By Alexandra Stern, Alexandra Magliarditi, Lauren Wilcox, Meredith Dominguez

Gender and the Disney Princess

Franchise

• Disneyland is the world's first permanent, commercially viable theme park

• The Disney Princess franchise is considered one of the biggest entertainment successes of all time

• 240 million people have seen a Disney movie, and 800 million people have read a Disney comic book or magazine.

Disney in American Culture

• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938)

• Cinderella (1950)• Sleeping Beauty (1959)• The Little Mermaid

(1989)• Beauty and the Beast

(1991)• Aladdin (1992)• Pocahontas (1995)• Mulan (1998)• The Princess and the

Frog (2009)• Tangled (2010)

The Princess Chronology

Cultural Criticism of

Disney

• Enforcing Gender Stereotypes• Struggle between personal desire and

predetermined gender roles• Disney gives young girls unrealistic expectations

about love and feminine roles

Disney’s Gender

Roles for Women

The Passive Princes

s

A Media Example

Sleeping Beauty

• Beauvoir• Enforcing Gender Roles• Changing Representations

The Passive Princess

• “…on the merits of the woman who is ‘truly feminine’ – that is, frivolous, infantile, irresponsible – submissive woman” (36)

Simone de Beauvoir• Men also monopolize politics and industry. Beauvoir

does believe that women receive some benefit form their “allegiance with the superior caste (i.e. men)” (35).

• For example, men provide women with “material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence” (35).

• Men, however, clearly benefit from the most current arrangement.

• Cinderella is forced into a lower caste system by her stepmother. She is only freed from this by the handsome prince. He fell in love with her, not for who she is as a person, but because of her beauty.

• “Thus, woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well please with her role as the Other.” (35)

• “Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego.” (39).

Simone de Beauvoir

Media Examples of Gender Roles in Disney Princess Films

Mulan: “You’ll Bring Honor To Us All”Mulan is made into an object for men. She is dressed up,

her face is painted, and she is made to no longer look like herself, so she can impress the matchmaker. She is

supposed to bring honor to her family by marrying a man of prestige and high class, and she does this by turning

herself into an object.

Important Lyrics

A girl can bring her familygreat honor in one way

By striking a good match

Men want girls with good tasteCalm

ObedientWho work fast-pacedWith good breedingAnd a tiny waist

We all must serve our EmperorWho guards us from the Huns

A man by bearing armsA girl by bearing sons

Importance of Diversity

• Crenshaw• Disney’s Response to Criticism

• The problem with identity politics is that it… ignores intra group differences… many women[‘s experiences] are often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class” (1)

• Economic background not an emphasized issue in Disney movies, but the relationships between race, class, and gender are important

• Intersectionality = the ways in which, in this case, Disney princesses reside at the intersection of race, gender and culture

• Crenshaw uses her intersectionality concept to “articulate the interaction of racism and patriarchy generally” (12)

Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality – Kimberle

Crenshaw

Disney and Race• Disney’s early princesses were fair-skinned women, inspired by traditionally

European fairy tales• Change in the 1990s• Disney receives criticism for its portrayal of Arabs in Aladdin, Native Americans in

Pocahontas• Article: “Disney accused of racism for demonstrating that they’re not racist

Disney’s Take on Economics and

Culture• Cinderella and the importance of class and economic freedom

• Disney’s portrayal of Arab, ancient Chinese, and Native American culture

The Idealized

Body• Bordo • Feminine Body Type• Using the Body to Represent Good

and Evil

Susan Bordo• “Here we encounter another reason for anxiety

over soft, protuberant body parts. They evoke helpless infancy and symbolize maternal femininity as it has been constructed over the past hundred years in the West. That femininity…is perceived as both frighteningly powerful and, as the child becomes increasingly to recognize the hierarchical nature of the sexual division of labor, utterly powerless.” (208)

• “Nineteenth-century hourglass figure, emphasizing breasts and hips – the markers of reproductive femaleness –” (208)

Decreasing Waistlines

-Concluding Remarks-

Where is the Disney

Princess Franchise

Today?

Examining Gender

Roles for Disney

Princesses Over the

Years

2010 1959

The Changing World of Disney