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Bend It Like Beckham Gender Roles

Decent Essays

Gurinder Chadha’s film Bend It Like Beckham is a movie that exhibits the cultural clashes that occur between western culture and Indian culture. The protagonist of the film is an 18-year-old daughter of Punjabi Sikhs in London. Jess is enamored with football but is prevented to play by her parents because she is a girl. She joins a local soccer team and makes it to the top of her league. The main character struggles with making decisions due to the moral relativism of gender roles and reverence of elders without trying to upset those who hold certain values to be true. The role of women is seen very differently in every society making gender roles distinct in every culture but relative to the values of each society. In the film, moral relativity …show more content…

For instance, although every culture has established their own gender roles for men and women, each of those roles are informed by values that can be specific to a nation, religion, region, or even a family. In the case of the film Bend It Like Beckham, one can make the case that in western culture and Indian culture it is true that women are generally seen as the ones who are to be homemakers but the cultures are different enough to make it socially unacceptable for Punjabi women to participate in sports. In the case of Jess, being part of a sports team did not only have a social cost, but it created serious conflict with her elders. The protagonist would be met with phrases such as, “Behave like a proper woman” and “Indian girls aren’t supposed to play football” by many of her Indian elders, siblings, and relatives. Jess’s British counterparts faced no social repercussions for belonging to a female soccer team with their parents. On the contrary, many of them would explain that their parents encouraged them to participate in sports. For the British girls, being on a soccer team did not necessarily prevent them from getting married with men that they were interested in. Even though gender roles are generally seen as having large similarities, they are informed by certain moral values that

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