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More handpicked essays just for you.
Literature and gender equality
Gender roles in literature impacted people views on gender
The influence of society on the behavior of the individual
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Negative Attitude toward Women Carol Bark was in the first class of West Point, which is Military academy, located north of New York city. During the first year, she often heard back the negative words, “Mornin’ bitch” after greeting “Good morning sir” to her upperclassmen. Those men did not respect Carol Bark because they must have thought that she was weak and impossible to handle harass environment in being trained even though the fact was not true. For many decades, many society and cultures have overlapped the idea that men and women play different roles in life due to biological differences between the sexes. Thus, they support men more than women. In their article, “Sex Roles,” Hamilton McCubbin and Barbara Blum Dahl advocate, “ Feminists believe that traditional sex roles are used to keep women in their (disadvantaged) place.” Similar to many authors embrace and support traditional sex roles through their books and movies. Twilight is one of the examples of this. Thus, Twilight reinforces stereotypical gender roles by portraying a supernatural strong male vampire, Edward, who has the capacity to protect and control his weak and submissive human, Bella; as a result, the author tries to show us that men and women are not equal in society due to their gender and sexuality. Every culture has different social expectations for men and women. Most of the time traditional norms or stereotypical gender roles are created by society. What they observe seem to be true and convince others to believe it; as a result, the “script” come from stereotypical gender roles about masculine and feminine nature: Hamilton McCubbin and Barbara Blum Dahl states clearly, “men should be brave, strong, ambitious, and aggressive, while keeping the... ... middle of paper ... ...e biggest problems of humans, and people feel fear about this. For instance, before Bella had become a vampire, she wanted to become a vampire so badly in order to stay with Edward forever. When she turned a vampire after she had died due to giving birth, she had sex with Edward and said that vampires do not need to sleep because we do not feel tired at all. Today we have seen a lot of aging women and men undergo to plastic surgery in order to improve their physical looking. The authors of Twilight books and movies understand the humans’ desires, and they want us to know that the world we live today is just a temporary life. They believe that humans will have an internal life after we die, so they try to convince and encourage us that we should accept the limitations of human life and even inequality between sex roles because we will live happiness in later life.
Science has proven that anatomically, women’s physical strength is generally less in comparison to men’s enhanced muscularity. This anatomic disadvantage that women suffer has led to negative stereotypes of gender. Women are considered weaker, or less intelligent than men based on an impression that women are minuscule in comparison to men. In the novel Dracula, Bram Stoker sheds light on gender inequality, establishing that not all women are inferior to men, in fact, they should be seen as equals. Notably, Stoker reveals society’s ambivalence to women’s fortitude by providing an abundance of Victorian gender stereotypes and their inaccuracies throughout the novel. In addition, Stoker downplays female cliché’s, disclosing that women
Brannon, Linda. "Chapter 7 Gender Stereotypes: Masculinity and Femininity." Gender: Psychological Perspectives. 4th ed. Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon, 2005. 159-83. Print.
Believe it or not, gender scripts shape our everyday lives. The way we think, act, or even the way we interact with one another is undeniably influenced by gender roles. References toward gender are placed subliminally around us in ads, billboards, and on the television. These messages subconsciously tell us as a society what is acceptable behavior and what is not. As learned in class, gender scripts are socially constructed behaviors that society sets for all of us to follow. If someone behaves differently from the already established norms, that person is looked as weird or as an outcast from the rest of the group. The iconic film Love and Basketball allows us as viewers to see gender scripts being defied and role reversal emerged.
Vampires have been viewed with fear and fascination for centuries. Of all the vampires in literature, Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula is probably the most prominent vampire. Recently, there has been an upsurge of public interest in socially acceptable vampires, like the Cullens in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer. This essay will contrast Stoker’s Dracula with Carlisle Cullen, one of the newer vampires from the Twilight series. They will be examined in terms of their origins and how they dealt with immortality.
This article was written to bring attention to the way men and women act because of how they were thought to think of themselves. Shaw and Lee explain how biology determines what sex a person is but a persons cultures determines how that person should act according to their gender(Shaw, Lee 124). The article brings up the point that, “a persons gender is something that a person performs daily, it is what we do rather than what we have” (Shaw, Lee 126). They ...
of, as well as the activities appropriate to, men or women” (160). These stereotypes were supposed to be adhered to sternly. Obviously, the stereotypes for men and women were polar opposites. This patriarchal society viewed the male as the head of the household. They were expected to be the workers in the family. Men were expected to be powerful, brave, worldly, rational, independent, and sexual.
In Twilight, Edward Cullen presents the question; “ But what if I’m not the hero? What if I’m the bad guy?” The role of vampires is very controversial. Back in the day they were evil, soulless monsters and people genuinely feared them. However, in the present day it seems that we have grown to love them and even hope to one day be them. There are a plethora of vampire stories and many of them have become immense hits. With so many vampire stories, it is not uncommon that readers are able to identify a vast amount of similarities. Although similar in aspects, there are still many differences between the classic and modern day vampires. Two highly popular stories, in which we can easily identify similarities and differences, are Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.
