Legally Blonde Gender Stereotypes

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Legally Blonde is an American romantic comedy film released in 2001. It was directed by Robert Luketic, and written by and Kirsten Smith and produced by Marc E Platt. The story of the movie is an adaptation based on the novel Legally Blonde, by Amanda Brown. The film stars Reese Witherspoon as a Elle Woods, a fashion major and a sorority girl who follows her ex-boyfriend to Harvard Law School to earn a law degree in an attempt to win back his love. Even though the film Legally Blonde is one of the modern commercial films that can be can be considered an example of feminist work that showcases achievements of a successful woman, it still contains many elements created by the patriarchal society to separate man as the superior sex and female …show more content…
Therefore, the treatment of female protagonist raises the questions; will the society ever evolve to producing films that truly will eliminate the male gaze? Will women ever be portrayed in films same as male protagonists without stereotyping? That is, even though the main protagonist in Legally Blonde is a woman, she is subjected to typical female stereotypes somehow diminishing her achievements. In addition, it also raises a more fundamental question as to what needs to be done to dissolve the two-gender constraint so women can break through the artificial barriers set by the society, and find self-empowerment and individual …show more content…
In it, Mulvey states that film typically depicts women as objects, rather than the possessors, of gaze. This is because the underlying construct in the control of the camera (and thus the gaze) are factors such as the as the assumption that the assumed target audience for most film genres is heterosexual men. While this applies to the film the 70s, when film protagonists were overwhelmingly male, the base concept of women as objects to watch and men as spectators still applies today, despite the growing number of movies that feature female protagonists that are targeted toward female audience. The movie “Legally Blonde” has a female protagonist in Reese Witherspoon who plays the title role. The primary target audience for this movie is female; the story is of a sorority fashion major who becomes a successful Harvard law graduate; the film overwhelmingly caters to the male gaze in the projection of the female protagonist, and objectifies her character to a great
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