As Cinderella became the archetypal figure of a beautiful girl who gets into hypergamy, her chara... more As Cinderella became the archetypal figure of a beautiful girl who gets into hypergamy, her character was often depicted under the gold digger trope. This paper employs the Constructionist Approach of Representation Theory propounded by Stuart Hall to read the Grimms' and Walt Disney's versions of Cinderella comparatively from the cultural lens, to decipher the varying representations of Gold Digger embedded in the story of the German and its Americanized Disney version. Under the Constructionist Approach of Representation theory, two models, the Semiotic and the Discursive Approaches, will be incorporated to frame the arguments. The study traces the disjuncture in the representation and the culture's ambiguous constructions of the gold digger stereotype by analyzing the difference in narrations and signs projected through the characters' actions, behaviors, and perceptions in both versions. It finds that the stepmother and stepsisters in the Grimms' tale and the projections of Cinderella in the Disney version coalesced into the trope of a gold digger. In contrast, Ashputtel (Cinderella) of the Grimm version could not be associated with the stereotype.
A woman being trashed by words is not a novel thing. The past few decades have archived literatur... more A woman being trashed by words is not a novel thing. The past few decades have archived literature that tells the story of how some women met their fate of being the subject of gossip or ended up being cautionary tales. This paper outlines how women fell from being the admired 'pretty woman' to monstrous figures and perceived as a predator and labeled as 'gold diggers', or 'la belle dame sans merci' the study is done qualitatively through texts such as Gold Digger; The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce by Constance Rosenblum (2000), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925), "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by John Keats (1819). The paper unfolds the sexual politics of males and females in terms of materialism and beauty by employing the Theory of Deviance propounded by Howard Becker in his book The Outsider in 1963 and the concept of Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth in 1990, providing the arguments on the politics of both genders on how the mentioned labels are inscribed.
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Papers by Lalthan Zami