the same conclusion that the mass media is a powerful resource through which viewers develop their...
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...Disney characters : the reflect of women's place in the society Walt Disney, under his real name Walt Elias Disney was born in 1901 in Chicago. He founded in 1923 the famous Walt Disney Company with his brother Roy as the Disney Brothers Studios. After three years, the studios take the name Walt Disney Company. Their first animated film came out in 1937 "Snow White" inspired by a famous children's story by the Brothers Grimm. Thereafter follow many animated films like Cinderella, Mulan, or Rebel. One of the most important question in recent years is : What image Disney returns with respect to the role of women and the role that women play in society in the twenty-first century? In fact, Disney is primarily a media and integrate media stereotypes and habits of society to which they belong in their history or animated movie. Disney is the reflects of the habit of society to which they belong in their history or their short films. Thus heroines like Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora are submitted to wish than others, especially men, have chosen for her. They are docile women who spend their time dreaming. They are always save by men from a evil spell and are submit to the will of men. Instead, the heroines of the late twentieth century are beginning to take their lives and rebel against the male authority . In the twenty-first century heroines are increasingly rebelling and advocate of feminist principles : women are the equals of men. This analysis allows us to see a marked increase...
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...Princesses For many kids, Disney films have grown to nurture their escalation into developing as a child. Children have viewed different characters in different colours and patterns, whether idolizing them, favouring them or even despising them; those characters succeeded in impacting the mentality of those children, marking a point of interest that I would like to thoroughly investigate in this research assignment. Bearing that in mind, I have centered the aim of my research on the pink innuendos flaring from the very similar roles of the helpless princesses of Disney – the same innuendos that are now mostly looked as the societal norms of the Disney world. Some particular films that I have studied include ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White’, ‘The Little Mermaid’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Beauty and The Beast’, ‘Tangled’, and ‘Mulan’. Through the utilization of those films, I have carried my study in an order that would allow me to scrutinize the similarities assigned to the ‘pink’ customs fitted to Disney princesses, and any other differences that could break the code followed through years on the films – hence an investigation in the representation of conventional Disney princesses. Disney films have allowed children to compose a preconceived idea of women or female roles in the films or even in life altogether, as helpless, and in need of an external party (usually male – or the Prince Charming) to come in and switch their lives into the better. These stereotypical roles assigned to the princesses...
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...Many parents feel that Disney animated films are pure and wholesome, and they are perfectly suitable for children to watch starting at very young ages. On the surface of Disney movies, they are quite wholesome and they try to teach life lessons, but do these movies really portray positive images of men and women that will help a child become an individual, or do Disney movies place ideas in children’s heads, at early ages, telling them how they should act, feel, and live. In an article printed on December third 1966 in Time magazine, the author proposed that Disney films were just as much for adults as they were for children. “Disney always maintained that he made films not for children but for "honest adults."”(time.com). Anyone who has seen a Disney animated film can see that most of these movies are based on adult situations that involve the union of man and women in one way or another. For as long as Walt Disney animated films have been around, spanning eight decades, they have made a great impact on the way children view themselves and others, and they help shape how children view the opposite sex in a negative way. Most people were exposed to the wonderful world of Disney animated films when they were still toddlers. And since people are exposed to this material at such young ages, these films tend to give children an early idea of how men and women, according to Walt Disney studios, interact with each other. They also show children at an early age how people of their...
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... 4 Corpus 9 The Research: SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS 11 The Research: THE LITTLE MERMAID 18 The Research: THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG 24 Findings and Interpretation 31 Identity Formation 35 Conclusion 38 Literature 41 Media 43 Introduction The Walt Disney Company’s cultural products have been a great influence on popular culture since the 1930s and an inspiration for generations all over the world ever since. For many, including myself, the Princes, Princesses and fantastical creatures of Disney’s animated fairy tales have become symbols of their youth. Seeing the films gives rise to a feeling of nostalgia, they become a memento of one’s childhood world. But what kind of world is this? What kind of realities do Disney’s fantastical representations construct? In my thesis, I will analyze a specific element of Disney films: gender roles constructed through the representation of femininity in their animated features. I will study how this representation changes over time: has Disney’s highly criticized construction of gender roles changed over time, and if so, what realities do contemporary Disney discourses construct? I propose to research how femininity is represented in Walt Disney‘s animated features, how this representation changes over time and what kind of effects this has on the...
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...Splitting Hairs in Disney’s film Tangled Cinderella tells us that a dream is a wish that your heart makes, and following suit dreams play a large part in the newest Disney princess film, Tangled. In the end of the film Rapunzel holds Flynn and they admit their deep secret that they had become each other’s dream, and an “awww” moment ensues. The question to ask is “Where do these dreams come from?” and “What do these dreams mean?” Taking this second question, the implications of Rapunzel and Flynn’s dream impact more than just the world of the film. The Disney Princess films have been studied within an inch of their lives by a great number of scholars in a great number of fields. One common study takes the ideas of gender development and combines them with the Disney Princess films. However, the implications of gender do not stop here as gender identity can still be impacted as the viewers age. Interpretation of the princess films has been a huge aspect of their scholarly application as the behavior of the princesses, and princes, can be interpreted and compared with gender stereotypes and norms to assess the impact their portrayals can have on the viewing audience. The film Tangled is often seen as Disney’s take on a modern princess, and Rapunzel and Flynn have a great deal to contribute to both gender development study and media interpretation of gender. Gender development is a field of study which has been impacted in a number of ways by modern theorists and he field is continuing...
