Preview

Film Review Xxy

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1092 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Film Review Xxy
Name Movie: XXY
Name Student: Anneloes Engels

XXY

The movie is about a girl, Alex who is hermaphrodite and lives in a quite place in Uruguay with her parents. One day old friends of her parents are coming with their son, Alvaro. Their visit has a purpose; to transfer Alex with a surgery to a girl (the father of Alvaro is a doctor). At the moment they are coming Alex stopped taking her medication and a decision has to be made soon…..

The movie has a quite heavy subject; hermaphrodite. It is also the first movie with this subject, but the movie handles this subject in a perfect way. The movie is not too heavy, the subject of the movie is already heavy enough. This is a very strong point of this movie.

The sex of Alex is based upon biological criteria; ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, her chromosomal typing is; XXY.
The environment of Alex see her as a woman/girl because from the day she was born her parents raised her as a girl; her parents gave her the identity/gender of ‘girl’. However her parents let her free in choosing her own identity because they did not choose for a sex operation at her birth. In this way Alex is able to choose her own gender at a later age. I like this because her parents have not taken her choice away.
So the environment knows not better than that Alex is a girl; Alex displays herself as a girl. Alex has to take in account the normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for her sex category. Alex has to play a certain role in order to be linked with her sex. Off course this brings ‘role conflicts’; Although she has developed breasts and has a girl’s voice, we eventually discover that she has a penis. Her masculinisation may not yet be visible in facial hair and other signs, but her male aggression has already landed her in trouble. As the story begins, she has overreacted to the curiosity of a close male friend about her sexuality and has broken his nose. So she has also behavioural verbal responses of males.

Another

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Money, T., Ehrhardt., 1972. Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, The differentiation and dimorphism of gender identity from conception to maturity. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. [Online] Available from: http://www.gender.org.uk/about/ [cited 3 January 2009]…

    • 2216 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    She talks about the struggles that she had understanding her gender identity through middle school, along with how she came to understand her gender through a friend who explained the term "Bi-Gender".…

    • 441 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    As a young girl, the narrator, holding on to her carefree spirit and strong sense of individualism, is unaware of the constraints of her gender. Although she is the main character, the narrator is not given a name.…

    • 1241 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    To begin the piece, Devor takes an educational approach by giving us some background on why gender is important and how we learn about gender through our first few years of life. “Gender identities act as cognitive filtering devices guiding people to attend to and learn gender role behaviors appropriate to their statuses.” (Devor 527) As toddlers we learn the differences between female and male. When we begin to determine which gender we are, our attitudes and actions quickly take shape. According to Devor, children by the age of two usually understand that they are members of a gender grouping and can correctly identify other members of society. I was astonished to learn that our brain can process information like that at such a young age. Devor made me think back to my childhood and how I acted as a little kid. One memory stood out to me. A good friend of mine when I was about five or six years old was a girl and we always played with dolls. On a rainy day when Allison and I were playing inside, my good buddy Jack Scherer came over and secretly told me that playing with dolls was for girls. Knowing that he was a boy, I immediately stopped playing with dolls and converted to the “cool” thing to do, play Pokemon. Because of this experience, I quickly came to the conclusion that this statement of Devor’s is true.,…

    • 1154 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    However, no one can completely change someone’s innate being. In Jennifer Ouellette’s book Me, Myself, and Why A peculiar case of sense of self is analyzed. David Reimer was a child that had a failed circumcision leading to the removal of his penis. The doctors recommended a sex reassignment surgery including hormone supplements to turn David into Brenda. However, “Brenda” rejected all feminine activities and continued to display boyish activities (Ouellette 187). Kitty too rejected the gender role thrust upon her by Stew. She was a lesbian, not Stew’s stereotypically perfect, heterosexual little princess. This illustrates that Stew’s expectations for his family would never be fulfilled. The roles he designated for those around him did not keep his family “perfect,” they only destroyed his relationships with his wife and…

    • 1213 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gabby has always felt like she was in the wrong body. She had always felt awkward and uncomfortable in her own skin. She knew she belonged in a boy’s body. Gabby has been into girls for has long as she can remember. She’d always dress like a boy, act like a boy, think like a boy, deep down inside she was a boy and wanted to become one since she was a little girl.…

    • 648 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Boys Party

    • 586 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The girl attempts to deny the emergence of her femininity though the impersonal use of…

