Real Women Have Curves - Essay Example

In the film, Real Women Have Curves, the main character Ana Garcia is an American-Mexican teenager who lived in the Latino community of East Los Angeles where the traditional view on gender roles still dominates their family values. This was the case of Ana who was asked by her mother to instead work in her sister’s sewing factory to help in the family. Her ambition of going to college through her scholarship at Columbia University was not given importance because, in traditional Latino family values, women are not expected to be highly educated. They are just supposed to take care of the family and do menial jobs such as factory work to help the family. It is the male that is expected to go to school to provide for the family which is very common among patriarchal families.

The female gaze in the film Real Women Have Curves may not have a sexual connotation of looking down at women as mere sex objects but it still bore traditional thinking and relegation of women to be subjects of their families, husband, and community. It is imposed on women albeit in the film it was not imposed by a male figure but Ana’s mother played a surrogate male figure subjecting Ana to gender roles of being domesticated and not aspiring too much. This kind of female gaze that is associated with gender oppression is Laura Mulvey in her work "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” where the concept of gaze and its dynamics is said to be a manifestation of an imbalance of power between the male and the female where a male dominates the female. There may be no dominant male figure in the film but gender oppression was imposed on Ana by making her work in a sweatshop instead of pursuing her dream of going to college. In the film, Ana’s mother played a substitute “male gaze” because she imposes on Ana the traditional male-oriented patriarchal values of not getting an education. This is evident in Mulvey’s theory which is Freudian in origin where she “breaks scopophilia down into an active part, which is always male, and a passive part, which is always female. Women are the objects that are looked at” (Finzsch). In Mulvey’s male gaze, the male’s patriarchal role is extended to the film where the male imposes a hegemonic gaze on Ana as a subject of the family to do their wishes even against her will or own ambition. This produces an imbalance relationship as women are reduced to an object of two distinct modes of male gaze where they became Madonna in male perspective (voyeuristic) or whores (fetishistic) or in this case, a female servant.

Those film examples were chosen to support the analysis of this paper because it relates to my stature as a student. While it may be a given to many students to go to college to improve themselves and prepare for the future, there are women who have to fight for it because they are subjected to the female gaze which oppresses or in the film’s case, prohibit them to pursue their dreams.