Women and men, girls and boys are expected to exhibit different behaviors, which they learn from their socio-cultural context, as there are specific expectations for each gender. One of the ways of "learning" the appropriate gendered behavior since childhood is children's popular culture texts, such as cartoons, which sometimes, in a very clear way, show this separation between women and men, reproducing the dominant gendered ideologies. The aim of the present study was to investigate the sociolinguistic representations of gender in children’s cartoon movies. For this reason, a qualitative comparative analysis of two scenes from two Disney animation films, an older and a contemporary one, was made through the use of the Androutsopoulos’s model, the Bucholtz and Hall’s approach as well as the ethnomethodological model of Sacks’s Membership Categorization Analysis. The analysis of the older film has shown a clear reproduction of traditional gendered stereotypes. In the contemporary film, it is observed that attempts are made to eliminate traditional patriarchal stereotypes, through the emergence of progressive gendered representations, which reflect the feminine fictional character. This, however, does not disturb the traditional female figure, which is conventionally associated with the kindness and sweetness of the female character. When it comes to the ways of speaking, the male fictional characters in the two movies use both the “feminine” and the “masculine” way of speaking. On the contrary, the female fictional character in the older movie uses only the “feminine” way of speaking, whereas the female fictional character in the contemporary movie uses both the “feminine” and the “masculine” way of speaking, in order to express dynamism and independence.
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In-Text Citation: (Tsotsou & Stamou, 2018)
To Cite this Article: Tsotsou, V. & Stamou, A. (2018). Sociolinguistic Representations of Gender in Children’s Cartoon Movies in the Past and the Present: A Comparative Scene Analysis of an Older and of a Contemporary Disney Animation Film. Multilingual Academic Journal of Education and Social Sciences, 6(1), 158–175 (in Greek).
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