Practice essay
Cultural and gender expectations are shown in bend it like Beckham
2002 between the main characters Jess and Jules. Jesses mother is
placing strong culture and gender expectation of being Sikh Indian
women, while Jules a typical British girl, has a mother who is a very
feminine woman and expects for her daughter Jules to be feminine.
Jules however, has decided what she wants to do and it is for her to
play soccer. This is demonstrated in the bra shop scene, the backyard
scene, the training scene and the wedding scene to refer to the
examples of culture and gender expectations.
In the bra shop scene of bend it like Beckham it particularly explores
gender expectations. The scene opens with an extreme close up of
Jules mother pumping up a bra insert for Jules. Her mother is
wearing feminine clothes; Jules in the other hand is a tomboy. When
the wide-angle shot shows the store you can see that it is
predominately made up of feminine items, this shows that society
looks at casual feminine clothes as normal but Jules doesn’t care. She
makes her way to the sports bras where Jules mother says, “Not the
sports bras. They are so plain they don’t enhance”. She says this in an
annoyed.
Cultural and gender expectations are placed on Jess in the training
scene of the film. After Jesses mother found jess playing soccer in
shorts at the park with men she is not happy. The high angle shot
shows jess looking up to her mother and the picture of Babaji in the
background that shows how mad she is. She says to Jess, “now exams
are over you’ll learn a full Punjabi dinner, meat and vegetarian”. This
shows the cultural expectations of her cooking a proper Sikh Indian
dinner and also the gender role of being a Sikh woman. Now jess
knows that the only way she can play for the all women’s team is to
lie about having a job for the summer to be able to make it to matches
and training with her team. The lyric of the song “move on up” that
plays during this scene shows how Jules and Jess are moving on up
from their gender and cultural expectations, this is also shown as
they are running past the two Indian women jogging through the
park.
In the wedding scene it explores both gender and culture
expectations. You can see how Jules’s mother decides to support Jules
by watching her play the grand final. As the film switches between
the final match and the wedding of jesses sister you can see how
although jess is wanting to be playing, she has decided to put her
family first. As Tony takes jess to talk about the rest of the game, her
father turns up. Her father has diced that Jesses choice is more
important then his own and let her go. Jess says, “I don’t want to ruin
it for them. It doesn’t matter”. Her father says, “ you aren’t smiling at
all, you look as if you at my funeral”. Jess made it to final and goes to
take a penalty shot. The wide-angle shot shows family members, this
is a metaphor for how she has to get past the cultural expectations
and bend the ball around the players in the game.
In conclusion the expectations of culture and gender are quite
evident as shown in the Bra shop scene, the backyard scene, the
training scene and the wedding scene. Both girls face significant
pressure form their families to act a certain female way and to adopt
the expectation for culture form their mothers. The film enables us to
see the role families play in the gender expectation of girls in modern
times of 2002.