Last week’s class article and discussion was very eye-opening to the ways that language and accents impact our views on people foreign to ourselves, from a very young age. The article discusses a multitude of examples in Disney films were accents and physical depictions were weaponized to differentiate the good guys from bad guys, the heroes from the villains. For example, the Wolf in the 1930s Three Little Pigs was clearly drawn to look like an Orthodox Jewish man, with a yarmulke, payots, and a large hooked nose, as well as speaking with a Yiddish accent. This clear example of anti-semitism in a children’s movie demonstrates the simultaneously sneaky and non-subtle ways that prejudice is injected into media. In our own in-class activity, we were tasked with finding four characters from children’s TV shows and analyzing whether they had accents or not. The first character with an accent was Ravi from Disney’s Jessie, who sported a thick Indian accent (despite the fact that the actor himself has none) and was unmistakably the nerdy, un-cool brother who never had any success with fellow boys or girls. While this use of an accent is not villainizing Ravi, it without a doubt communicates to young children that Indian/South Asian accents are uncool and unattractive. In my personal experience as an Asian-American, it has been duly noted that media persistently emasculates Asian men and boys with accents and odd behavior. For example, Long Duck-Dong from Sixteen Candles has been burned into both of my Generation-X parents brains as a humiliating, emasculating character that non-Asian peers seemed to not find any problem with. As a result, I have never watched Sixteen Candles.
It was also interesting to see how femininity is portrayed in children’s media. The example we found was Daphne, from Scooby Doo. While she is a smart, capable women who is instrumental in the gang’s efforts to solve mysteries, she is still relatively demure and speaks in a high, feminine voice. Additionally, she was drawn to be the more attractive than Velma, who is the smarter of the two. Velma is shorter, nerdier, wears glasses, has a more piercing voice in comparison, and is generally more frumpy looking. This simple comparison demonstrates how femininity is strongly attached to looks and voice. This activity pushed me to reflect more about characters whose design and personality more subtly influenced my concept of gender norms and femininity.
