Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Community
Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts
Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users
Free resources
Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors
The role of gender as a discourse in media through the analysis of two films, Clueless (1995) and Black Swan (2010). how gender is performed and reinforces harmful stereotypes, focusing on the forced need for perfection and the requirement for women to be innocent and seductive. The document also touches upon the impact of these stereotypes on young women and the creation of unrealistic beauty ideals.
Typology: Assignments
1 / 7
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
Gender is “the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sex category. Discourse in terms of gender refers to “a whole range of different symbolic activities, including the style of dress, patterns of consumption, ways of moving, as well as talking”. Gender identity is constructed and reproduced through these symbolic activities in a very broad sense. For example, within modern culture, masculinity is considered as something like being tough, drinking alcohol, smoking, having a good sense of direction, and having power and money. All these things are accepted and naturalized characteristics of males within the culture. Gender is expressed or exhibited through interaction and becomes normalized and recognized as a socially organized achievement. According to Butler’s (1990) theory of performativity, gender is not inscribed onto a biological body. Gender is performed by individuals on a daily basis and the everyday performance constructs gender within social and cultural discourse.
When analyzing a pop culture text, several frames can be used in figuring out what messages the text consciously or subconsciously was encoded to send to the audience. The feminist perspective is one of the frames which focuses mostly on gender roles and rules which have been taken for granted and thus have been passed as “normal” in our society. More specifically, the goal of the feminist perspective used in analyzing media and popular culture texts is finding out the dominant ideology of society which works in a way that privileges males and masculinity while disadvantaging females and femininity (Sellnow 161). Gender is an extremely significant aspect of many forms of entertainment, particularly film adaptations. It is easy to form opinions on certain characters due to portrayals of gender stereotypes which have always been prevalent in the media and in real life. Film adaptations are exceptionally fascinating when studying gender because they are able to either stay true to the original source, which may be deemed problematic now, or stray away from the source and create a different version of the same character, perhaps one with a different perception that can change the meaning of the film entirely. For example, female characters can be changed to adapt to current times and perhaps be shown from a feminist perspective.
should look like. The movie portrays that a women’s appearance is almost the only thing that matters. These stereotypes alter the girl's mentality into thinking that they must look and dress like Cher to be the “ perfect Barbie “ that society values. Each character actively plays their limited role as either a tomboy or barbie.Cher especially demonstrates her strong focus and concern of appearance in many different ways throughout the film: her extensive wardrobe, her virtual wardrobe, her diet books, her exercise routine, her diet choices, etc. Cher’s strong concern about appearance and little concern about intelligence and achievement embodies the sexist stereotype of the “dumb blonde”. Similarly , in the movie Black Swan Nina’s obsession with her body image. Nina,usually wears dancer’s clothes that show her body line vividly, and her body, already has a very petite body from the beginning of the film. In the film she gets smaller and skinnier over time, to a point where it almost seems like that a young child.Nina’s obsession to have “the perfect body” seems to be picked up over and over in the film. She constantly throws up; the film never shows Nina eating food.She wanted to be perfect like Beth. Nina seems to end up killing Beth, which shows how Nina unconsciously has been thinking that if Beth is gone, Nina would be the perfect one. Again mentioning the theory of being either a Barbie or a Tomboy in the movie Lady Bird, is labeled as a Tomboy.Only when she starts observing the other popular girls , is when she becomes conscious of her personality. It can be seen where her friends julie offers her lunch to which she replies: “ no thanks i am trying to lose weight. ”( Lady bird).
Women have also been always forced to be “the perfect girl” for men. That is, women are often required to fulfill men’s fantasy by being as innocent as a child sometimes, and other times as sexual and seductive as women. Media representation of women and female sexuality are depicted within these boundaries. The hetero-patriarchal society presented in Amy Heckerling’s film, Clueless , negatively portrays femininity as revolving primarily around and serving men – not only does Cher takes care of her father by monitoring his diet, talking to his doctor, planning his outfits, etc., but she fulfills the discriminatory stereotype of women being in the kitchen as she believes: “whenever a boy comes you should always have something baking” (Clueless). In a gender-segregated society, Clueless reinforces the traditional female roles of “caregiver, helpmate, and nurturer… providing service to men”..Womanhood and female identity is sexualized and objectified by the heteropatriarchy for the purpose and pleasure of the men. In Clueless this is shown in Cher’s relationship tricks: “ anything you can do to draw attention to your mouth is good. Also, sometimes you have to show a little skin. This reminds a guy of being naked, and then they think of sex ” ( Clueless ). Cher also demonstrates this through the
types of dresses she choices to wear to impress Christian, her romantic interest: “looks like underwear” ( Clueless ). Again coming to the movie Black Swan this stereotype discriminatorily sexually objectifies women by portraying their bodies and sexualities as the property of men. At the beginning of the film, Nina is depicted as very naive and innocent, as a dancer working hard to achieve her dream while being referred to as “ my sweet little girl ” over and over by her mother. At this point, Nina is represented as the White Swan. Nina is always in control of herself; she is shy and childlike and seems to be (sexually) innocent. Even when she says she’s not a virgin, her denial is not very convincing.However, as the plot thickens, the director cannot stop challenging Nina to be the Black Swan too, meaning that “ she has to lose control over herself and give in”(Black Swan). She constantly battles with herself to be the dancer the director wants. In addition, women are traditionally erotic, a spectacle that arrests narrative, flat characters. Men are the point of identification, three-dimensional, and actively driving the story forward. In the movie Lady Bird, however, the men are secondary characters and stepping stones in Lady Bird’s life. Kyle and Danny, both of her love interests, are merely passing points, as opposed to a focal points of the film. They teach Lady Bird things about herself without staying long, focusing on the growth in her own life, not theirs.In these relationships, as well as thought out the film, she is also not hyper-sexualized. She carries seemingly “undesirable traits” which wrestle with conformity and traditional ideas of Western beauty such as fading dyed pink hair and a lack of makeup. These traits make her incredibly human and also mirror the average seventeen-year-old girl instead of an unrealistic image of teenage glorification. Conclusion: Results of the Forced Perfection All these harmful stereotypes not only “ reproduces gender ideologies by defining women through their appearance and bodies rather than their occupations or achievements ” but also “ reaffirms men’s intellectual superiority ”, and legitimizes their dominance in contemporary society ( Milestone and Meyer 96 ). In Clueless , this is demonstrated by the fact that older, authoritative figures such as teachers are held to a much lower standard. The same goes for social class, in Clueless those who are of the lower class are only expected to have a lower standard of physical appearance. The result of such a negative and stereotypical representation of modern society is the creation of unhealthy, unrealistic beauty ideals for young women. The lack of multifaceted female lives set an extremely narrow ideal for young girls to live up to. Black Swan “documents the way Nina believes she can attain perfection and take control of her life by purging, starving, scratching, sexualizing and prostituting herself”. This unattainable desire to be perfect in every way possible leads to
