Gender Stereotypes In Get Out

Get Out is a horror film released earlier this year in February. The film centers on Chris Washington, a black man, and his white girlfriend, Rose Armitage. Rose invites Chris to a weekend trip to meet her parents. When meeting Chris, Rose’s parents are overly accommodating towards Chris and constantly speak about how much they love President Obama and other African-American people. Chris attributes this as awkward attempts to deal with their interracial relationship. However, after a series of events, Chris learns that the Armitage family has been performing illegal acts in order to obtain a “superior genetic race”. In order to accomplish this, they kidnap black men, hypnotize them, and perform illegal surgeries to place white people into

He is a heteronormative, heterosexual male. Chris himself does not necessarily enforce gender roles or expectations on any of the other characters, but rather they are enforced upon him. For example, when he meets his girlfriend’s brother, the brother asks him about his athleticism. He states something along the lines of, “You must be great at sports, you know, with your superior genetic make-up.” This statement contains heavy racialized sentiments, along with gender expectations. The brother makes this claim because Chris is black and a man. There is a stereotype of the great “black male athlete”: they are strong, fast, and almost animal-like in their performance. Had Chris been a woman, the brother may have never brought up the topic of sports and athleticism. Also, when a family friend meets Chris, she makes a comment to Rose about black men being better in bed and bigger “down there”. The family friend was racially fetishizing and enforcing gender roles onto Chris by saying this. Her comment enforces the gender expectation that men must have a large penis and be good in bed to be considered a

Chris and Rose seem like an in-love couple that is trying to deepen their relationship. Rose’s family, while awkward and overly nice, is not unrealistic in how they handle their daughter’s interracial relationship. Everything about Chris and Rose’s weekend trip and the Armitage residence are portrayed as normal in order to demonstrate that not everything is as it seems. One of the main twists of the story is that Chris’s girlfriend has been in on the plan the entire time because throughout the story, she is very supportive of Chris. Rose is the one who defends Chris from racism, comforts him, and reassures him constantly. It is not until Chris urges Rose that they both leave the house immediately that Rose reveals she has been in on the plan the whole