This Week's Project: Highlights and Lowlights of Disney Analysis Presentations

This week and last week in class, Mrs. Castelli used us as guinea pigs for a new assignment that she just recently came up with because of a conversation we had in class about Disney.  We were to make a presentation (in Powerpoint, Prezi, etc.) analyzing the sociological messages conveyed in Disney's classic movies.  Many groups chose to criticize the messages about gender that the films sent us.  For example:  the skinny waists of Sleeping Beauty's Aurora, the dim wit of Ariel, the unrealistically huge biceps of Hercules.  However, as more and more groups gave their 10-15 minute presentatinos INCLUDING CLIPS, we pretty much got the message and were ready to move on.  One group focused not only on gender stereotypes but on Tarzan and its false representation of human socialization.  As refreshing as that was, I still was extremely bored out of my mind at the majority of the presentations (two groups decided to do Hercules and showed the exact same things).

However, aside from the Tarzan group, the real stars of the project were, in my opinion, Kaitlin and Nicole.  They took a super creative spin on the project by comparing two movies:  Sleeping Beauty and Anastasia.  They did look at the gender stereotypes exhibited in the movie, but the major point of their presentation was to draw attention to the changes made throughout the years.  They saw how, in the late 1950s, Sleeping Beauty was made as the story of a helpless girl relying solely on beauty and singing (a soprano, nonetheless), who finds a man and only sings songs about her prince.  Anastasia (1997), on the other hand, features a heroine rather than a hero (In Sleeping Beauty, Aurora just slept through the whole battle scene); she herself defeated Rasputin, and although she did find a romantic interest in Dimitri,  the songs she sings in an alto voice are about finding herself and establishing her own identity.  In my opinion, this is much better than simply being boy-crazy.

That then got me thinking:  What other movies show the difference betwen the more early times of the twentieth century and the modern values held today?  Mulan certainly put a spin on the classic tales of damsels in distress and huge muscular heroes.  Mulan herself became the hero of China by proving to be just as strong, disciplined, and capable as a man.  Not only that, but she did the whole thing for her family (remember how Ariel ran away from her father, the "ugly stepsisters" in Cinderella, stepmothers in Cinderella and Snow White), which certainly was a much-needed aspect of Disney movies.

Furthermore, I suggest this to my teacher:  Have the project be a timeline or comparison between children's films (not necessarily Disney), and see whether your future students believe society has improved or gotten worse.  After all, there's no real answer to that question, is there?

Male vs. Female, Men vs. Women: It's Not All Black and White

Line 1:  Handsome, Strong, Brave, Buff, Football, Basketball, Jerseys, Jockstraps, Blue.

Line 2:  Pretty, Graceful, Spunky, Hot, Dancing, Cheerleading, Makeup, Bras, Pink.

What did you think of when you read the first line?  How about the second?  Hopefully, your respective answers are something like guys and girls, men and women, or male and female.

It's easy to tell the sex of a person.  Anatomically speaking, males and females are different in some pretty obvious ways.  However, gender isn't always so easily defined.

Traditionally speaking, males (those born with a penis) have the minds of men, and are pretty much summed up using the words in Line 1.  Traditionally speaking, females (those born with a vagina) have the minds of women, and are likewise described using the words in Line 2.

However, as it is with all things in the modern world, we aren't always speaking traditionally now, are we?

Sometimes, the match-up of one's sex and gender isn't male-man or female-woman.  These people are the ones who may eventually become homosexuals, transvestites, or even transgender.  In the article I read this week, Gauging Gender by Stephen T. Asma (of The Chronicle Review), gender is described not as something set in stone; but as a concept created by the evolution of human society.  In other words, we came up with the categorization of the words in Lines 1 and 2 simply because of the way things happened in our society. 

In cultures outside the U.S., there are more extant genders other than man and woman.  In fact, there are at least 23.  We learned about one of these in class this week; fa'afafine are a Samoan third gender and are basically men who were raised to carry a woman's role in society.  These fa'afafine are not considered men, and relations between a male and a fa'afafine are not considered homosexual.  Fa'afafine keep house and raise children.  Here's a picture of one, just for a visual:

*Don't ask me why she's wearing boxing gloves; I don't know.  Whatever.  It's irrelevant.

These fa'afafine are culturally accepted in Samoan society and are actually a pretty innovative and smart idea. If a family gives birth to two boys, they may decide they want a girl to take care of them in their old age, so they decide to raise one of their boys as a fa'afafine.  They treat him like a girl and teach him how to do chores around the house just like his mother.  Because of his natural male strength, however, it is arguable that he is even better at keeping house and doing chores than a typical woman would be.

The Samoan fa'afafine are proof that gender bending is something that can and has been done.  Gender isn't set in stone, and although some natural factors do have an impact on our perception of males and females (males being naturally bigger and stronger, and therefore prone to more aggressive behavior; women being the childbearers and nurturers, and therefore having a more gentle nature), our ideas of how each sex should look, act, speak, and behave is simply something conjured from our own imaginations.

A good friend of mine has a father who recently came out of the closet as a homosexual.  He has undergone some serious and painful medical procedures and injections to turn him into a female.  Although this has obviously been a very difficult thing to handle for my friend and her family, she's doing a good job of accepting her father and his situation simply by acknowledging the point discussed by my class this week as well as the article I read yesterday.  Sometimes a person's sex doesn't match up exactly with how society wants their corresponding gender to be.  If my friend's father had lived in Samoa, his decision to change his sex would have been way more accepted than it is here in the United States, and it probably would have been a lot easier on him (or her...?) than it has been.

Bottom line is, if a male acts "prissy" rather than "manly", or if a female acts "dykish" rather than "girly," don't judge them for it; these perceptions of gender are only illusions made up by people as the years went on.  It isn't a sin to not have a traditional correlation between sex and gender, and those who persecute people who fall into the "confused" category really need to think before they speak.