Disney Film Analysis

Gender roles often begin to have an impact while the child is still young and at home. One of the first places young children begin to pick up on these gender roles is while watching television and movies. If you ask anyone born in my generation and younger they will tell you that they grew up watching Disney films. These films are where the stereotypical gender roles start to show up and when children absorb them. As Eckert and McConnell – Ginet, both professors of linguistics at Stanford University and Cornell University respectively, say in their Learning to Be Gendered essay

Eleanor Maccoby (2002) emphasizes that children have a very clear knowledge of their gender (that is, of whether they are classified as male or female) by the time they are three years old. Given this knowledge, it is not at all clear how much differential treatment children need in order to learn how to do their designated gender. (Eckert and McConnell – Ginet 742)

Multiple studies have been done that analyzes the way Disney does this. Three different examinations/analysis, with a combined amount of 48 Disney films, found that the female leads were focused on, especially with characters of color, their sexuality, in which there were frequent examples of sexism and racism in films that noted the “pale skin tones, small waists, delicate limbs, and full breasts” of leads. One of three showed and provided gender role examples that were not up to date on how current society views these roles; this analysis emphasized a multitude of domestic work being done by females. The last study reviewed films for different cultural constructs that included gender and distinguished the consistency of stereotypes throughout the films, even with the latest of the films having less stereotyping (Dawn et al., 556 – 557). These three studies all demonstrate an interesting effort in the way gender roles and stereotypes are portrayed in Disney