Screening Gender on Children's Television

The Views of Producers around the World

Dafna Lemish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136997327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Screening Gender on Children's Television offers readers insights into the transformations taking place in the presentation of gender portrayals in television productions aimed at younger audiences. It goes far beyond a critical analysis of the existing portrayals of gender and culture by sharing media professionals' action-oriented recommendations for change that would promote gender equity, social diversity and the wellbeing of children.

Incorporating the author's interviews with 135 producers of children's television from 65 countries, this book discusses the role television plays in the lives of young people and, more specifically, in developing gender identity. It examines how gender images presented to children on television are intertwined with important existential and cultural concerns that occupy the social agenda worldwide, including the promotion of education for girls, prevention of HIV/AIDS and domestic violence and caring for 'neglected' boys who lack healthy masculine role models, as well as confronting the pressures of the beauty myth.

Screening Gender on Children's Television also explores how children's television producers struggle to portray issues such as sex/sexuality and the preservation of local cultures in a profit-driven market which continually strives to reinforce gender segregation. The author documents pro-active attempts by producers to advance social change, illustrating how television can serve to provide positive, empowering images for children around the world.

Screening Gender on Children's Television is an accessible text which will appeal to a wide audience of media practitioners as well as students and scholars. It will be useful on a range of courses, including popular culture, gender, television and media studies. Researchers will also be interested in the breadth of this cross-cultural study and its interviewing methodology.

Chapter 1
Gender Representations and Their Socializing Role

What Do We Already Know?¹

What do media representations of gender, those images that re-present females and males to us, contribute to children’s understandings about themselves and who they should strive to be? How do the media construct what is portrayed as normative femininity and normative masculinity in our societies? We begin to address these key, general questions by reacquainting ourselves with what exists in practice. This will be followed by presenting a broad conceptualization of these issues, grounded in scholarly thinking and research, that serves as the rich resource for interpretations presented throughout this book. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of gender representations for children’s socialization and then, given all of the above, a brief presentation of the project’s research agenda.

Features of Gender Representations in Children’s Visual Media

Most visual media present characters that can be assigned to one of the two gender categories – be they humans, cartoon figures, animals, or science fiction characters. Collectively, such characters constitute a pool of models with whom children can negotiate, use to make meaning, identify with, and imitate – should they chose to do so. They define for them what is “normal” and accepted in their society. Consequently, adopting such models earns positive reinforcement, while those deemed exceptional, even deviant, are negatively sanctioned.

Findings from studies that have examined the portrayals of females and males on television, in movies, computer and video games, and advertisements point to a social world available to children that differentiates between the two genders quite systematically, in a manner much in line with representations in adult programming.² On the whole, like adult males, boys are identified with “doing” in the public sphere that is associated with characteristics such as action, rationality, forcefulness, aggressiveness, independence, ambitiousness, competitiveness, achievement, higher social status, and humor.

Girls, like adult women, are associated with “being” in the private sphere and are characterized, generally, as passive, emotional, caregiving, childish, sexy, subordinate to males, and of lower social status. Their “girly” personality traits are depicted as being fundamentally different in nature from those of boys. Girls, by contrast, are portrayed as being more romantic, sensitive, dependent, vulnerable, and continue to be defined more by their appearance than by their actions. Such dominant media messages in texts designed for children continue to promote the same restrictive ideologies of femininity and masculinity that characterize media in general, and say little about the multifaceted aspects of girls’ and boys’ lives, capabilities, and potential contributions to society.

Males – both younger and older – are the main heroes of most children’s programs. They succeed in overcoming everyday problems, deal successfully with all sorts of dangers, and have many adventures. Even non-gendered imaginary characters – such as creatures and animals – are considered “naturally” to be male, unless they are specifically marked as female through processes of sexualizing their appearance (e.g. hair ribbons, long eyelashes, colored lips, waspwastes, long legs, short skirts, high heels). Female characters in most media texts for children are there to be saved and protected by the males and provide the background for the adventure. Above all, their position is defined by their meaning for the male heroes. Certain symbols, such as horses, dolphins jumping in front of a sunset, bunnies, and flowers are gendered in our societies and reinforced by market forces as “girlish.” Other areas, such as technology, action, or fighting are almost always framed as male, hence reinforcing viewer expectations of masculine dominance in these domains. Marketing, and more specifically, television advertising and merchandise packaging for children, applies gendered clichés excessively in presenting goods for consumption by signaling gender intention via means such as glittery or pastel colors for girls and action-packed dark hues for boys.³

