Introduction Mean Girls, loosely based off of Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes, is a 2003 comedy that follows Cady Heron’s first venture into a public high school after being homeschooled. Cady moved to Illinois from Africa due to her parent’s receiving tenure at Northwestern University for their research. She befriends two outcasts, Janice Ian and Damien, who warn her about the Plastics, a clique of popular girls. Cliques can be “sophisticated, complex and multilayered, and every girl has a role within them (Wiseman, 2009). Though the Plastics is not the most complicated clique, each girl has a role. The members of the Plastics are Queen Bee Regina George, sidekick Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith. Regina is the queen bee, who typically have “a combination of charisma, force, money, looks, will, and social intelligence,” all of which are seen in Regina (Wiseman, 2009). The audience also sees Regina as the center of attention, and all eyes are on …show more content…
nurture. (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). Biology is one part of gender identity, but more importantly are societal, community, religious, cultural values (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010); “biology and environment… continually interact to inform virtually every aspect of human social functioning” (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). People pick up gendered norms through family life, the neighborhood and the media (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). School is a major place where gender identity is acted out and defined and gendered scripts on what it means to be male or female are made during early adolescence (Nakkula and Tosholis, 2010). This can be seen with Cady, as she has no idea what the gendered norms are due to her background of being homeschooled in Africa. We see over the movie that she becomes immersed into the gendered norms of her school. The work of Carol Gilligan has helped people understand how gender identity is
The film Mean Girls is about a young girl, Cady Heron, born and raised in Africa by her zoologist parents, who were also her homeschool teachers for sixteen years. When Cady moves to the United States, she enrolls in a public school for the first time. Here she realizes that high school students have the same hierarchy as the animals she observed in Africa. The lowest ranking group in this high school hierarchy is the outcasts, who also happen to be Cady’s first friends in the U.S. The highest on the high school food chain are the “plastics”. The “plastics”, are the most popular girls in school. The plastic’s notice Cady’s charming personality and stunning good looks and invite her to join their clique. In order to avenge her first friends,
Kane displays five different ways of parenting based on gender. She first introduces us to the Naturalizers. Naturalizers practice traditional values when raising their child. They believe in the concept of “it was how they were born” (Kane, 2012. p. 53). The mere definition explains to us that the biological outlooks outweigh the social outlooks. Naturalizers believe that differences are vital to gender. Next, the reader learns of a group named Cultivators. Cultivators believe that gender is socially constructed in the parents influence. Although this is deemed true by them, Kane shows the reader how Cultivators still adhere to the traditional value of young men but are okay with young women being nontraditional (taking out trash, doing
Mean Girls tells the story of Cady Heron’s transition from 12 years of home school in Africa to public high school in the United States when her mother gets offered tenure at a nearby college. Upon her arrival, Cady bonds with Janice and Damian who are considered apart of the “out crowd”. Janice and Damian give Cady the scoop on all of the social cues and how to navigate her new territory. When she is invited to join the most popular clique in the school, “The Plastics” Cady is placed in the middle of revenge and is encouraged to invade the lives of the girls to steal their secrets and eventually uproot their lives. Although this movie is primarily focused on revenge (which can be correlated with coercion, the least ideal form of leadership)
There are many different facets to the nature versus nurture argument that has been going on for decades. One of these, the influence of nature and nurture on gender roles and behaviors, is argued well by both Deborah Blum and Aaron Devor, both of whom believe that society plays a large role in determining gender. I, however, have a tendency to agree with Blum that biology and society both share responsibility for these behaviors. The real question is not whether gender expression is a result of nature or nurture, but how much of a role each of these plays.
...s a classic that shows just how nasty adolescent girls can be under typical circumstances. Nearly every character at one point shows adolescent egocentrism. There are numerous lifespan concepts covered throughout the movie. Cady Herron is a perfect example of how tough high school can be for an adolescent girl going through multiple changes. She goes through a lot more than the typical adolescent girl. However, I think she shows how staying true to yourself is important when going through high school. The "plastics" do a great job of displaying different relationships with peers. They have strong relationships with each other, but struggle to form these relationships with anyone outside of their group. All in all, Mean Girls does a great job of displaying parenting styles, egocentrism, relationships with peers, self worth in relationships, and juvenile delinquency.
The movie main character is Cady Heron who is a homeschooled girl. Her and her family lived in Africa for 15 years. They return back to the states and place Cady into a public school for the first time. Cady meets her classmates and finds a few good friends the introduce her to a group of girls called the Plastics. She ends up joining the plastics with the motive of bring them down because her new friend don’t like them very much and thought it would be funny. However, she eventually gets assimilated into the group of three unkind girls and starts to be just like them.
