Presentations in Summary

After our last day of presentations on tuesday, november 24, we were all done presenting our topics and a few trends were recognizable. Alot of us chose to work with the topic on gender shaping in young children, and this included myself.

Although the other topics seemed thoughtful and possible to research, it seems that the many discussions on disney movies and their role throughout the years in shaping young childrens imaginations led most of us to work with this topic. Although disney has changed their image alot over the last decade and has shown through movies like "Enchanted" that they are well aware of the stereotypes their movies used to make, the childrens movies we grew up with, such as cinderella, beauty and the beast and snow white all appear more and more controversial when we look at the imagery and plot today. Its clear that society has grown not just alot more tolerant towards all races and genders, but we have also uncovered and dealt with alot of stereotypes that have been around for a long time and have previously remained untouched. Through our accepting and dealing with these issues, it is obvious that our perceptions of racial and gender equality have not been so clear and recognized in the past, and have led previous generations to overlook these controversial aspects of disney movies, deeming them as appropriate for children. Would this be the same case today? Although these movies would most probably still make it through a ratings review without much of a problem, I would imagine that issues like unrealistic portrayal of female characters in movies such as Cinderella would be a topic that would be mentioned in a review or critique of the film.

Thus although we may not have become more dismissing and restrictive in what we watch, and choose to let children watch today, It seems that we have just grown to accept these stereotypes in entertainment media of the past, and have learned to appreciate these materials the way the were supposed to be appreciated at the time of their release, and not through the eyes of current media standarts regarding what we deem as good or bad. If this wasnt the case, many great works of art, like the classical disney movies would be discarded simply because of their inability to stay current with societies values as they shape and adjust in constant flux.