The movie Mulan was released in 1998, where the story opens with the Great Wall of China, where ShanYu (leader of the Huns) invades China for the sake of control and conquest. Mulan, the daughter of a famous but disabled war veteran, sets out to meet the matchmaker, but things go horribly wrong. He simply cannot maneuver properly and fails the test of what is expected of women. There is a draft for men and in the end she decides to take her father's place by cutting her hair and pretending to be a man to do so. Meanwhile, the ghost of her family's ancestors sends help to Mulan who ends up being Mushu, a small dragon with a spotty track record. After joining the ranks and a few battles later, she ends up saving the emperor from Shan Yu and making her father proud. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay To set the stage a bit, Mulan brilliantly describes the links between sex, gender, and status. The opening song "Honor To Us All" is sung by all the characters as Mulan prepares for her fate regarding the matchmaker's visit. The song introduces the gender politics of the narrative world where in it they sing “A man who bears arms, a girl who bears children”, in relation to the service of the emperor. Gender norms that function within a culture that is based on militarism distort what it means to be a human being in relation to other human beings. This manifests itself in Mulan in two ways, tying together the symbols of gender and status with the symbol of family. So we have the emperor as a sort of patriarch father figure to the nation. He is like a grandfather and has a sort of analogue relationship with his grandmother. Their analogues, for example, use knowledge of family power to provide sexual guidance to the couple at the end of the film. The emperor says "You don't meet a girl like this in every dynasty", and Grandma Fa says "Would you like to stay forever?" after Mulan suggests dinner. Gender roles have a familial dimension, such as having children, as well as a political dimension, such as children being allowed to bear weapons. The Fa family is a kind of miniature state of the whole, in which gender plays an important role in every aspect. Militarism with its codes of honor and shame binds all parties together. Shakespeare and his friends knew in the Renaissance that genre is a performance. Mulan as a film is a kind of Shakespearean comedy. Mulan as a Disney film, surprisingly, doesn't place as much emphasis on a romantic plot unlike others. The story revolves around a series of gendered performances by Mulan, whose persuasiveness and lack of persuasion create holes in the performances of those around her. The story begins with Mulan's unconvincing performance of extreme femininity with the matchmaker. This is a dramaturgical struggle, right down to the makeup, the costumes, the choreography. So, even if she doesn't convince, she is still a woman. Her dramaturgical failure is not due to the fact of being biologically a woman, but to the fact of being marriageable. The point is that being a woman and being marriageable in this context are seen as the same thing, but Mulan's failure implicitly proves this to be false. There is nothing natural about anything she is asked to do. As mentioned above, she failed in a performance of extreme femininity. Maybe it's not about romance, but about power and hierarchy. The stakes throughout are based on honor, which in the film is what you get after playing your role according to all political, cultural and moral norms. The opposite is shame, which isat play throughout the film. The majority of the film follows Mulan's second take on gender, this time with masculinity in its extreme form. Musho obviously tries to give Mulan direction on how to deal with men, and what's great about the film is that it sets up the match-maker scene and the boot camp scenes as analogous to each other. Both men and women are asked to perform something unnatural or toxic, a set of norms that alienate people from their own desires and those of others. The problem with militant masculinity is that it holds itself together with a lot of misogyny. So Mulan's performance ultimately becomes unconvincing, as is clear from Chi Fu, which brings us to male performances of masculinity. Chi Fu is indeed misogynistic, but he's really somewhere in between when it comes to the way he interprets gender codes. This is illustrated during the swimming scene when she goes out and squeals... she says just before "I don't squeal like a girl." All three friends Ling, Yao, and Jin Po, who are insecure about their various masculinities, have no problem at the end of the film when they change their gender interpretation to dress as drag queens to help Mulan save the emperor. On the other hand, Shang is consistent and resistant to change even as the others embrace their gender slippage. What this film does is identify and represent the growth of personal identity. Mulan wants to look in the mirror one day and recognize the face she sees. We discover who he really is, he is intelligent, someone who can defy the classic clichés of manliness, in exchange for ingenuity, and complete tasks that other physically stronger men could not. Mulan as a film and as a character conveys how powerful personal identity is, even if you need to dress up to achieve it. He uses the army as a platform, not because he feels like fighting, but because he sees it as a way to risk his own life, rather than that of his ailing father. The irony in all this is in a film that places much of its emphasis and song on combat, war, and all the various traits needed to succeed in both. Having a female protagonist in the process is what creates this resonant story of self-discovery and self-acceptance. I think this is where feminism comes into play more than anywhere else. Too many people (men) accuse feminism of being an oppressive hate group when feminists are a minority. In reality, it would be about treating both genders with equality, meaning that the unique and invaluable ways in which both can contribute to society should be given an equal footing. Mulan is the representation of this. Not only because she is embraced by a male-dominated society, but because she never feels the need to consider herself more important than anyone else. This is gender equality at its best, because both she and her comrades know that it took both of them to win the battle. So ontology and ethics, being and doing, are related to ideas about sex and gender, but in different ways. Throughout the film they are in tension with each other. As a woman, Mulan is subject to being a certain way (ontology) and expected to behave accordingly (ethics). The film's job is to deconstruct the way duty in the world of cinema and real life is understood as the product of ontology plus ethics, when in reality it is something we use to justify the way things they manage women's bodies on the one hand and men's emotional lives on the other. on the other. Mulan challenges both her families and the state's ontological (her sex) and ethical (her gender) demands; Not to create a completely new idea of.