Stereotypical Characters

Gabby Vicente, Melique Ogilvie, Adan Abdi & Tom Barnard

GenderThe representation of gender is that the characters will be confined to responsibilities that their gender is supposedly associated with i.e.: work, cleaning or partying. The reason for this is that people have created hegemonic views of what certain genders should be stereotyped to do.

The reason why marge is a typical example of gender is because she applies to the typical stereotype of females and cleans and cooks for the Simpson family. The positive stereotypes of marge Simpson is that she is the sensible parent and is a role model for the children characters such as marge and Bart and portrays herself positively.

Ethnicity

The way that ethnicity is represented is that they usually stand out from the normal and appear to be comical characters because their cultures are different from the norm. Apu is a typical example of this because he applies to the typical stereotype of an Asian man which is to work in a shop and also stands out from the rest due to his accent and skin colour.

A positive stereotype of this is that ethnicity brings something new into the scene which will be out of the norm which could teach the audience.

Negative stereotype is that they usually are singled out and don’t like to associate with others and like to keep confined with in their ethnicities

Sexuality• HomosexualityThere are many stereotypes of homosexual people. The main ones seem to be, men being overly flamboyant, funny and hang round with girls. The main action that is associated with gay men is the floppy hand movement.

Lesbians are also seen to be Man-hating, butch and tough, so a lot similar to straight men.

Class & Status

• In American TV cartoon episodes, they often present English characters in their cartoons as being very posh which is a common stereotypical view in America, that all English people are posh.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVBKKZctLpQ Clip from Family Guy

• In views to the American audience, this may come across as funny but to British people this may not be the case as we know not everyone living in the UK are posh and come from different backgrounds.

• They tend to associate “Posh” with the fact that the Queen lives in England

Disability

• A common stereotypical view for a disabled person, would be someone with not clear speaking skills, maybe someone in a wheel chair who cannot participate in normal day to day activities.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siiqwkUnKKY

• Joe from Family Guy shows a classic example of a cartoon character who cannot walk.

Regional identity

Hyacinth Bucket

She would be considered to be from the south of England probably the home counties. This is because she speaks in the queens English and lives a very prim and proper life with certain standards.