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The Little Mermaid Semiotic Analysis

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The following essay will be a semiotic analysis on the theme of dominant gender ideologies and representations in mass media. Furthermore, the essay will explore how modern cultural and society’s expectations of gender can derive from mass media, especially from what one could of the first exposures to fairy tales. Furthermore, the Disney film The Little Mermaid (2015) will be used as a case study in order to explore how Disney circulates dominant gender representations through stereotypical heteronormative characters. The character of King Triton will be the main focus in order to analyse the film’s dominant gender representations by exploring his physical appearance, clothing and accessories. Later this essay will describe his role in the film, The Little Mermaid (2015).
The construction of gender roles and ideologies begins from a young age as one could argue both by social norms and by an early exposure to mass media (Samara Green 2012: [sp]). Classic fairy tales, either in their original form or the mass production of them, create some of the first expectations of gender roles (Green 2012: [sp]). Taking into account, the level of media consumption from an early age in a media savvy-culture, one could argue that, a large corporation such as Disney play a huge part in constructing society’s gender roles. According to Adrien-Luc Sanders (2014: [sp]), the Walt Disney Corporation has been one of the most successful multinational mass media corporation since 1923 and largest

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