GIRLS AND MOVIES

Many academics have researched the power of gender messages within films and teenagers as well as the power of gender and toys. Here are the main highlights.

 

 

 

Gender in Media

Bandura and Bussey's (1999) Social Cognitive Theory of Gender Development and Differentiation has been a formative text for much of the literature focusing around gender portrayals in media and its effect on children. The theory integrates psychological and sociological frameworks and states that “gender conceptions and roles are the product of a broad network of social influences operating interdependently in a variety of societal subsystems”.

 

According to the authors, the impact of peers on gender development is significant—young children “reward each other for gender appropriate activities and punish gender conduct considered inappropriate for their gender…boys, like girls, also react more positively to members of their own sex but differ from girls in that they are less approving of boys who engage in female-linked conduct”. This, in conjunction to validation of these behaviors as well as from representations of gender roles in the media, have contributed to a social environment where boys are held in higher regard than girls.
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Gender Roles and Film

Marshall and Sensoy (2009) analyzed the narrative of Shrek 2 and found that although the female characters in the film “purports to offer viewers a more progressive curriculum about girlhood in relationship to other media texts such as Disney, it ultimately reifies heterosexual white femininity as the norm”. Through their analysis, Marshall and Sensoy found that although the female characters in the film behave in ways that seem to subvert traditional gender discourses, they ultimately offer pseudo-feminist messages that replace weak princesses with strong girls who still reinforce heterosexual and heteronormative ideas about girlhood.

 

Neuendorf, Gore, Dalessandro, Janstova, and Snyder-Suhy (2009) performed a quantitative content analysis of the 195 female characters portrayed in 20 James Bond films. One of their findings was that “despite societal progression of feminist ideology, the women of Bond continue to be portrayed in a rather limited and sex-stereotyped manner. As a result, seasoned Bond fans and new viewers alike are exposed to homogenous portrayals of women within old or new Bond films”.

 

Gender Roles and TV

Potts (2001) found that the animated television show The Powerpuff Girls, despite its violent nature, was popular with most of its viewers because it provided “positive female media images that are not based on sex appeal…viewer comments reveal that the show is viewed as empowering for both girls and boys because children are depicted as saviors to adults”. Another study looked into the unexpected devoted male fan base of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a female oriented animated television show and found that the universal themes of the show allowed male fans to set aside their “normative notions of gender, attitude, and behavior”.

 

Gender Roles and Toys

Malik and Wojdynski (2014) conducted a content analysis of toy-affiliated websites and found that although almost all of the websites showed depictions of wealth and materialism, the depictions were very gender specific. The websites that focused on girls promoted materialism through the form of consumption, whereas websites that targeted boys focused on gaining wealth through activities that were either achievement oriented or antisocial in nature (such as hoarding or stealing). The researchers suggested that because of this, these forms of media might “teach boys and girls how to use possessions differently to cope with decreased life satisfaction. For example, media might teach girls to cope by shopping and teach boys that obtaining wealth through success and achievement can increase their happiness”.

 

Conversely, Wohlwend (2009) argued that toys are not only “a text to be read, performed, and consumed with meanings suggested by its materials and its history of attached story lines [but also] a text to be written, produced, and revised as children improvise new meanings through play". Through her work with young girls who were avid Disney fans, she found that the girls were “productive consumers” who “enthusiastically took up similar media narratives, encountered social limitations in princess identities, improvised character actions, and revised story lines to produced counter-narratives of their own”.

 

Tweens and Media

Hoffner (1996) interviewed boys and girls between the age of 7 and 12 to learn about their favorite television characters and found that almost every boy and roughly half of the girls chose a character that was the same gender as them. Hoffner suggested that the reason this may be the case was because while boys primarily identified with characters who were similar to them, girls were open to a wider range. This may be due to the fact that there is a much broader range of male characters portrayed on television, whereas most female characters are very conventional, and “girls who named male favorites looked on them more as pseudo-friends than as role models, whereas female favorites were regarded as both”.
 

Female Film Franchises

Although gender theory in film is a well established topic, there is still relatively limited academic research that looks specifically into female film franchises. Hunting (2014) examined the Clueless franchise of the mid 1990s, one of the earliest female driven franchises to be developed. At the time that Clueless was released, the common belief in the retail market was that girls were a difficult demographic to reach with licensed products, and that franchises as a concept fit more naturally with the male-oriented fantasy and science-fiction genres. Hunting argued that although the franchise did not managed to have the longevity or scale of franchises such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, it is still  important to examine female-centered franchises such as Clueless to gain a more nuanced and well-rounded image of what goes into creating and constituting a franchise, especially as the Clueless franchise was not only aimed primarily at girls, but was also shaped and created primarily by women producers, unlike many other franchises, which are associated with creators such as J.J. Abrams and George Lucas.
 

 

Promotional Content Analysis

Gabriel (2010) conducted a mixed methods analysis of movie posters for the top-grossing American films of 2007, 2008, and 2009 in order to learn more about the depictions of male and female characters in movie posters, citing the lack of similar research. Through her analysis, the author found that the posters followed the typical social construction of gender in American society, except when the roles were subverted for the sake of humor, and also maintained the heteronormative status quo by avoiding any homosexual overtones in their imagery.

 

Coon (2005) conducted a content analysis of the promotional campaigns for the 2003 film Charlie’s Angels and the ABC television series Alias, both of which feature strong female characters that are powerful and action-oriented. He asserted that because promotional materials work to influence how viewers may read the main texts, they merit further investigation.  Through his analysis, Coon argued that in an attempt to appeal to male viewers, the promotional campaigns for both Charlie’s Angels and Alias decontextualize the themes of female empowerment found in the actual films and focus on the sexual appeal of the female characters, undermining their agency and turning them into passive sexual objects.