by Ina Tolentino
Ina is a double major in nursing and psychology from Elk Grove, CA. Ina “always had trouble embracing myself with the way masculinity and femininity are pitted against each other” and found meaning in writing this essay, as they believe “there’s so much value in painting ourselves however we want … regardless of the expectations of gendered roles.” As a non-binary individual, Ina feels that writing this piece was a healing experience and a reminder to embrace all aspects of who they are. They love reading and writing, which has led to a bedroom flooded with different kinds of books. Now and in the future, Ina hopes to reach people and help them, whether it is through the medical field, psychology, or writing. They note that “life is full of people, relationships, and stories worth sharing, and there’s something very special about being a part of that process—giving or receiving.”
Pink and blue. Sparkly and strong. Through these common oppositional stereotypes, gender is so easily understood as a dichotomy – perpetuating femininity and masculinity as mutually exclusive. This extreme divide of gender can be attributed to patriarchy, the principle that quantifies worth based on gender. bell hooks in “Understanding Patriarchy” defines it as “a political-social system that insists males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females” (1). The patriarchy’s sexist ideologies are upheld and enforced “through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence,” especially prevalent in medias with stigmatized depictions of gender expression (hooks 1). If these discriminations are internalized, an understanding and construction of one’s gender identity can easily become mutated. The goal of this paper is to expose the patriarchal undermining of femininity and analyze its effect in adolescent media on young girls in order to advocate for more inclusive, accepting, and even fluid gender expression.
hooks describes the patriarchal influence on her own childhood, specifically how her and her brother’s behaviors were expected to fall in accordance with a “predetermined, gendered script” that was commonly “assigned…as children” (1). This script establishes rules about gender expression that crucially hinder early enactment of identity, causing “confusion about gender” at a young age (1). The script’s basis on “patriarchal values and beliefs” forces children to be and act according to its definitions of gender, regardless of their own natural dispositions. hooks anecdotally shares a time she broke free from this script, aggressively playing marbles, “a boy’s game” (1). However, she was punished with both verbal and physical abuse by her patriarchal father for displaying masculinity; he belittled her as “‘just a little girl’” and repeatedly beat her with a board (2). She was “banished – forced to stay alone in the dark,” symbolic of the way she was diminished to and trapped within her “natural” place of patriarchal femininity (2). Because the patriarchy deems such strict standards for the “natural” roles of genders, females and males are diminished to the confines of feminine submissiveness and masculine domination. The indoctrination and reinforcement of these roles in childhood is traumatizing, and though hooks’s physical violence of the fifties might not be as relevant in today’s context, the psychological terrorism she describes still is.
hooks, quoting therapist Terrence Real, outlines the patriarchal destruction and convolution of views on gender: “‘Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued’” (6). By imposing what is “right” and “natural” against what is “wrong” and “unnatural” solely based on gender, the patriarchy uses gender stereotypes to dictate what identities are socially acceptable. On a fundamentally universal, human level, the patriarchy constructs stigmas of gender that deny wholeness of identity. This discrimination between the genders has been shown to create confusing relationships with identity, as scholar Adam Rogers, whose studies emphasize competence and gender development in adolescence, researched:
The subjective experience of oppression (e.g., discrimination) elicits feelings of social and psychological dissonance that are fundamentally distressing, and which demand a coping response from the individual. This coping response involves the reshaping of a person’s social identity as they try to make sense of their relationship to the systems of power in which they are embedded. (Rogers et al. 336)
Understanding, shaping, and claiming gender identity becomes a complicated process in a social context that not only emphasizes the rift between the genders, but places “greater inherent valuing of masculinity compared to femininity” (Rogers et al. 336).
Thus, if “to be immersed in any culture is to learn to see the world through the ideological lenses it validates and makes available to us,” immersion in a patriarchal culture involves enacting identity as a response to what is understood and validated by patriarchy (Scott et al. 48). Childhood and adolescence are crucial time periods for establishing identity within the context of ideology since gender is one of the earliest learned social constructs. Patriarchal gender portrayals, especially when popularized and perpetuated throughout childhood, then become key influencers for children to understand gender in the world and in themselves.
And one of the most popular and arguably patriarchal media targeted toward children is the widely accepted fan-favorite Disney Channel Original Movie, High School Musical (HSM). Its overwhelming success prompted two immediate sequels and a more recent television spin-off. Its millions of viewers leave no room for doubt on its substantial impact on 2000s tween pop culture (Keveney). The plot follows basketball jock Troy and nerdy brainiac Gabriella, “star-crossed” lovers bonded by a passion for singing, who must break free from the status quo of high school social archetypes to express their multifaceted identities. Its overarching message is one of liberation, urging the audience to dissolve clique-y, stereotypical perspectives. Yet, this theme questionably does not seem to apply to gender, since it has very different ways of embodying and quantifying femininity.
