A Study Of Gender Norms And Beauty Myth In Sex And The City

Sex and the City is a popular TV drama. The depictions of the four protagonists and their life have shown us contemporary women's living state and status in the society. On the one hand, they are described as having more power and freedom superficially; on the other hand, they are still faced with a lot of challenges and difficulties in their life because of their female identity. Consequently, the protagonists themselves also present to us a fanciful and colorful life filled with satisfaction, freedom, and happiness, and at the same time, a struggling and anxious psyche, because of the pressure from the society, which makes them feel sorry for themselves sometimes. This thesis starts from this point and attempts to study the gender norms and beauty myth in the life of the women and the effect they have on themselves from a feminist perspective.In her theoretic views about gender, Judith Butler highlights the impact of social order and social mechanism on the construction of gender and on the female bodies. According to Butler, the action of gender is a repeated performance and the repetition is a re-experiencing of a set of meanings that have been socially established.Therefore, gender is the mechanism by which notions of masculine and feminine are produced and normalized. In other words, notions of the distinctions between femininity and masculinity are actually normalized by the society. When the norm works on the female body, it turns the female body into a commodity to be consumed by men and women have to work hard to keep a perfect image to maintain their femininity to attract men's attention and keep male interest on their bodies. In this sense, women are trapped and shackled by the beauty myth and have to use fashionable and fanciful items to make them feel good about themselves and thus objectify themselves without noticing. Besides, the beauty myth also makes the women pay so much attention to their physical beauty that they have to suffer from hunger and other forms of oppression for the purpose of shaping the body.Employing Judith Butler's theories of gender norms and femininity and Naomi Wolf's theoretic arguments about the beauty myth, and through a textual analysis of the popular TV drama---Sex and the City, this thesis aims at elaborating the representation of gender norm in the show, the regulation of gender norm to the protagonists' life and bodies, the influence of the beauty myth to the women's obsession to fashion and the oppression the beauty myth imposes upon the female bodies.The thesis further explores women's internalization of the gender norms and their compromises to the heterosexual norm in the show as the women follow the regulation of the norm and objectify themselves in a way that they don't really recognize. The thesis makes a conclusion that the women in the show are normalized by the gender norms and in consequence, they act and talk according to the norms,and, as a result, cater to and make a compromise to the norms. Moreover, the beauty myth works together with gender norms and makes the women strictly regulated and even oppressed even in a developed society.