The Gender, Language and Animation Resource at Lancaster University was created to help you learn more about, as the name suggests, gender and language in animated films. Whether you’re interested in analysing how Disney characters use language in gendered ways, how villains are represented in DreamWorks movies, or how translations of dialogue change gendered representations in Studio Ghibli films (and more), the blog posts and how-to-guides on this site will in due course provide some help! The bibliography, which will continue to grow and become more and more annotated as time goes on, should also help you find useful literature to deepen your knowledge in this area.
A little history: back in 2004, I wrote a masters assignment (supervised by Jane Sunderland) looking at gender stereotypes in the film Shrek. This later turned into a presentation, a working paper (Unger & Sunderland 2005) and eventually a book chapter (Unger & Sunderland 2007). When I returned to Lancaster in 2010 as a lecturer, I thought that gender stereotypes in animation would make a great dissertation topic for our Linguistics and English Language undergrads, and it turned out that a lot of students agreed – I think I had 32 students interested in the first year (but unfortunately could only supervise around 6!). Over the years I have continued to offer this topic, and have supervised a range of fascinating and often very thought-provoking dissertations.
However, I have realised over the years that there isn’t really a textbook that explains how to do this. Each year, students have to figure out more or less from scratch how to analyse the films they are interested in, and bring together lots of different frameworks and approaches to help them. Even though I can give them some pointers, this is quite time-consuming, so I thought it would be great to have an online resource to help start them off. And then I thought this could be interesting for a wider audience of students and other researchers new to the field, including A-Level students working on projects related to gender and their teachers… and so, GLARe was born! Together with Jasmin Awoodun, who worked as a research intern in summer 2022, I started GLARe and hope to continue adding to it as the years go on! Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions!
Johnny Unger, Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University