Introduction Mean Girls, loosely based off of Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, is a 2003 comedy that follows Cady Heron’s first venture into a public high school after being homeschooled. Cady moved to Illinois from Africa due to her parent’s receiving tenure at Northwestern University for their research. She befriends two outcasts, Janice Ian and Damien, who warn her about the Plastics, a clique of popular girls. Cliques can be “sophisticated, complex and multilayered, and every girl has a role within them (Wiseman, 2009). Though the Plastics is not the most complicated clique, each girl has a role. The members of the Plastics are Queen Bee Regina George, sidekick Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith. Regina is the queen bee, who typically have “a combination of charisma, force, money, looks, will, and social intelligence,” all of which are seen in Regina (Wiseman, 2009). The audience also sees Regina as the center of attention, and all eyes are on …show more content…
nurture. (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). Biology is one part of gender identity, but more importantly are societal, community, religious, cultural values (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010); “biology and environment… continually interact to inform virtually every aspect of human social functioning” (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). People pick up gendered norms through family life, the neighborhood and the media (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). School is a major place where gender identity is acted out and defined and gendered scripts on what it means to be male or female are made during early adolescence (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). This can be seen with Cady, as she has no idea what the gendered norms are due to her background of being homeschooled in Africa. We see over the movie that she becomes immersed into the gendered norms of her school. The work of Carol Gilligan has helped people understand how gender identity is
In the film Mean Girls, teenager Cady Heron was home-schooled in Africa by her zoologist parents. When her family moves to the U.S., Cady finally gets a taste of public school and learns a vital lesson about the cruelty involved in the tightly knit cliques of high school. She eventually finds herself being drug into a group of “the worst people you will ever meet”, The Plastics; and soon realizes how they came to get their name.
Kane displays five different ways of parenting based on gender. She first introduces us to the Naturalizers. Naturalizers practice traditional values when raising their child. They believe in the concept of “it was how they were born” (Kane, 2012. p. 53). The mere definition explains to us that the biological outlooks outweigh the social outlooks. Naturalizers believe that differences are vital to gender. Next, the reader learns of a group named Cultivators. Cultivators believe that gender is socially constructed in the parents influence. Although this is deemed true by them, Kane shows the reader how Cultivators still adhere to the traditional value of young men but are okay with young women being nontraditional (taking out trash, doing
Mean Girls is a comedy film aired in 2004 this film captures the influences on lifespan development during adolescence. The main character Cady Heron was home schooled in Africa and now she must transition into high school where she is tested in different areas of her development. Throughout the film she becomes known as the new girl who is trying to figure out her self-identity. Cady integrates herself into a clique of girls known as the Plastics, soon enough Cady understands why they are known for their name. The Plastics run the school by the norms they have created and must always be followed otherwise it will lead into exclusion from the group. In order to be socially accepted social norms determining attitude, behavior, and status must
The film Mean Girls is about a young girl, Cady Heron, born and raised in Africa by her zoologist parents, who were also her homeschool teachers for sixteen years. When Cady moves to the United States, she enrolls in a public school for the first time. Here she realizes that high school students have the same hierarchy as the animals she observed in Africa. The lowest ranking group in this high school hierarchy is the outcasts, who also happen to be Cady’s first friends in the U.S. The highest on the high school food chain are the “plastics”. The “plastics”, are the most popular girls in school. The plastic’s notice Cady’s charming personality and stunning good looks and invite her to join their clique. In order to avenge her first friends,
Regina George is a junior in high school who is described as teen royalty. As the leader of her clique referred to as “The Plastics”, she rules the school with her best friends Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith loyally at her side. The three girls feed off of tearing the other girls in the school down and diminishing them by writing awful rumors and secrets in the “Burn Book”. With her tall and skinny physique, bright blonde hair and good-looks, she uses her sex appeal and superiority to manipulate and victimize the people around her including her family. Regina easily controls her family members. Her mother worships the ground Regina walks on and desperately looks to her for acceptance. Her ability to make other girls at school feel inferior fuels her power, as queen bee Regina is seen as the “it” girl. Everyone wants to look like her, dress like her, and be just like her. She uses her sex appeal to get any guy she wants and dangles them around everyone else to make them jealous.
The second concept from our textbook I will talk about in relationship to the movie is Non- verbal cues. This takes place when everyone starts to clap when Regina (the main plastic) gets told off and leaves the cafeteria. This shows that people are glad someone stood up to her and they cant be pushed around by her.
There are many different facets to the nature versus nurture argument that has been going on for decades. One of these, the influence of nature and nurture on gender roles and behaviors, is argued well by both Deborah Blum and Aaron Devor, both of whom believe that society plays a large role in determining gender. I, however, have a tendency to agree with Blum that biology and society both share responsibility for these behaviors. The real question is not whether gender expression is a result of nature or nurture, but how much of a role each of these plays.
