Gender Roles In Avatar The Last Airbender

In general, when someone speaks, they reveal something about gender, either by upholding or subverting social expectations and ideology about gender. By analyzing the linguistic forms of a conversation, we can gather information about the ways in which gender ideologies permeate language. Examining a conversation from the media can additionally reveal something about how gender is viewed and upheld or subverted in our society. In the animated children’s show Avatar: The Last Airbender, there are both characters who challenge gender roles and some who uphold them. In a conversation from the episode “The Blind Bandit,” the characters perform gender, either through subverting expectations, as seen in Toph and Aang, or upholding them, like Sokka and Katara, and reveal their gender ideologies through their speech, views which are influenced by their backgrounds and societal expectations.
In Avatar, some people, called ‘benders,’ can telekinetically control an element of
His approach is more direct: he uses the powerful word ‘war,’ a choice that may be part of his performing masculinity: men are viewed as strong, so they wouldn’t shy away from talking about war. He also may have been trying to make Toph uncomfortable to persuade her to help. Then, there’s a sudden shift in Toph’s tone. She raises her voice, both in pitch and volume, to call the guards to scare away the trio. When they scatter, Toph speaks timidly to the guards, sounding much more like one would expect of a twelve-year-old blind girl. The raised pitch is more feminine, and she says she “thought” she heard someone, which implies that she was mistaken, just a silly little girl, and she says she got scared, because that’s what society, particularly her protective parents, expects of her. This drastic change reveals how people may perform their gender differently the expectations of them given their current