Gender Stereotypes Of Gender In Horror Film

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Dario Argento once said, "If they [women] have a good face or figure I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man”. In every clichéd horror film that holds it’s own originality, there will always be a pattern found within the characters and plot. Given the characters, horror films are known for a killer and a victim. The killer holds the role of being a man and the victim being a woman. This suggests a dominant superiority character for the male-killer and a submissive inferior character for the woman-victim. Moreover, the plot of horror films essentially is based on misogyny, the degrading depiction of women who struggle to survive in a world of male hierarchy. Thus this phenomenon proves the woman representations …show more content…
More specifically, it is a concept that describes how societies determine and manage sex categories; the cultural meanings attached to men and women’s roles; and how individuals understand their identities including, but not limited to, being a man, woman, transgender, intersex, gender queer and other gender positions. Gender involves social norms, attitudes and activities that society deems more appropriate for one sex over another. Gender is also determined by what an individual feels and does. Gender, like all social identities, is socially constructed. Social constructionism is one of the key theories sociologists use to put gender into historical and cultural focus. Social constructionism is a social theory about how meaning is created through social interaction, through the things we do and say with other people. This theory shows that gender it is not a fixed or innate fact, but instead it varies across time and place. Gender norms (the socially acceptable ways of acting out gender) are learned from birth through childhood socialization. We learn what is expected of our gender from what our parents teach us, as well as what we pick up at school, through religious or cultural teachings, in the media, and various other social
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