Amanda Blohm's Introduction: Gender in Popular Films

Hey everybody, my name is Amanda Blohm and I will be posting about Gender in Popular Films. I find that the influence films have on gender in general society, from a young age for children even up to young adults, is important to look at and understand. Generally, when one thinks of gender, it is in the two boxes of female and male. These are not the only genders, as there are several gender identities. As our society progresses in the LGBT movements, more of these are coming to light and being represented in media. Films happen to be a large part of our life and what we see as children, teenagers and adults.

Children are influenced by what they see characters do and how they act. We tend to develop our gender norms from a very young age, especially influenced by what we see in films. How women and men are represented differently in films greatly affects a child's perception. Young girls look at princesses and see how they act, and usually they emulate the way and style these princesses have. Boys will see how men are represented, almost always as the leads of movies and confident, rarely are they ever seen as weak. The great difference between how women and men are represented in movies becomes important when looking at the development of gender roles from a young age.

As I said, the representation of gender in films is changing as more than just the gender binary is expressed now. Although the amount of transgender characters in movies are limited, they are beginning to be shown and it is important for any person of any age to see that proper representation in films, in media.

The fact remains that:

• "Males outnumber females 3 to 1 in family films. In contrast, females comprise just over 50% of the population in the United States. Even more staggering is the fact that this ratio, as seen in family films, is the same as it was in 1946." [Source and if you scroll to the bottom, you can find a few more statistics about the gender ratios in film]
• And by far, the fact that there is so little representation of transgender, genderqueer and nonbinary people in media that there is far less information about the topic. But that does not mean that there is no representation for genders other than the binary, here is an article that points out all of the transgender characters that have been introduced through film (as well as television shows, although all my blog posts will be focusing on films).