Gender Representation In Animated Disney Princesses Movies

Gender is a term or a tag which is constructed by the society rather than it being biologically determined as per the sex of that person. Males and females are expected to act or behave in certain ways. So males are usually expected to be emotionally strong, bold and muscular (Planned Parenthood, n. d) while females are expected to be sensitive, weak and have feminine characters. Stereotypes many times over-generalise groups based on genders such as that men are better drivers than women or that women are better caregivers than men. Moving on to our topic, Disney movies have a great impact on the young children. They are thought as the foundation for the young children to explore the society. They target on younger generation so they can explore and understand the current society and its various norms. Disney movies are found to generate new ideas in the types of roles.

A belief system is created in a child when influenced by the roles of the characters in the movies. It is said that children develop the basic gender stereotypes by the age of three. Therefore, children are more likely to limit their play to same-sex peers. Since Disney princess movies are commonly watched in young ages and act as source of influence and life lessons, they give rise to such moral panics. Stereotypes are a great concern and root cause to various moral panics because it limits an individual’s capacity to develop and explore, have distinguish personalities and characters and lastly it refrains an individual from pursing certain careers or occupation that are considered uncommon for a particular gender. For example it can be said that the occupation of driving military pilots are usually for men or the job for teachers are generally for women. This led to our hypothesis for the presentation, “To what extent does animated Disney princess movies stereotype males and females?” .

At the beginning, before we started our research on the topic, we had this idea inside our heads that Disney movies in the ancient years depicted women as weak and dependent but as the years followed and woman empowerment became a huge phenomenon, the Disney production started creating princesses that are strong and independent. To make it clear, it was just a thought and we did not bias our research based on the thought. So as to not have a biased research we selected Disney movies between the years 1994-2016 and majority of it having a two year gap between two consecutive Disney movies. For the content analysis. we chose ten feminine characteristics and ten muscular characteristics for the analysis and analysed the lead male and female for fifteen minutes and used an online randomizer to select three Disney movie posters for the semiotics. We observed that Mulan, Moana and Brave had princesses with high masculine characteristics. This did not support our thought as Mulan was an ancient Disney movie yet had high muscular traits. We also observed that the male leads in movies such as Tangled and Princess & the frog had quite a high feminine traits. As for the semiotics we found that most of the posters were associated with gender stereotypes. After completing our analysis and semiotics, we concluded that there was an increase in the muscular characteristics in the princesses, however it was not a straight line and thus did not follow a trend. So coming back to our hypothesis, we concluded that to a large extent, gender representation is stereotypical in Disney animated movies, although it is improving.

Through this assignment, I improved my understanding of semiotics and content analysis to a great extent. I also realized through semiotics that simple posters or pictures can also have so much of deep meanings. I did learn it in the class also but doing semiotics with the team, using our head to such great lengths, actually made me realize the importance of it and why it is used for solving disputes. As for the things that I obtained through this course will for surely be my increase in general knowledge and the happenings around the world. I realized I was very ignorant of the world. This course taught me various terms and concepts that is applicable in the present world. Also through the various blog posts that I have created, it helped me to organize my thoughts and express myself well. Although I am still lacking in that part, I can still consider the present me is better than the past me.

Lastly my team was a great moral support to me. At times when I was confused, lost and believed I contributed very less to the team, they ensured me that I was doing fine. The team gave me a feeling of belongingness. As a whole, I thoroughly enjoyed the course and the last presentation.