The Movie, Real Women Have Curves Essay

In the play the men are made out as bad guys and Ana is waiting to hear from NYU through financial aid. More so in the movie it is Ana’s mom who does not want her to go away to college and make a better life for her only because she want’s Ana to grow up how she grew up. Ana strives to be an independent woman who wants to find love. But her mom just wants her to find a husband to take care of her.

In, “Real Women Have Curves” Ana’s family has a lower social class, a majority of her family members work hard labor for jobs. They do not have college degrees and they expected just that from Ana. Therefore, they did not have high expectations from Ana educationally because they

She has a talent for storytelling.” Carmen’s motivation is seeing her daughters succeed and be happy in life. She gets there by helping her daughters with whatever like she helped Estela make some of the 100 dresses and she helped Ana by letting her go across the state to a great university at the end of the play. Therefore, she was a strong mother for letting them be free and she was there all along to support them with anything because she didn’t want to be in the way of her daughters’ fantasy. Another character is Ana. She is “18, plump and pretty, sister of Estela, daughter of Carmen. She is a recent high school graduate and a young feminist.” Ana’s motivation is becoming a writer. Ever since her high school year, she had a journal to write in so, when she becomes famous she will publish it and will be her autobiography of her accomplishing her dream. She gets there by getting a typewriter for a contest and she will save up money to go to a University. However, she is one hell of a great sister because whenever she leaves the house, she comes back to help her Estela with her

In her article, Peggy Orenstein touches on how females develop skewed body standards from the media and others around them at a young age. Parents start to worry about their daughter’s body image even if they fall within “the female body standards” based on how others may view them. Children as young as Kindergarten start to gain a sense of “fat phobia” meaning they are afraid of either becoming fat or fatter people. She also writes about ways parents can help combat the body expectations put on daughters, like stressing what a daughter’s body can do, praising accomplishments, getting her involved in a sports team, and volunteering. She incorporates the idea that to children, physical appearance is becoming more prevalent than ones’ characteristics. On page 3 of “Fear of Fatness,” Orenstein mentions how the phases of life are becoming blurred: girls are trying to look like adult women, and adult women are trying to look more like young girls. One of the last things that Orenstein makes clear in her article is that

Throughout the movie Real Women Have Curves, Ana deals with a fairly common issue: body image. Despite being constantly told by her own mother that she is fat and that she’d be pretty if she was skinny, she comes to realization that her body is part of who she is and she should be proud of it, but, really, she is so much more than her weight. She demonstrates confidence in her body and in herself as a person. She sets clear examples of the first two components of the female gaze: (1) Women possess the gaze or do the looking, and (2) Women enjoy and control their own bodies and/or sexuality.

Being on the verge of adulthood and having just left the simplicity of childhood, teenagers have always been particularly complex and enigmatic individuals. While most people struggle to see things from an adolescent perspective, Canadian playwright Joan MacLeod is well-known for her accurate portrayal of teenagers. In 2002, she published The Shape of a Girl, a play related to the dramatic story of a young girl named Reena Virk who was tragically affected by bullying, a characteristic behavior of adolescent development. Throughout The Shape of a Girl, MacLeod effectively exploits the Aristotelian dramatic elements and she uses Reena Virk’s story as well as the thoughts that it produces in the antagonist’s mind to portray both adolescent character traits and behavioral patterns.

In Susan Bordo’s article “Never Just Pictures: Bodies and Fantasies” this is an article that is informative as well as interesting. Bordo mentions celebrity names like Alicia Silverstone and famous dieting products like Citra Lean to introduce the “thin” trend in today’s popular culture. The author explains how today’s society explores different media cites to acknowledge how individuals should appear in today’s world. Advertisements have also become a big part on the reflection of society’s beliefs. Bordo talks about body figures that were once considered normal, have become known as an abnormal appearance. Bordo wants to convince the audience that being thin has become an issue that must be addressed by the general public,

Hands down the play that affected me the most for the rest of this class was Josefina Lopez’s play Real Women Have Curves. Her play is set in a tiny sewing factory in East Los Angeles. Both the film and the play illustrate the issues of gender politics and the Latina immigrant experience. I think another important theme that this playwright also is wrestling with is women and the issues they face with their bodies. Most importantly Latina women who have curves and I definitely feel she is trying to empower those women who feel insecure about their bodies and she is sending a positive message to all the women who are all different shapes and sizes but still beautiful.