Sharpay Evans – pink “It Girl” and literal drama queen – is the story’s antagonist, actively combating Troy and Gabriella from invading the school’s drama program. Sharpay displays some typically masculine traits, such as aggressiveness, assertiveness, and strong-minded outspokenness, breaking the aforementioned patriarchal script (Stevenson 107). However, she does so with a conflicting, excessive performance of femininity to compensate, leading her to “serve a hegemonic rather than subversive function” (Stevenson 109). Sharpay’s outward appearance of the epitomized girl is actually so inflated that it is essentially treated as a source of absurd comic relief, since she is pointedly decked in glittery pink everything, including her microphone and locker. Especially when she’s placed in complete opposition against the film’s leading female, Gabriella, (possessing a quiet personality and more muted femininity), Disney’s intentions for gender portrayal can be challenged. Why does Disney’s polarization of femininity have to correlate to its protagonist-antagonist relationship? Why are their contrasting traits shown as good versus bad and right versus wrong, perhaps even natural versus unnatural? Even if Sharpay’s gender performance is an over-exaggeration, Disney’s acceptance of femininity can still be called into question. The High School Musical cinematic universe in which she resides, one often naively valorized by youth as the “dream” high school reality, reveals itself to be one that not only ridicules femininity, but antagonizes it.
Thus, as young viewers correlate antagonism with Sharpay, and Sharpay with hyper-femininity, discrimination against femininity can easily be internalized. Maura Leaden in her thesis, “Unlearning Disney,” speaks on her consumption of Disney Channel and its effect on her own gender identity. Leaden has described HSM as a treasured childhood “safe-haven” (24) but revisiting its themes with a feminist lens has complicated her attachment; she now realizes that it had “restricted…aspects of [her] femininity, sexuality, and emotions” (26). She recalls a confusing and discouraging “inadequacy” since her tween self did not know where to fall in comparison to Disney’s femininities (35). There was no compromise in Disney’s opposing portrayals; girls were either bashfully quiet or unashamedly loud, smart scientists or over-the-top fashionistas, “innocent maidens” or “sinister witches,” (35) so Leaden had serious difficulty choosing how to embody her femininity and sexuality:
The binary, being either [good or bad, right or wrong, natural or unnatural, alluding to Gabriella and Sharpay respectively] erases the possibility of anything in between. There is no image of young women negotiating a sexuality that is self-possessed and self-satisfying, yet also kind and loving and profoundly mutual. (51)
The messages HSM and Disney send have clearly had a prevalent effect in Leaden’s capability to understand her own gender identity, since her self-comparison, as a form of self-discrimination, has inhibited her from comfortably claiming femininity.
While Leaden’s anecdotal experience with HSM is highly personal, it is not necessarily exclusive. Common Sense Media, a research-based organization focused on educating parents about media/technology’s effect on kids, studied gender-typed television portrayals and how they contribute to children’s worldviews (Ward et al. 6). Their extensive research revealed that watching TV and movies that reinforce specific gender roles leads children to have much stricter beliefs about what their gender can and should do (Ward et al. 38). Overall, popular media consumption has shown to be a prominent force on ideology and identity formation of children. Taking this data and HSM’s popularity into account, Leaden’s experience with HSM can be read as more than just a singularity; HSM’s confusing and harmful ideologies about femininity could easily permeate the ideologies of all its younger viewers, like it did with her. Leaden’s experience can be seen as a microcosm, encapsulating something much larger about general tween culture surrounding Disney Channel.
Adolescent ability to claim femininity then becomes relative to mainstreamed views of patriarchal gender performance like HSM’s, since “the degree to which a [feminine] identity is stigmatised or valorised, seen as part of a wide spectrum of possible femininities or regarded as aberrant, will depend on the norms and understandings prevalent” (Paechter 24). If the most HSM has to offer in terms of femininity is just pink villainy, how can girls be expected to understand, lest embrace, their own femininity? Considering how Sharpay and everything she represents is antagonized, even accepting femininity can be a struggle since “girls who experience discrimination might come to perceive that identifying with femininity is a liability” (Rogers et al. 337, emphasis added). So, as a response to social spheres existing in reality, reinforced by patriarchal mass media which is constantly devaluing and opposing the feminine, girls might be led to relatively understand femininity as a hindrance, a burden, a fault–something to dissociate from. In fact, Adam Rogers, and other scholars focusing on gender socialization, conducted a longitudinal study with adolescent females to observe the effects of gender discrimination on gender identification. An inverse relationship was found between the two: “Girls who reported more frequent experiences with discrimination…reported one year later that…they felt less similar to other girls, and that they felt more similarly to boys” (Rogers et al. 344). It seems in this case; femininity has become an object to reject.
