Modern Family Stereotypes

The media has huge power on the way it is able to influence its audience. Although some media can be positive, much the medias influence has negatively affected youth today. In the show Modern Family, it aims to portray a contemporary view of American families. Although most research on body image has focused on white girls and women, body image concerns also affect women of color, specifically among Latinas. The purpose of this paper is to understand how the media creates stereotypes that enforces gender identities, race, class, disability and sexuality. The media has the power to influence the way we view and create stereotypes of Latinos as poor, idiotic, thick accent criminals. Gender stereotypes in the media provides us with two stereotypes that have been placed on males and females. In reference to Modern Family, one of the three family structures of the show are the Pritchett family; Jay is a divorced father who has an interracial marriage with a younger, Colombian woman; Gloria, as they raise her teenage son Manny from a previous marriage. Dominant beliefs regarding gender and gender roles within this family will …show more content…
Class today is used a tool of oppression, “as a structure, gender divides work in the home and in economic production, legitimates those in authority, and organizes sexuality and emotional life”” (Lorber, 1991). Health disparities are caused by race, class and gender. Environmental contamination and other infectious diseases are associated with poverty and poor living conditions. Women of color often live in areas with poor physical environment, “the complex process of fetal development and linked fetal and infant health to external environmental factors like contamination due to lead, chemical weed-killers, and other hazardous substances” (Kirk & Okazawa-Rey, 2013, p