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...Disney Heroines and America: Yesterday and Today Haley Hayes English 311c Section 02 Movies reflect current American values. Symbols and signs of these shifting values creep into every aspect of the American people’s lives. The entertainment industry provides an example by depicting the powerful influence animated heroines have on cultural trends. In animation, the heroine archetype has come to mean the “ideal person”: a symbol of the qualities, attitudes, popular trends, and those socially acceptable norms which are the most desirable. Has the public brought this upon themselves by buying into the movie-madness scheme, which dictates how one should think, feel, and, in part, be? This introduces another interesting question: Does the shift in societal values affect the nature and content of animation, or do the values portrayed in animation and public’s willingness to be overpowered create these changes in American beliefs? Regardless of which comes first, analyzing a character is synonymous with analyzing the culture from which the character is spawned. These symbols in animation, unfortunately, don’t always depict America’s best values and more often than not are targeted at children. Truly, the influential impact of animation on children is most perfectly depicted in the famed Walt Disney Heroines. These Disney girls have come to reflect America’s ever-changing values and the evolution of its popular culture. Despite the public’s initial skepticism...
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...instead of getting to know them. In the 1920’s, where The Great Gatsby is set, many stereotypes against women are present. Women started going to parties, smoking, and wearing shorter skirts. This drastic change from the stereotypical housewife caused many people to view women as foolish and scandalous. When I was a child, I used to believe that everyone was treated equally. Whether it be your race, gender, religion, I always believed that everyone deserves the same amount of respect. But this is clearly not the case with most people and a big reason for this is stereotypes. A siren is a mermaid like creature that is often described as being evil and enchanting. Sirens are known for their magical voices which draw in men for the purpose of viciously destroying...
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...11 minutes. Barbara Bush’s commencement address successfully honored and inspired the graduates of Wellesley College. The is an important speech of Barbara Pierce Bush’s “Commencement Address at Wellesley College” speech because she encouraged women to stay true to who they are, enjoy life, and most importantly to cherish their families rather than to focus only on studying and wasting their life's becoming well educated women only, because at the end of the day with family, friends, and children are by far more important than a textbook and a pen. I think that she was little nervous because she was so cautious that don’t miss to think anybody and constantly looking at the piece of paper for this. In the introduction, Barbara Bush successfully grabs the attention of her audience as she sparks interest, honors the occasion, establishes credibility and relates to her audience. I think she very well knew that what kind of the audience, she is going to address and she seems prepared for it as she as written the speech keeping in mind her audience. Barbra bush’s speech made an impact on the woman of Wellesley because they were expecting somebody to tell them how great a class one education would be on their futures and how money and a great job would benefit them, but instead they got a speech about life and goals, not goals to achieve at work but personal goals. This speech, as well as many others, is important in our society because women each and every day are trying to...
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...* The word Gender, as a grammatical term has been around since the 14th century, according to Oxford dictionary as “referring to classes of noun designated as masculine, feminine, or neuter.” Gender is more commonly used now in the 21st century to describe a person’s identity. Sex is another word that is commonly used when describing gender, it is ‘the state of being male or female’. Sex is the biological difference, where as gender is to cultural or social differences. Sex could also be defined as evolution, our genetics. Where as gender, which is our nurture, our life experiences, which help us shape who we are as an individual. Sociologists argue that the relationship between sex and gender is absolutely arbitrary – there is no causative connection between sex and gender – sex doesn’t determine the type of roles you can engage in society. We announce our identities by the way that we dress, walk, talk, act etc. We convince other people that we’re the gendered person that we’re presenting ourselves to be, a product of interactions. With ones sex being defined as male or female, there are bodies that can’t be categorized under these two sexes. Hermaphrodites, now more commonly known as intersex, are becoming a commonly known and used term in society with 17 in every 1000 babies having some kind of intersex condition. Gender is only one of the fundamental principles in organisation of social life, in particular in structural organisations of; childhood, sports, media and employment...
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...Gender Roles in Disney Movies It is undeniable that the company that is leading to many generations in their child age is Disney. Who does not remember Mickey and Minnie Mouse?, Who has not thrown a tear when Snow White was poisoned by the evil witch?, Who did not want to ever be in the place of handsome John Smith or Pocahontas herself to revive their love story?, that tender these films, is not it, for example the Little Mermaid and Sebastian the crab song, who does not remember that song from "under the sea”? Has anybody ever wondered why the dwarves themselves did not do the housework when they came home once Snow White "moved in" with them? Or why an Indian as Pocahontas, falls for a murderer of thousands of his countrymen as was John Smith? Or why witches are always bad? Or why women are always in the background in these films (Hubka, Hovdestad & Tonmyr, 2009)? The world of Disney Princess began in 1937 when Snow White entered the world with the Seven Dwarfs (McRobbie, 2008). Since then it continued to add princesses in this world and the most recent movie was Tangled (Rapunzel) in 2011. In the past years, due to the lack of portraying ethnicity, Disney movie makers were highly criticized by their audience. Therefore, Pocahontas appeared in 1995 and after three years in 1998 came Mulan, which created a racially diverse collection of Disney princesses. After a decade The Princess and the Frog was released in 2009. It is important to understand that Disney plays an important...
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