Shrek and Gender Socialization

This week's lectures and readings about gender socialization made a lot of sense to me, and got me thinking about how it applied to my own life.

One reading that really spoke to me was "The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children's Fairy Tales" by Lori Baker-Sperry and Liz Grauerholz. In this reading, the authors discuss the importance of children's literature for assimilating children socially, setting their values, and setting gender power structures in society from an early age. Classic fairy tales like Cinderella and Snow White show girls that outer beauty and being "saved" by a man are what girls should value. Laziness, ugliness and blackness are contrasted with whiteness and goodness, setting gender and racial stereotypes in young girls' minds.

These are the same movies that I watched and treasured as a child. I had Disney princess dolls, a bedspread, and dressed as a different Disney princess for every Halloween. Though I don't attribute my girliness exclusively to Disney and fairy tales, I do believe it played a major role, and that "this emphasis on a feminine beauty ideal may operate as a normative social control for girls and women" (Baker Sperry and Grauerholz, 191). As the authors say in the conclusion, movies like Shrek will hopefully change this idea and stop the pattern of teaching young girls hegemonic femininity so early in their lives. However, I was old enough when Shrek came out to remember that I didn't really like the movie and watch it over and over like I did my other favorites, like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella- simply because Shrek doesn't follow the pattern of beautiful princesses falling in love and living happily ever after. How many little girls want to dress like an ogre for Halloween? Definitely not me.

On the other hand, some argue that the Shrek franchise, rather than crossing this masculine/feminine beauty and gender boundary,  "reproduces white heterosexuality as the norm" and is actually "simultaneously reproducing normative ideas in new ways." This is written by Elizabeth Marshall and Ozlem Sensoy in their discourse on "The same old hocus-pocus: pedagogies of gender and sexuality in Shrek 2." They say one ongoing theme of the movie is "girl powerlessness," and that girls are taught to "kick ass to keep their man," among other gendered topics.