sociology

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For this Independent Research assignment, the category that will be examined is Disney films. Much of the worries around gender stereotyping include kid’s media and a lot of the academic concentration is directed at Disney. Because of its worldwide supremacy, Disney has been the foundation of kid’s entertainment for around half a century. Gender stereotypes worry a lot of investigators as “much of what children learn about the world outside of their immediate family and community comes from the media” (Bryant et al 2012, p.259). Nearly every child grew up watching Disney films or at least had a notion what they were about. The characters and the plot of the films are unforgettable as a lot of young girls wanted to be Cinderella when they grow up or young boys wanted to be Hercules. As children, we looked up to these characters; they were our so-called ‘heroes’. If you look deeper into Disney films, you can see the creation of gender roles being made to us as children that we never realized. It also gave us this imagination of how ‘perfect’ life is when we get older and how society is expected to be but little did we know as kids that that wasn’t the way it was going to turn out.
Dominant media embeds images into our minds from a young age, stating what is suitable for our gender description. Images are embedded into girl’s minds of princesses which declare to them that to be happy you have to be beautiful and find your prince charming and live happily ever after. On the other hand, in order for boys to be happy, they have to be handsome and rugged. One of the many disputed meanings that come and go within Disney’s animated movies relate to the depiction of girls and women. For example, in The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, the...

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... on Pocahontas’ lengthy, streaming hair, helps to portion her physique into sectors which further endorsed her girlishness. It is essential to see that lengthy, streaming hair is identified with beauty. For example, Oprah Winfrey suggested on her program that she would love to have lengthy hair that whooshed from shoulder to shoulder when she moves her head, she disclosed the dominance of gender normalization, not just normalization to femininity but also to the measures of beauty that are influenced on Disney films (Ross 2008, p.93-94).
The two theoretical perspectives that are used throughout this independent research assignment which are “The Beauty Myth” and Foucault’s concept of “Normalization” have a great connection with the example of Disney films that is used. I feel personally, that “The Beauty Myth” analyses the example I have used in a more excelling way

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