When Ana was a junior at the University of Virginia she studied abroad and became associated with a Spanish student. The two became very close over their leftist ideals and political radicalisms. They spent time together during frequent anti-government and anti-American protest. A fellow college student and friend of Ana's stated “After every protest, Ana used to explain to me the ‘atrocities’ that the U.S.A. government used to do to other countries,” and “She was already so torn. She did not want to be American but

The film Real Women Have Curves (2002) by Patricia Cardoso, is a film about a young Mexican-American woman named Ana. Ana lives in East L.A. with her father, sister, grandfather, and her extremely overbearing mother. She has recently graduated high school and is persuaded to apply to college by her teacher, Mr. Guzman. This displeases her mother, as she wants Ana to remain with the family and work in her sister's factory. Throughout the film, Ana goes against her mother by applying to college, questioning the ridicule that women face, as well as explore sexual experiences with a boy from her class.

Real Women Have Curves is a comedy drama Mexican American film with a time of 1 hour and 33 minutes. This film was released in October 18, 2002 in the United States with a box office of $7,777,790 worldwide. Real Women Have Curves was directed by Patricia Cardoso, produced by Effie Brown and written by Josephina Lopez and George LaVoo. This movie it had gained popularity when they win the Awards of the best dramatic film, and in 2002 in Sundance Film Festival they win the special Jury Prize, also received the Youth Jury Award at the San Bastian International Film Festival, and many more. Referring to the article paper by Carlos Ortega from the Synopsis on Real Women Have Curves, the film was including in the “31st New Directors/New Films 2002

Real Women Have Curves is portrayed from the perspective of a female protagonist Ana Garcia. Garcia’s gaze is especially empathized during the two scenes in which

“To be happy and successful, you must be thin,” is a message women are given at a very young age (Society and Eating Disorders). In fact, eating disorders are still continuously growing because of the value society places on being thin. There are many influences in society that pressures females to strive for the “ideal” figure. According to Sheldon’s research on, “Pressure to be Perfect: Influences on College Students’ Body Esteem,” the ideal figure of an average female portrayed in the media is 5’11” and 120 pounds. In reality, the average American woman weighs 140 pounds at 5’4”. The societal pressures come from television shows, diet commercials, social media, peers, magazines and models. However, most females do not take into account of the beauty photo-shop and airbrushing. This ongoing issue is to always be a concern because of the increase in eating disorders.

with curves are considered lower class. “When a woman becomes well educated and enters male dominated professions, she is encouraged to look wafer thin, child-like, and as non-sexual as possible”, said Nielson (Nielson, 2000). Well educated, upper women are associated with high class female expectation; following that White upper class women are more at risk to eating disorders than uneducated lower class women. In fact, Nielson states, “More than 90% of the black women were ‘very satisfied’ with their weight, compared to only 45% of the white women. Likewise, only 5%of the black women said they were ‘extremely unhappy’ with their weight, compared to 27% of the white women” (Nielson, 2000). Black women, who are considered to be lower classes,

and female, are often looked to as the ‘ideal.’ Perhaps this is due to their level of success, which the public attributes, in part, to their physical appearance.” (Pitura, 62). This then pairs beauty and success together, this combination creating happiness. This paring makes one without the other insufficient, and therefore making happiness unachievable for the real women in America. Peggy Chin Evans, took a closer look into why women try to achieve this idealized body type, she states, “It is possible that women strive for the thin-ideal body type by associating thinness with positive life success, and it may be this life success that women strive to achieve via having a thin-ideal body.” (Peggy, 209). As girls grow they will try to emulate