Regina George is a junior in high school who is described as teen royalty. As the leader of her clique referred to as “The Plastics”, she rules the school with her best friends Gretchen Weiners and Karen Smith loyally at her side. The three girls feed off of tearing the other girls in the school down and diminishing them by writing awful rumors and secrets in the “Burn Book”. With her tall and skinny physique, bright blonde hair and good-looks, she uses her sex appeal and superiority to manipulate and victimize the people around her including her family. Regina easily controls her family members. Her mother worships the ground Regina walks on and desperately looks to her for acceptance. Her ability to make other girls at school feel inferior fuels her power, as queen bee Regina is seen as the “it” girl. Everyone wants to look like her, dress like her, and be just like her. She uses her sex appeal to get any guy she wants and dangles them around everyone else to make them jealous.
Nurture side. She explains that the dominant view of gender is that it is natural (264). This
In the film Mean Girls, teenager Cady Heron was home-schooled in Africa by her zoologist parents. When her family moves to the U.S., Cady finally gets a taste of public school and learns a vital lesson about the cruelty involved in the tightly knit cliques of high school. She eventually finds herself being drug into a group of “the worst people you will ever meet”, The Plastics; and soon realizes how they came to get their name.
Mean Girls is a comedy film aired in 2004 this film captures the influences on lifespan development during adolescence. The main character Cady Heron was home schooled in Africa and now she must transition into high school where she is tested in different areas of her development. Throughout the film she becomes known as the new girl who is trying to figure out her self-identity. Cady integrates herself into a clique of girls known as the Plastics, soon enough Cady understands why they are known for their name. The Plastics run the school by the norms they have created and must always be followed otherwise it will lead into exclusion from the group. In order to be socially accepted social norms determining attitude, behavior, and status must
Norms in society do not just come about randomly in one’s life, they start once a child is born. To emphasize, directly from infancy, children are being guided to norms due to their parents’ preferences and choices they create for them, whether it is playing with legos, or a doll house; gender classification begins in the womb. A prime example comes from a female author, Ev’Yan, of the book “Sex, love,Liberation,” who strongly expresses her feelings for feminism and the constant pressure to conform to gender. She stated that “From a very young age, I was taught consistently & subliminally about what it means to be a girl, to the point where it became second nature. The Disney films, fairy tales, & depictions of women in the media gave me a good definition of what femininity was. It also showed me what femininity wasn’t (Ev’Yan).She felt that society puts so much pressure on ourselves to be as close to our gender identities as possible, with no confusion; to prevent confusion, her mother always forced her to wear dresses. In her book, she expressed her opinion that her parents already knew her gender before she was born, allowing them t...
The movie that I chose to do my analysis on, is Mean Girls because it is my all-time favorite movie. I watched it a million times, it never gets old and plus I know every single line in the movie. The main character Cady, played by Lindsay Lohan, exhibits how to go from being a nerd, popular, hated and rehabilitated all in one school year. It’s hilarious movie about high school but, it also covers many interpersonal concepts that we learned in class like: verbal communication, conflict and relationship dynamics. Before I provide my analysis, I’ll present my brief summary on the movie Mean Girls.
Mean Girls sends the message to women that they should not criticize one other to feel some type of empowerment. The way women criticize each other can be very aggressive, this act make women gives them the feeling of confident that there is someone who they consider lower than they are. When the movie Mean Girls first starts the female students of the school are continually judging and gossiping about one another. Because of this, it caused friction between the female students. Throughout the movie the consist fighting between girls gets worst. This friction causes women to feel the need to fight amongst one another. For example, The Plastics owned a book called the Burn Book where they wrote terrible things about their classmates but, once the book got out, the female students being fight even more. Once they stop feeling the need to bring each other down, the atmosphere of school changed. For instance, the different cliques were able to it and talk to about ...
Over the decades, a significant mark of the evolution of gender is the increasing social phenomenon in how society conceptualizes gender. Gender is a system of social practices for characterizing people as two different categories, femininity and masculinity and arranging social relations of inequality on the basis of that difference (Ridgeway & Correll 2004). Gender-neutral parenting (GNP) refers to raising children outside of the traditional stereotypes of girls and boys. It involves allowing children to explore their innate personalities and abilities rather than confining them into rigid gender roles that society has shaped. It can be argued that it is through socialization children discover how to operate in gendered structures, learn
Gender is such a ubiquitous notion that humans assume gender is biological. However, gender is a notion that is made up in order to organize human life. It is created and recreated giving power to the dominant gender, creating an inferior gender and producing gender roles. There are many questionable perspectives such as how two genders are learned, how humans learn their own gender and others genders, how they learn to appropriately perform their gender and how gender roles are produced. In order to understand these perspectives, we must view gender as a social institution. Society bases gender on sex and applies a sex category to people in daily life by recognizing gender markers. Sex is the foundation to which gender is created. We must understand the difference between anatomical sex and gender in order to grasp the development of gender. First, I will be assessing existing perspectives on the social construction of gender. Next, I will analyze three case studies and explain how gender construction is applied in order to provide a clearer understanding of gender construction. Lastly, I will develop my own case study by analyzing the movie Mrs. Doubtfire and apply gender construction.