Image Expectations: A Comparison In the nearly not-a-short-story “Girl,” Jamaica Kincaid tells of a girl growing up in Antigua and receiving a long list of rules from her mother, while in the short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” Karen Russell writes about girls who were raised by wolves until taking in and reformed to fit into human society by nuns. Both stories have significant differences, but despite them, both “Girl” and “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” share the issue of gender and the world 's forced and limiting image of a “perfect” girl. The girls from both stories deal with the pressures of becoming a "perfect" girl through the world’s high expectations of what their appearance, behavior, and relationships…
Mean Girls, is a film loaded with stereotypes and roles of all different genders and cultures. Many people see this movie as a center of American culture and is known to many as a great comedy. Famous characters including Regina George, Gretchen Wieners, Karen Smith, Cady Heron, Janis Ian, and Damian help build the story and themes seen in gender and communication. Stereotypes of feminism, gay and lesbian terminology, and essentializing are key terms that are the basis of the movie Mean Girls. Characters Janis Ian and Damian, help to defy the stereotyping going on in the film by not caring what is being said about them and refer to themselves to Cady as “the greatest people you’ll ever meet.”…
This line discusses the way teenage girls address, indicating that they hide their insecurities with their clothing choices while accidentally revealing other aspects of themselves, possibly hinting at the contradictions of teenage life. By articulating “Teenage girls wear clothes that cover their insecurities but exposes everything else”. Based on this evidence, we can see the struggle for identity and self-expression within the school environment. The difference between covering insecurities and exposing other aspects suggests the complexity of teenage life and the pressure to follow societal expectations while seeking individuality. This supports the author's conclusion that traditional public schooling is a place where students must navigate conflicting desires of fitting in and…
I will discuss how Queer theory, Anti-racist Theory, and Radical Feminist Theory is portrayed in the Mean Girls. Firstly, Queer theory is shown. In the beginning of Mean Girls, we see some people that are home schooled. One boy says, “And on the 3rd day, God created the Remington bolt-action rifle; so that man could fight the dinosaurs … and the homosexuals” to which the others return with “Amen”.…
How much of what we do influences children at a young age? Things that we do that influence children, such as giving them toys and clothes based on their gender. Toys and clothes could be considered more purposeful way to engender children, but sometimes there are actions that parents do without even knowing towards their children. Without the parents knowing they are setting gender norms for their children and this would possibly affect them in the future. In the readings of “From Women, Men, and Society” by Claire Renzetti and Daniel Curran and the reading “What’s Wrong with Cinderella” by Peggy Orenstein, the authors write about how parents and society form children in stereotypical ways and how it creates gender norms.…
Gender-role deeply influence on girls in childhood. Most people think that girl should be cute, pretty and beautiful, and should become nurse, teacher or cook. That is, people always view girl as a more tender role. Therefore, girls’ parents usually teach their girl children to dress themselves, to be tender and even give them fewer education when they are in childhood.…
In her Graphic Memoir Tomboy, Liz Prince, born a girl but likes to do boyish things talks about what its like to not fit into society’s gender role conspiracy. She talks about the first 18 years of her life while using pictures to describe her feelings from dresses, to hair, to clothing at various ages. She is truthful and forward while strolling down memory lane about the things girls aren’t supposed to do and how expectations of gender roles can play a major part in the way a young girls mind can think. Society tells young ladies that there 's one and only approach to be a young lady and that silliness is innately worth not as much as boyishness. Liz Prince disguised those messages and considered them important.…
Alright that’s it; you just lost your phone.” I painfully surrendered my phone to my mother. But it wasn’t for a bad grade or any other typical teenage mishap; the cause was simple: makeup. Sure I was old enough and had any right to wear it, but her reasoning always remained the same, “Leah, you are too beautiful to wear makeup”.…
If one wants to be successful in life they must wear certain clothes, look a certain way, act in a socially acceptable manner. All of which is impossible to perform correctly. “Girl” should mean an innocent, young female whose is full of wonder and life. However, Jamaica Kincaid obliterated that meaning by forcing the reader to see what girl’s in this age are told to do. A child should be able to wear what they want, play as they want to and be…
Traditionally, femininity is associated with a particular set of personality traits and behaviours, which are deemed acceptable for women to perform by the most influential institutions of the dominant culture. The teen makeover movie is a visual medium that reinforces these expectations through the types of female characters they present. Gender stereotypes reveal a distinct correlation between performances of idealized femininity and the distribution of female power in their high school community. Heathers (1988), Clueless (1995), and Mean Girls (2004), despite having been released decades apart from one another, use similar makeover tropes to reveal trends in the use of makeover transformation that demonstrate how idealized vision of femininity…
In magazines aimed at the general population, including Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair, women are oversexualized with provocative slogans, little to no clothing, and electronically edited photos. This creates an apparent distinction between what the media reinforces as the ideal woman and what women really look like. Here, a phenomenon called the feminine beauty ideal arises. The feminine beauty ideal is "the socially constructed notion that physical attractiveness is one of women 's most important assets, and something all women should strive to achieve and maintain." (Spade 3)…
Whether intentionally or not, especially as a male, we all have used the term “like a girl” without a shadow of concern about the ramifications of such words. Our obnoxious preface that girls may be inferior, as evident by the phrase, has sadly been apparent since youth and changes the schema in which both genders view the world at hand. The people over at Always have created a campaign centered on the rhetoric of counter-thinking societal clichéd views. Growing up as male within a predominately female family (both immediate and extended) allowed me to see the fault in this line of thinking. Seeing athletic, intellectual or artistic abilities being dependent on the person rather than their gender for which my family proves time after time.…
INTRO In our contemporary society media plays a huge role in defining and denoting different stereotypes, genders and class. It is not often that the media has nothing to say about any given topic especially when it comes to representations of youth. Throughout media young women are commonly portrayed as snobbish, vain and ego-centric queen bee’s or the unfortunate, weak admirers of the reigning queen bees. Characterizations in various movies, literature and social media label teenage girls with stereotypical and offensive titles which inevitably have affected an entire generation of girl’s self-confidences and mental stability and may continue to do so if nothing is changed.…
The Negative Effects of Barbie Dolls on Body Image: “As a child most girls played with Barbie dolls and if they had not, their views of what is considered beautiful and acceptable for women would be different, as well as how they felt about body image” (Ive, Dittmar, Halliwell 283). Childhood is the period of time where girls start to build their basic belief system that they will carry into their adulthood. Most young girls, especially in the United States, are given toys that portray the “perfect way” a girl should look. One of the most common examples is the Barbie doll. The Barbie doll image engraves a belief system in these girls’ forms a young age.…
Picture a freshman boy with glasses, straight posture, and overalls walking down the hallway inside his high school. There's no doubt that everyone in school will assume the boy is a nerd with straight As who has no friends because of his appearance. A second example would be a varsity cheerleader, everyone assumes that she is sassy, loud, and mean not knowing the person she truly is. Society often labels people with stereotypes even though they don’t take the time to actually get to know this person. Stereotypes often begin because of true or false information on certain individuals.…