    • 586 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Parents dress the girls in pink and the boys in blue. Once children are cognitively capable, they themselves begin to contribute to the conformities of gender identity. Every parent hopes and prays that they will have a “normal” child, one that fits into today’s societal standards. This is why there are so many issues and complications that arise when an adolescent begins to push the boundaries of gender identity. There are invisible borders of what is and isn’t accepted by the general public. Gender determines how you dress, how you look, and how you act. However the most disturbing of gender determination is the fact that it controls how you feel, whether you are sensitive and emotional like a girl or tough and aggressive like a boy, you’re feelings are constantly being judged on a scale of appropriateness. Gender conformity is everyday behavior that conforms to norms and expectations that are related to a gender. Gender nonconformity is behaviour that is considered unusual and abnormal for a gender.…

    • 798 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    It is a common practice to assume that gender is biological aspect of human lives, but in social sciences “gender identity [is] not a “thing” that people “have,” but rather a process of construction that develops, comes into crisis, and changes as a person interacts with the social world” (Messner 2009:120). As Messner (2009) explained, gender identity is not static but is rather a dynamic process that all individuals experience through social interactions. When I was young, my parents always referred to me as a “tomboy” because I often played with boys and was comfortable wearing boy’s clothes. Likewise, I knew that I was a girl. However, I preferred to play with boys because their games were more enticing and intriguing. Since I was little,…

    • 240 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Being a boy or a girl seems a very certain thing referring to the “sex” of the child which is determined by the child’s physical characteristics. Actually, children are able to decide to behave like a boy or a girl or something in between when growing up by their personal internal definition and interpretation of self which is their “gender identity”. This identity does not completely depend on their biological sex though most children’s gender identity aligns with their biological sex. Sometimes it is also influenced by expectations of gender from children’s parents, grandparents, teachers and some other previous generations and the society. Expectations from different people in different societies differ to each other and children of a society are often punished or rewarded for the degree to which the social roles they play accompany culturally constructed expectations of gender which is their “gender role”.…

    • 1417 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the short story “Boys and Girls”, Alice Munro portrays the difficulties of the narrator and her brother. Throughout the story, the narrator faces inequality of being a different sex compared to her brother Laird and the effect this has on her as she is growing up. The narrator goes through many experiences that she has to understand herself as she is growing up. Alice Munro shows how gender labeling, different relationships within the family and the narrator’s innocence plays a controversial role in growing up. Munro’s story “Boys and Girls” interprets growing up to be a necessary experience in every child’s life.…

    • 818 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Everybody in today’s society experiences gender throughout his or her life. However, as a female, I have personally always been affected by the social construction of gender in my day-to-day life, whether I was aware of it or not. Gender is such a prominent aspect of life for everyone that we barely recognize the effect it has on us, especially when it’s constructed within our own families.…

    • 565 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Gender Identity is a crucial part of a child’s development because it helps children to see themselves in relation to others. A child develops their sense of gender at a very early age, for most children gender identity begins to develop between 18 and 30 months. After a child has developed their sense of gender they begin to realize that gender is stabile; girls grow up to become woman and boys grow up to become men. By the time a child is the age of four or five they have come…

    • 1865 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Best Essays

    Gender Roles and Marriage

    • 3719 Words
    • 15 Pages

    The development of gender awareness is fundamental for our sense of self and is also predominant in any assessment made of another person as from birth on people respond differently to males and females. Gender identity can be seen as one of the earliest social categories that children learn to apply to both themselves and other people. This is suggested in Schaffer’s (1996) definition where gender identity is the correct labeling of self and others as male or female. There are three main theories that have been explored which all suggest multiple ways in which gender awareness is developed: Bandura, Kohlberg and the Gender Scheme Theory. Firstly, Bandura (1977) notes that the idea that social influences clearly plays a very significant role in the development of gender identity. Socialization makes children aware that there are differences between male and female, and that these sex differences matter. These social pressures also suggest there are specific genders stereotypes that they are expected to conform to. Nevertheless, it can also be seen that biological and cultural changes interact with these social factors, thus defining how an individual eventually develops the gender identity of a man or a woman. An alternative theory, expressed by Kohlberg (1966), suggests that children are not the recipients of any physical information from social experiences and therefore they search for specific regulations which will explain the way in which males and females are expected to behave. In addition, gender tends to be the first thing a parent wishes to find about their child. It can be suggested that from then on the child will be treated depending on the fact that they are male or female. This is shown in research attempting to clarify the development of sex roles including: preferences of toys, personal…

    • 3719 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Good Essays

    Throughout the short story “ Boys and Girls”, Alice Munro takes us through a young girl’s journey to break away from the typical life of a woman. Munro suggests that although we would like to define our identity, it is society who defines who we are.…

    • 358 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays