Identification of Gender Stereotypes in Compulsory Secondary Education: Double Analysis of Animated Feature Films

Abstract

Children's and youth animated films make up an artistic and social reality that shows, even today, sexist topics and stereotypes on a visual, linguistic and musical level. This represents an educational problem, given the relationship between stereotypes and the acceptance of discrimination and violence against women. With the objective of investigating to what extent the adolescent public is capable of identifying gender stereotypes, qualitative and quantitative methods were used that included the validation of a perception questionnaire, with a construct validity index of .764 and answered by a non-probabilistic sample of 84 adolescents, belonging to three natural groups enrolled in Compulsory Secondary Education. Of the 90 children's and youth animation cinematographic works that they selected for their work, the 23 that met the criteria (animated feature films released since 2009) and that were worked on by more than one team were subject to a complementary analysis through the application of the instrument validated GS_5x4 for the analysis of gender stereotypes in audiovisual products. The results show that, of the stereotypes existing in these films, the adolescent audience was only able to identify the stereotypes present in two films, especially physical or fashion issues, followed by audiovisual issues. Likewise, it was difficult for them to identify the breaks in stereotypes in the emotional-sexual sphere. The analytical rigor and the large corpus compared to similar studies provide solidity to the results. According to the above, they are the two remaining dimensions (attitudinal/social) where there is the greatest risk that the society in formation will assume gender stereotypes and, with them, the social injustice related to these areas, hence the importance of working on their identification from regulated education, especially in high school classrooms given that its students are at a critical moment of forming their identity and learning about relationships between sexes.

Keywords: animated movies, teenagers, gender stereotypes, equality, educational
field.