Sydney Series

Released in 2004, Mean Girls has remained one of the most popular movies of the last two decades. On the surface level, Mean Girls is a teen comedy referenced a lot in pop culture, but looking deeper, it is a critique of the stereotypes of teenage girls. The protagonist’s dilemma is straightforward, Cady wants to fit in at her high school. She is granted the chance to join her school’s popular clique the “Plastics”. The plastics embody the stereotypes of teenage girls; they gossip, shop excessively, fight over boys, and wear pink. Although she doesn't intend to befriend them, Cady unintentionally mirrors their behaviors and becomes a mean girl herself. Reflecting on her actions, Cady concludes that all girls in her school are mean girls because they all want to fit in, even if it means feeding into stereotypes. The movie resolves with the girls reconciling and learning to be themselves. At first, the female characters are entirely based on stereotypes of teenage girls. Howeve...

Recall the last movie, TV-Show, or book you have read. Were there any characters that had a disability in it? More importantly, did you notice that there was a lack of disabled representation in the media you were consuming? In a society that treats disability as an oddity, it is rare for disabled people to see themselves represented in the media. Oftentimes, writers and TV-producers choose to exclude disabled people in their movies, books, and TV-shows because they are fearful that including a character that does not fit into the mold of a “normal” person would make the audience uncomfortable. On other occasions, a disabled person will be included, except the character is an offensive caricature of a disbaled person. Because good representation of disability in the media is scarce, disabled people feel even more alienated from a society that prefers able-bodied people. Fortunately, there has been an increase in accurate diasbled representation in the past few years. Netflix's hit ...