Vampires have been a popular figure in literary works for almost 200 years; from John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005), the figure of the vampire has changed and developed over time but still remains popular and recognisable throughout literary history. The figure of the vampire is often used to represent ‘the other’, or as a manifestation of social anxieties at the time of writing. This is why it is interesting to study the how the tropes found within vampire fiction differ between texts, and the reasons behind these differences or transformations in the figure of the vampire. I will look at a range of texts to study how sexuality
The way individuals discipline their body is analogous to how they act towards the idea of power and status. How bodies are trained to emit gender distinctions is similar to how people tend to clothe their bodies. The way people tend to “sit, stand, gesture, walk, and throw” are different depending on their performance of masculinity or femininity (Martin 297). Women’s bodies tend to be more “confined, their movements restricted (Martin 297).” The term “femininity” defines the idea that the female sex is perceived with specific traits and characteristics. Crossing their legs, sitting up straight, having a softer voice and light footsteps are all ways in which women become naturally embedded to the gender norms. She is ascribed to be more gentle, nurturing, and emotional, and weak. These traits she attains are given by society the moment she is born, creating an idealized sexually more inferior identity than that of a male. By analyzing the socially constructed gender profile of men, it is easy to see how society creates a more dominant and powerful facade. They are stereotyped to being more aggressive, highly sexual, strong, competitive, emotionless, and in control. These socially constructed differences confines males and females to particular character profiles that limit their equality as a whole. The bodies are gendered “as a product of social doing; constituted through interaction (West and Zimmerman 175).” The way male and female establish their gender order in society correlates to their mentality as a whole. Overall masculinity is more valued than femininity in society. Masculinity correlates to gender privilege. An inequality that gives males the access to more power, resources and positions due to the traditional notions of gender roles. Men are given a greater advantage because he is deemed more capable to fend for himself. He is given greater power in the working field and
Throughout today’s society, almost every aspect of someone’s day is based whether or not he or she fits into the “norm” that has been created. Specifically, masculine and feminine norms have a great impact that force people to question “am I a true man or woman?” After doing substantial research on the basis of masculine or feminine norms, it is clear that society focuses on the males being the dominant figures. If males are not fulfilling the masculine role, and females aren’t playing their role, then their gender identity becomes foggy, according to their personal judgment, as well as society’s.
The Twilight series is a bestselling series written by Stephanie Meyer that has captivated millions of teenage girls. Twilight diverges from the vampire lore quite a bit and contains very little information about any other supernatural beings. Most vampire stories stress that vampires are night dwellers; that they cannot remain “alive” when the sun rises. Nevertheless, Twilight ignores that known ...
Society places ideas concerning proper behaviors regarding gender roles. Over the years, I noticed that society's rules and expectations for men and women are very different. Men have standards and specific career goals that we must live up to according to how others judge.
...present powerful characters, while females represent unimportant characters. Unaware of the influence of society’s perception of the importance of sexes, literature and culture go unchanged. Although fairytales such as Sleeping Beauty produce charming entertainment for children, their remains a didactic message that lays hidden beneath the surface; teaching future generations to be submissive to the inequalities of their gender. Feminist critic the works of former literature, highlighting sexual discriminations, and broadcasting their own versions of former works, that paints a composite image of women’s oppression (Feminist Theory and Criticism). Women of the twenty-first century serge forward investigating, and highlighting the inequalities of their race in effort to organize a better social life for women of the future (Feminist Theory and Criticism).
“Girls wear jeans and cut their hair short and wear shirts and boots because it is okay to be a boy; for a girl it is like promotion. But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading, according to you, because secretly you believe that being a girl is degrading” (McEwan 55-56). Throughout the history of literature women have been viewed as inferior to men, but as time has progressed the idealistic views of how women perceive themselves has changed. In earlier literature women took the role of being the “housewife” or the household caretaker for the family while the men provided for the family. Women were hardly mentioned in the workforce and always held a spot under their husband’s wing. Women were viewed as a calm and caring character in many stories, poems, and novels in the early time period of literature. During the early time period of literature, women who opposed the common role were often times put to shame or viewed as rebels. As literature progresses through the decades and centuries, very little, but noticeable change begins to appear in perspective to the common role of women. Women were more often seen as a main character in a story setting as the literary period advanced. Around the nineteenth century women were beginning to break away from the social norms of society. Society had created a subservient role for women, which did not allow women to stand up for what they believe in. As the role of women in literature evolves, so does their views on the workforce environment and their own independence. Throughout the history of the world, British, and American literature, women have evolved to become more independent, self-reliant, and have learned to emphasize their self-worth.
Human beings have been, and always will be, dichotomized into either male or female. When determining a person’s sex we often look for differences in facial features, body shape or mannerism’s, but another promising way to determine a persons sex and one that is most often used today, is through gender roles. Gender roles are behaviors that portray masculinity or femininity. The theory behind gender roles through multidisciplinary viewpoints is the focus of this paper. Throughout history and in every culture these roles have shifted and transformed into what society says is expectable. In this analysis, gender roles will be examined through a sociological, biological and evolutionary scope.