Gender In Pop Culture

Worse, when women swallow the emptiness, loneliness, and naked violence that comes with their gender performance, their ability to develop self-awareness on matters such as academic, sexual, reproductive, safety, and health care rights no longer exists. When characters such as Ruth from Green Girls come to believe that womanhood means being on display and having to perform their roles as women in public spheres despite the feelings of wanting to shield oneself from strangers, they lose their freedom and become fettered to performative roles. Their performance of gender becomes, as Butler mentions, the result of both subtle and blatant coercions. These coercions offer a script of life that women must follow in order to remain the star of their

Gay suggests another way characters within pop culture are portrayed as unlikable or at least not powerful, is by being a person of color. As stated earlier, there exists a narrow conceptualization of womanhood and femininity, which primarily mirrors the privileged class, which dominates pop culture in terms of the books we read, television we watch, ads we consume, heroines we aspire to be, and music we listen to. However there does exist different identities of what it means to be a woman. In Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens. Cathy J. Cohen imagines the contemporary view and power of women to be in relation to their homogenized identity. This meaning, to be a woman also depends on other factors of identity; to be a woman in relation to if you are poor or rich, black or white, gay or straight, queer or fall into the dominant class. Luckily, this understanding of womanhood has somewhat expanded. The scope of racial expansion somewhat increases by moving to include Gay’s idolized Black Miss America. Unfortunately, this expansion follows the privilege trend where only a certain type of green girl is able to satisfy the role of Black Miss America. A large issue that Gay has with representation of women of color is that they are tokenized, they are stereotyped, and they are grossly generalized. Instead of this poor misrepresentation of women of color, both Gay and Cohen seek, “a new political direction and agenda, one that does not focus on integration into dominant structures but instead seeks to transform the basic fabric and hierarchies that allow systems of oppression to persist and operate efficiently” (Cohen 165). Gay concludes that inclusion of women of color in pop culture fails to portray them as more than one dimensional characters. This lack of depth is attributed to the lack of respect that women of color face in real life as well. While the