Girlfight - Overcoming Gender Stereotypes Essay -- Film Movies

Girlfight - Overcoming Gender StereotypesIt goes without saying that a persons gender, racial and social origins influence their participation in sports. Particular races and genders often dominate certain sports. Afri stub Americans, for example, lam to dominate football and basketball, season Caucasians tend to dominate ice hockey. The same holds true for gender as well. Football is an entirely male dominated sport, while horseback riding, gymnastics and figure skating are much more female oriented. How and why did these divisions come about? Determining the origin of gender goes beyond the scope of this paper, however one can speculate about how gender classifications and stereotypes affect ones role in the sports arena.The movie Girl Fight did an excellent byplay of depicting how one person dealt with and overcame gender stereotypes. The movie depicts the struggle of a high school girl, Diana Guzman, to overcome gender buriers and become a boxer. Her mother having died when sh e was young, she lives with her have and younger brother, Tiny. The father forces the son to take boxing lessons because he feels that it is important that Tiny know how to defend himself. However Diana cannot even tell her father that she wants coin to take boxing lessons. Her father constantly hassles her about behaving more like a girl i.e., wearing skirts and giving more consideration to her appearance. He does not think it at all important that Diana should know how to defend herself as well, even though she obviously lives in the same dangerous neighborhood as her brother. In fact, her father has extremely traditional stereotypes of male and female. He believes that the male should be the defenderstrong, powerful, and dominant... ... among the first people to break out of these roles Diana leaves herself open to ridicule. This can be seen in the strained relationships she has with her best friend and others in her high school. Moreover, because Diana defies the gender stere otypes she has a hard time being accepted by both boys and girlssociety does not know how to treat her since she does not fit into any of its categories.Diana is an excellent illustration of the many struggles of women to find a place for themselves in sports. On an individual level, defying societal stereotypes is extremely difficult. The buriers that the first person must overcome are often extreme. However once the first person breaks down those buriers, it becomes more and more easier for others to follow in their footsteps. Dianas struggle demonstrates both how far women have come and how far women still have to go.