Essay About Gender Roles
Gender roles in the film have been looked over by a good amount of people for many years Media is something everyone looks at for entertainment. Young children look at the media as an influence, it teaches kids gender roles that they have to naturally make sense of and think they have to follow. Disney films portray gender roles very harshly, showing children that there’s a certain way you should have to act based on your gender. until the movie Mulan, The movie Mulan produced by Disney to tell a story of a young strong Chinese female who joins the army pretending to be a man to replace her elderly father who was about to be drafted. This essay will show how Mulan demonstrates the stereotypical gender roles in her society and the consequences of the roles that she had to follow.
Mulan’s story is originally described in a 6th-century Chinese poem known as Ballad of Mulan (Klimczak). The exact period is not known but is to be believed that the fable goes back to the Northern Wei Dynasty (386 – 557 AD). The Ballad of Mulan written by an anonymous poet, consisting of 31 sets of two successive lines that rhyme and have the same meter and are made of mostly five-character phrases. The original poem has been written in many different ways with the plot always being the same.
The stereotypical image of princesses was to have long hair and a tiny waist, Disney changes that in the movie Mulan by showing her cut her own hair and her dressing in giant armor to hide her identity as a female. Mulan must blend in with other men, but why? The gender roles like only a man could go into the army because a woman was perceived too weak both mentally and physically and was expected to stay home and cook, clean and nurture. Mulan was determined to fight despite the stereotypical gender roles that were set in her community. The importance of music in Mulan is symbolic of the depiction of gender because in the song “Bring Honor to Us All”, they need to follow rules like the desire for women to have good taste, be obedient, wear large amounts of makeup, and have tiny waists. It is very well noticed that there was gender discrimination during the same time that Mulan took place. So when Mulan dressed as a man and went to the army he was considered deviant to their social norms. Mulan gained her success through a lie because of gender discrimination.
This didn’t just happen in movies, During the civil war there was a burial detail at Gettysburg, this is where Pennsylvania estimated somewhere between 400-750 women disguised as men who had fought the frontline. Then women stood a smaller chance of being discovered because just like Mulan most of the people who fought started out with no military training so everyone started with the same training going at the same pace. Many women in uniform were still discovered often after being injured and having to get medical attention. The American Battlefield trust wrote in an article that Clara Barton, who went on and found the red cross, discovered Mary Galloway’s true identity while treating a chest would gallery had suffered at the Battle of Antietam. They discovered women would sometimes be sent home without punishment but a few faced imprisonment or institutionalization.
