Fifth Blog Post

My source is called “Disney’s modern heroine Pocahontas: revealing age-old gender stereotypes and role discontinuity under a facade of liberation”. This article was written by Lauren Dundes, in the Social Science Journal. This article is focused on one specific Disney Princess Pocahontas. In the article Lauren Dundes disputes the idea that Pocahontas was the start of a new generation of Disney princess.  That Pocahontas would break the race barrier, and gender stereotypes concerning Disney princess.  While Pocahontas does do these things, by being an independent princess. She makes a lot of her own decisions herself, but at the same time is still restricted by the same gender issues as the previous Disney princesses. Pocahontas is seen as Native American “savage” that needs to be “saved” and brought to the cultured world by John Smith. The article concludes that while Pocahontas does not act like the typical Disney Princess, and is more liberated than her predecessors she still is not a free woman. She still adheres to some of the previous Disney Princess bonds.  I feel like this source is very useful to my essay. This is because the essay directly, contributes to my essay question of if Disney princess movies are contributing to or harming their young viewers’ self-esteems, and self-views. This source helped me with the structure of my essay immensely. This is because it helped me figure out what I wanted to write my essay on. Before reading this article, I just had the broad topic of Disney princesses and the gender stereotypes that the princess movies contain.

Fourth Blogpost

My source is called “Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses”. This title may seem a little off, because my Research paper is supposed to be focused on James Cameron’s melodramatic film “Titanic”. However, while doing my research I came across this article, “Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses”, and decided to focus my paper on how female characters are portrayed in Disney movies. The main argument of this article is how male and female characters are portrayed in the various Disney princess films. The article uses various experiments, and outside information to compare and contrast the different Disney princesses, with their male counterparts. The “male” and “female” traits are categorized, and then the prince and princesses are each matched with whatever traits they exhibit in the films. This experiment helps support how Disney makes all of its’ princesses have “womanly” traits, and do things that a typical woman, according to Disney, would.  It also explains how the movies are also biased towards females. For example, according to the article Disney princess films are racist and sexualize the princesses with most of them appearing with, “extremely pale skin tones, small waists, delicate limbs, and full breasts”. A study was done the counted the number of female and male characteristics that males and females of each movie had. The male characters 495 female characteristics, while the females had more than twice that number with 1068. This source was very helpful to me, because it gave me a lot of information on how females are portrayed unfairly in Disney films.

Third Blogpost

I plan to write my research paper on the extremely melodramatic movie Titanic. I will be choosing this topic for a variety of reasons, the most important being it’s my favorite movie of all time. I saw the film for the first time when I was about 10 years old with my mother, and have seen it more times than I can even think about counting. Titanic is also a great topic for this research paper because it is the definition of melodramatic. It has “star-crossed” lovers who are from opposite backgrounds. The woman already has the person that she is supposed to be with, who just so happens to abuse her adding to the drama. Music is added throughout the film, to intensify emotions that are already intense. Then to add to all of the tension that is present already, it’s all set on the RMS Titanic which everyone knows is going to be a disastrous voyage.