Disney Gender Stereotypes

Media has the capacity to capture an audience’s attention and influence someone’s thoughts and ideas. Due to their growing and innocent minds, media can be very influential to children, in some cases it can stick with them as they grow into adults. Recently, this idea has been more concerning because as the world and society changes, the messages these movies are portraying have not. Therefore, researchers are interested in knowing how children are being affected, or not affected, by these films, and what other things may be adding to it.
Through their films, Disney uses gender to their advantage, to portray a false sense of what it means to be a man or woman. More so, in portraying princess characters in their films, Disney is affecting how

Through her study, she found that “…engagement with Disney Princesses can be limiting, as young girls especially are more likely to embrace traditional female stereo-types both concurrently and longitudinally.” (1923) This shows that by watching these films, girls are only shown female leads in traditional settings, which can limit what they are cable of doing later on in life. This idea is very similar to the idea presented in Lori Baker-Sperry’s article, “The Production of Meaning through Peer Interaction: Children and Walt Disney’s Cinderella.” The author is interested in knowing how the Disney movie Cinderella, effects young women’s self-esteem. During her interaction with a group of young women, she found that “The girls were envious of Cinderella. For example, one girl asked, with a voice full of anxiousness, how Cinderella got to be so beautiful, and stated that she wanted to be as beautiful as Cinderella.” (725) With this, she found that girls often wanted their lives to look like those depicted in these films. Which can contribute to the levels of their

In “Assessing Gender-Related Portrayals in Top-Grossing G-Rated Films,” Stacy L. Smith and et. al, states that the way media presents gender changes as the intended age of the films get older. In opposition to this, in Mia Adessa Towbin’s and et al. article, “Images of Gender, Race, Age, and Sexual Orientation in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films," they state that the way gender is being depicted in the media does not differ, it is still depicted in the traditional