Thus, contemporary children’s visual media continue to offer a significant underdevelopment of female characters. But what is even more striking, is the fact that the bulk of content presented to children continues to systematically promote quantified underrepresentation of females as well. For example, a study of gender prevalence and portrayal of G-rated (general viewing) films in the US (those deemed appropriate for children) found that only 28 percent of the speaking characters (both real and animated) were female; and only 17 percent of the films’ narrators were female. Similarly, male characters constituted twice the number of female characters in television created for children in the US.⁴ These findings are hardly unique for the US. A cross-cultural comparison involving 24 countries that analyzed over 26,000 characters in over 6,000 children’s fictional programs broadcast for children 12 years old and under during 2007⁵ reinforced these conclusions. First, and most striking, is the fact that the sample included twice as many males as females (68 percent and 32 percent respectively), reiterating the marginality of girls in all realms of life. This gender imbalance was evident all over the world, in public and private television, in international and domestic programming, in animated and real-life formats. Female characters were even more noticeably underrepresented as non-human characters (animals, monsters, and robots), where the biological sex of a character is clearly an arbitrary choice: whether an animal, monster, or robot is a boy or a girl is a choice producers make. It seems that the greater the degree of creative freedom, the more the gender ration is biased towards male characters. The study also documented the fact that girls appear much more often in groups while males are independent loners and antagonists.

Furthermore, the study clearly suggested that Caucasian characters dominate children’s TV screen around the world (72 percent), with the reality of ethnic diversity being repressed in most of the participating countries. That race and gender are heavily conflated in these images is strongly evident in the dominance of exaggerated Western body-types presented on children’s television. Major gender differences related to body size were also found: Girls tended to be very thin, twice as thin as boys, who were twice as frequently overweight. This is particularly the case in animated programs marketed on a global scale. Analysis of 102 animated girls and young women in such programs points to alarming findings:⁶ Globally, close to two in three young female characters have extremely unrealistic figures, with entirely unnatural small, wasp-like waists and long legs. What is more striking in these fabricated, unattainable figures is that they are so much alike, creating a unified model that puts even the heavily criticized Barbie figure behind as too curvy and full.⁷

These bodily characteristics are strongly related to an additional central feature of visual images of characters, which is the tendency to hypersexualize the appearance of young females. Females 11 years and under on TV for children were found to be almost four times as likely as males to be shown in sexy attire. Here, too, animated stories tended to exaggerate even more the unrealistic small waist and sexy appearance of girls, while at the same time animated action males were more likely to have a large chest and unrealistically masculinized physique than their live-action counterparts.⁸ And, once again, we see how the restrictive “truism” of “girls appear” and “boys do” take up form and shape in presenting oversexualized girls and overactive boys in animated content consumed by children around the world.

Over-sexualized portrayals of girls in popular culture have continued to attract public and scholarly attention, including recent studies.⁹ This phenomenon has been designated the “Lolita Effect,”¹⁰ after the famous novel by Nabokov, which describes a complicated relationship between a mature man and a seductive teenage girl. The frequent presentation of sexy little girls or fun-fearless-sexual teenagers is entangled with myths of sexuality that link these portrayals to particular ideal body types and youth (i.e., only girls who look a particular way are “cool” and “sexy”), as well as to beliefs about girls’ exhibitionism and manipulation that attract the male gaze and potential sexual violence toward them.¹¹ Scholars argue that the “Lolita Effect” suggests that the media circulate and contribute to the cultivation of distorted sets of myths about girls’ sexuality that work to both undermine girls’ healthy sexual development and at the same time to keep girls in their subordinated place in society.

Of course, we find changes over time¹² as well as exceptions in the domain of children’s programming, as in adult media. The exceptions include some features (but not all, as their body images remain unchallenged) of Disney’s female lead characters in more recent films such as Pocahontas and Mulan (and others discussed in the following chapters) as well as the global success of Dora the Explorer,¹³ the Latina girl in the hit Nickelodeon pre-school program. Indeed, Nickelodeon, the commercial cable network for children, has been cited for the creation and inclusion of many new, multidimensional girl characters (e.g., Clarissa, As Told By Ginger).¹⁴ While these exceptions, too, have been the subject of criticism (e.g. Disney’s Pocahontas, for example, has been criticized for the continued romanticization of Native American women, particularly in relation to her love for a white man¹⁵), they serve to highlight, by way of contrast, the routine gender bias of everyday commercial popular media around the world.

One trend of new images noted is the shift of perspective from girls as victims to girls as active subjects and creative media producers themselves (e.g. of blogs, digital images, etc).¹⁶ Of particular interest are depictions of strong but feminine girl heroes in children’s television and video games, such as the animated series The Powerpuff Girls, Kim Possible, Atomic Betty, and others that have been inspired by the emergence of the concept of “Girl Power.” While supergirls may be brave, smart, and independent, most of them also embrace the centrality of physical attractiveness (supposedly for their own pleasure) as liberated and empowered strong characters, and not as passive objects that are posing in order to please a male gaze.¹⁷ The highly successful Powerpuff Girls animation series is exemplary of this evolving strategy, as it contains many contradictory messages about the coexistence of strength (“power”) and femininity (“puff”)¹⁸ while nourishing itself on the themes of “girl power” and power feminism associated with third-wave feminism. Accordingly, being strong, brave, successful, and independent while fighting evil forces does not necessarily negate the pleasure of embracing “girlishness.”