As girls navigate this negativity surrounding femininity, because there is so little gray in between the black and white of patriarchy’s masculine and feminine, it makes sense that these over-essentialized identities are all they have to compare themselves to. Carrie Paechter, who studied embodiments of femininities in elementary schools, describes how children’s understanding of femininity has been divided into two “co-constructed oppositional identities”: the girly-girl and the tomboy (225). With patriarchal standards that make femininity and girly-girl-ness so easily recognized as a liability, seeking refuge in masculinity, and enacting a tomboy identity becomes a coping mechanism of “psychological protection” (Rogers et al. 344). This rejection might even be viewed as an act of resistance from femininity’s patriarchal connotations; for example, being a tomboy might act as a way to reject the more traditional values of banishment (hooks was punished and banished for displaying masculine traits) or of hegemony (Sharpay covers her masculine traits with extreme femininity and is ridiculed for it); embracing masculinity might disprove the patriarchal stigma that girls are weak.
However, taking up a tomboy identity in spite of femininity only reinforces harmful patriarchal values. After all, the “central aspect of claiming [a tomboy] identity” (Paechter 228) is not just embracing the masculine, but also “embracing the expulsion of the feminine” (Paechter 231). Embracing masculinity is so harmful in this sense since it is constructed only in contemptuous relationship to femininity; femininity is further devalued, othered, and misunderstood. A binary then forms within the binary, further splitting genders and gendered traits into unnatural, seemingly irreconcilable divisions. Girls believe they “hav[e] to opt for one identity or the other,” since gender is perceived as mutually exclusive (Paechter 234). Psychological terrorism still persists, since “de-identifying with their gender collective may only serve to further isolate girls” from their emotional well-being and gender identity (Rogers et al. 345). This confusion, this dissonance within female identity remains a result of the patriarchal “‘tortured value system’” that cyclically contorts both genders (Real qtd. by hooks 6).
So perhaps the only way to claim natural-ness is through wholeness. Revisiting “Understanding Patriarchy” and hooks’s anecdote, she describes the marbles she saw while playing with heavy awe: “All sizes and shapes, marvelously colored, they were to my eye the most beautiful objects” (hooks 1). These marbles should be understood as a larger metaphor in hooks’s narrative, symbolizing the rich and colorful diversity that lies within gender, which should be accessible to all, regardless of whether they “belong” to one and exclude the other. hooks combats the patriarchal tyranny that denies access to this “openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being” (6). She suggests the only way to be free from the unnatural oppression of the patriarchy is by accepting natural identities, discarding the expectations and even existence of gendered roles, and accepting all forms of gender expression. It is paradoxical to create through destruction, so gender should not be constructed through denying or rejecting, but through welcoming and embracing.
Patriarchy shatters identities, forcing their broken shards into dictated gender roles. Gender expression must be liberated to actively combat popular media’s patriarchal gender norms. Accepting gender unconditionally is the only way to achieve whole and natural inherency. We must pick up, recollect, reclaim the pieces of gender we’ve lost, the pieces patriarchy has taken from us, and piece ourselves back together.
Works Cited
hooks, bell. “Understanding Patriarchy.” Louisville Anarchist Federation Federation, 2010.
Keveney, Bill. “Can ‘High School Musical’ Do It Again?“. USA Today, 2017.
Leaden, Maura, “Unlearning Disney: Developing a Feminist Identity While Critiquing Disney Channel Original Movies.” 2020. Rollins College, Honors Program Theses.
Ortega, Kenny. High School Musical. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment, 2006.
Paechter, Carrie. “Tomboys and Girly-Girls: Embodied Femininities in Primary Schools.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, vol. 31, no. 2, 2010, pp. 221–235.
Rogers, Adam A., et al. “Is My Femininity a Liability? Longitudinal Associations Between Girls’ Experiences of Gender Discrimination, Internalizing Symptoms, and Gender Identity.” Journal of Youth & Adolescence, vol. 51, no. 2, 2022, pp. 335–347.
Scott, Tony, et al. “Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies.” Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Styles. Utah State University Press, 2016.
Stevenson, Lesley. “‘Bad Bitch’ or Just a ‘Bitch’: The Mean Girls of High School Films.” Through Gendered Lenses, vol. 7, 2016, pp. 105–122.
Ward, L. Monique, and Jennifer Stevens Aubrey. “Watching Gender: How Stereotypes in Movies and on TV Impact Kids’ Development.” Common Sense Media, 2017.