This leadership style has a strong focus on task requirements and less emphasis on concerns for people. When she asked for something she wanted it done immediately with no regard to what the needs of her followers were. When Gretchen wanted to make the word “fetch” a trend at school Regina halted her and demanded that she stop. On the other hand Regina’s mother, Mrs. George had a country club (1,9) leadership style. She was more concerned with being the “cool mom” than being an authoritative figure. This is reflected in the scene where she meets Cady for the first time she emphasized that there were no rules in her house and even went as far as to offer 16 year old Cady alcohol. She was exceptionally eager to be “in the mix” with the girls, making more of a friend than a parent.
One of the major conflicts is the intrapersonal conflict Cady has with herself. Cady goes from being home-schooled in Africa to entering the “girl-world” in high school. Throughout the movie, Cady is trying to fit in, become popular and to get the attention of her crush, Aaron Samuels. This causes Cady to ultimately lose herself in the process of becoming Plastic. In the effort to take revenge on Regina for taking Aaron back, Cady loses her own self by attempting to be Regina. This gets Janis to notice Cady’s transformation especially when Cady throws party the same night of Janis’s art show and doesn’t even show up to the art show. Janis came to Cady’s house tell her: “You think that everyone is in love with you, when actually, everyone hates you.” Cady then has to decide whether she wants to become a better person or become someone she’s
Norms in society do not just come about randomly in one’s life, they start once a child is born. To emphasize, directly from infancy, children are being guided to norms due to their parents’ preferences and choices they create for them, whether it is playing with legos, or a doll house; gender classification begins in the womb. A prime example comes from a female author, Ev’Yan, of the book “Sex, love,Liberation,” who strongly expresses her feelings for feminism and the constant pressure to conform to gender. She stated that “From a very young age, I was taught consistently & subliminally about what it means to be a girl, to the point where it became second nature. The Disney films, fairy tales, & depictions of women in the media gave me a good definition of what femininity was. It also showed me what femininity wasn’t (Ev’Yan).She felt that society puts so much pressure on ourselves to be as close to our gender identities as possible, with no confusion; to prevent confusion, her mother always forced her to wear dresses. In her book, she expressed her opinion that her parents already knew her gender before she was born, allowing them t...
Nurture side. She explains that the dominant view of gender is that it is natural (264). This
"Cold, shiny, hard, PLASTIC," said by Janice referring to a group of girls in the movie Mean Girls. Mean Girls is about an innocent, home-schooled girl, Cady who moves from Africa to the United States. Cady thinks she knows all about survival of the fittest. But the law of the jungle takes on a whole new meaning when she enters public high school and encounters psychological warfare and unwritten social rules that teen girls deal with today. Cady goes from a great friend of two "outcasts", Janice and Damien to a superficial friend of the "plastics", a group of girls that talks about everyone behind their back and thinks everyone loves them. Adolescent egocentrism and relationships with peers are obviously present throughout the film. I also noticed self worth in relationships, parenting styles, and juvenile delinquency throughout Mean Girls.
Over the decades, a significant mark of the evolution of gender is the increasing social phenomenon in how society conceptualizes gender. Gender is a system of social practices for characterizing people as two different categories, femininity and masculinity and arranging social relations of inequality on the basis of that difference (Ridgeway & Correll 2004). Gender-neutral parenting (GNP) refers to raising children outside of the traditional stereotypes of girls and boys. It involves allowing children to explore their innate personalities and abilities rather than confining them into rigid gender roles that society has shaped. It can be argued that it is through socialization children discover how to operate in gendered structures, learn
Mean Girls sends the message to women that they should not criticize one other to feel some type of empowerment. The way women criticize each other can be very aggressive, this act make women gives them the feeling of confident that there is someone who they consider lower than they are. When the movie Mean Girls first starts the female students of the school are continually judging and gossiping about one another. Because of this, it caused friction between the female students. Throughout the movie the consist fighting between girls gets worst. This friction causes women to feel the need to fight amongst one another. For example, The Plastics owned a book called the Burn Book where they wrote terrible things about their classmates but, once the book got out, the female students being fight even more. Once they stop feeling the need to bring each other down, the atmosphere of school changed. For instance, the different cliques were able to it and talk to about ...
Gender is such a ubiquitous notion that humans assume gender is biological. However, gender is a notion that is made up in order to organize human life. It is created and recreated giving power to the dominant gender, creating an inferior gender and producing gender roles. There are many questionable perspectives such as how two genders are learned, how humans learn their own gender and others genders, how they learn to appropriately perform their gender and how gender roles are produced. In order to understand these perspectives, we must view gender as a social institution. Society bases gender on sex and applies a sex category to people in daily life by recognizing gender markers. Sex is the foundation to which gender is created. We must understand the difference between anatomical sex and gender in order to grasp the development of gender. First, I will be assessing existing perspectives on the social construction of gender. Next, I will analyze three case studies and explain how gender construction is applied in order to provide a clearer understanding of gender construction. Lastly, I will develop my own case study by analyzing the movie Mrs. Doubtfire and apply gender construction.