While the Powerpuff Girls are only five years old, analyses of other programs featuring “tough girls” – as warriors and superheroines – suggest that the range of socially accepted physical appearances offered by supergirls is restricted, hypersexualized, and Westernized. Girls who do not conform to these expectations are often socially sanctioned, even ostracized as outcasts. Thus, popular culture seems to be involved in an ambivalent process, wanting to depict strong girls in a manner such that they do not pose too dramatic a challenge to the traditional association between men and toughness. As a result, female toughness, while growing in scope and widening in character, is still greatly restricted and regulated in a variety of ways, including the overemphasis on sexy appearance, never being tougher than the male partners, and the inclusion of overtones rendering a potential lesbian reading.¹⁹ Female friendships among strong characters are rare and those that exist are overshadowed by female rivalry. The exceptions – such as Xena: Warrior Princess and Buffy the Vampire Slayer – exemplify the possibility of toughness and female friendship and solidarity as feeding each other.²⁰ However, while successful young women characters like Buffy have attracted extensive scholarly and public attention,²¹ the textual narrative and other visual markers relate the message that even strong empowered young females continue to offer girls lessons about normative feminine beauty as a key to success, popularity, and an exciting life.

Another emerging issue in images of girls and women discussed in the recent literature cites the presentation of more “brainy” characters who break away from the negative depiction of clever girls as unattractive and unpopular. Scholarly critique of this move argues that these portrayals maintain clever women in a subordinate position to men, as women whose cleverness and intelligence is a sexy asset and not an obstacle. Recent characters in children’s cartoons (e.g. the PowerPuff Girls, Lisa in The Simpsons, Daria, Dora) as well as in family drama heavily consumed by children (e.g. Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) challenge this notion, suggesting that being smart and “cool” are not mutually exclusive nor do they cancel out one another.²² This argument is aligned with a third-wave feminism notion that the feminist and the feminine are not necessarily binary positions, and that one can be an independent and smart girl and still enjoy displaying girlish sensibilities and feminine performances.

Irrespective of these changes, in most of the television fare viewed by children around the world we find ambivalence about girls’ intelligence and the threat it might pose to the normalized gender order, as expressed among others by the resilience of the “dumb (or bitchy) blonde” stereotype and the presentation of girls who are not as clever as their male friends. Being clever is often signified by unfashionable clothing, wearing glasses, a lack of self confidence, and the like, and is juxtaposed to romance and female nurturance. Alternatively, smart girls often use “subversive niceness” to make their intelligence less noticeable and more palatable.²³ The problem with such strategies is that they match the preconceived notions that women are “manipulative” and “conniving,” using their feminine traits to get what they want.

Race has also been an area of exploration and change in children’s TV, with a growing blurring of racial differences. Here, rather than presenting a binary categorization of black/white, there is a tendency for hybridity and ambiguity that allows for open interpretation as to the racial identities of characters.²⁴ The hugely successful Bratz characters and dolls exemplify this phenomenon, as do the Cheetah Girls, Dora, and Gabriella from High School Musical and various other “brown” characters that speak to many races and “travel” successfully internationally. What seems like a fluidity of the category of “Whiteness” and the “browning” of characters is perceived, apparently, by producers and audiences alike, as more inclusive and universal. This strategy may seem to be less threatening than clear racial distinctions, and thus it serves marketing purposes quite well.

Male images in children’s television have been showing some signs of change as well. One trend is the growing numbers of buffoons and not particularly handsome “geeks” portrayed as techno-oriented wizards who are going to rule the world through their brains and mastery of technology (modeled, for example, after Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft and one of the world’s wealthiest people). Yet, scholars have noted a stronger trend towards the hypermasculinity of animated male characters, portrayed through the growing size of their bodies, for example by huge biceps and shoulders. One consequence is that such “beefy men” assume more space (both physically and symbolically) on the screen. Some researchers argue, as well, that these characterizations are a form of backlash to the perceived threats to traditional masculinity posed by the feminist and gay movements as well as a reaction to the Vietnam War and the perception of “weak Americans”²⁵ reinforced since with the events of 9/11 and recent military actions.

In conclusion, while we find a decrease in some types of traditional gender stereotypes on television for children, other stereotypes are emerging and becoming more prominent. Clearly, one major limitation of thi...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Gender Representations and Their Socializing Role
• Chapter 2 Studying Producers of Quality Television Around The Globe
• Chapter 3 What Does Gender Mean?
• Chapter 4 The Big No-No
• Chapter 5 The Segregated Workplace and the Implied Audience
• Chapter 6 Gender Representations in Children’s Television
• Chapter 7 Beyond The Principles
• Glossary of Programs
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index