Feminism and Animation
So, I realized that I was trying to approach the re-imagined purpose of this blog totally wrong. The point of doing this blog for this class is to utilize the platform of blogging to get my thoughts and ideas down in a distributable format and push it out there for review. I had been looking at it like I was doing a series of wikipedia edits on Feminism in Futurama. I think getting locked into that format choice was what was really hampering me from being able to produce any real entries towards this assignment. Hopefully, this more casual approach will be more effective.
The first question some may ask is "Why focus on animation?" To that my answer is pretty straightforward, if in two parts.
1) Because I personally find animation and cartoons interesting.
2) Because they are one of the most direct mediums in which messaging of any sort can be delivered to young, impressionable minds
This means that animation serves as a strong vehicle to impart young women with very basic ideas of gender roles and feminist goals. This implicit indoctrination follows them, at least since the 1990s, from their youngest years all the way through college for many. I know very few people in my generation that do not watch cartoons of some sort with regularity, and most of the people I know tend to lend greater credence to those messages they have been exposed to regularly. This means that cartoons and animation serve as a excellent means of showing people of my generation what roles women and men should have and how those can be expressed.
The first question some may ask is "Why focus on animation?" To that my answer is pretty straightforward, if in two parts.
1) Because I personally find animation and cartoons interesting.
2) Because they are one of the most direct mediums in which messaging of any sort can be delivered to young, impressionable minds
This means that animation serves as a strong vehicle to impart young women with very basic ideas of gender roles and feminist goals. This implicit indoctrination follows them, at least since the 1990s, from their youngest years all the way through college for many. I know very few people in my generation that do not watch cartoons of some sort with regularity, and most of the people I know tend to lend greater credence to those messages they have been exposed to regularly. This means that cartoons and animation serve as a excellent means of showing people of my generation what roles women and men should have and how those can be expressed.