What is your relationship to Barbie or any kind of children’s culture (like Disney?) How does Christensen validate or challenge your views?
Christensen’s perspective is largely the same as mine when I look back on my own experience with children’s media. Growing up, I was reading a wide variety of books, but my movie consumption was largely through Disney movies. Though I didn’t realize it until I was older, I was being taught even then that…
1. Romance is the thing that will save you if you are a girl.
2. Girls should dream of romance. Romance will get you your dreams. (Cinderella gets freedom from an abusive family through a man. Rapunzel gets freedom from her tower through a man. (Still one of my favorite movies though!) Jasmine gets freedom from the expectations of marriage through a man.
3. Main characters and important girls and women are skinny and conventionally attractive.
4. A man can love you even if you can’t speak (Ariel) or if he doesn’t know anything about you (Cinderella) or if you’re asleep (Sleeping Beauty) or dead (Snow White), and that’s true love.
As Christensen says, “Women’s roles in fairy tales distort reality.” There are many more subtle and not-so-subtle messages that I was taught through these movies, but when you are raised on them, it’s difficult to see where your desires end and the cultural messaging begins. For example, do I want a romantic relationship because I really want that specific form of partnership, or because I’ve been taught to value that above all else, or a mix of both? It’s uncomfortable to contemplate those questions because if the answer is different from what I’ve believed my whole life, it requires a reevaluation of my past and my plans for the future. Thus, I strongly related to Christensen’s student’s discussion of the dissection of dreams.
However, I also grew up on movies like Mulan, which challenged gender roles in a multitude of ways, and Frozen, which explicitly placed sisterhood and familial love over romantic love. Those are the taps on the class that demonstrate the importance of challenging, unconventional art in moving society forward. More recent Disney movies have also moved into unpacking complex parental and familial relationships beyond the stereotype of an evil stepmother (who is usually contrasted with the princess in a tale-as-old-as-time example of the Madonna-Whore Complex). Encanto is an example of that. Ultimately, when characters are treated as “just people” is when (I believe) we get the stories that stand the test of time. Not as boys or girls, not as a caricature of a certain race, but just as people experiencing life. Of course, the exception to this is when a person from an oppressed group wants to tell the story of their oppression, in which case identity does matter.
4. A man can love you even if you can’t speak (Ariel) or if he doesn’t know anything about you (Cinderella) or if you’re asleep (Sleeping Beauty) or dead (Snow White), and that’s true love.
As Christensen says, “Women’s roles in fairy tales distort reality.” There are many more subtle and not-so-subtle messages that I was taught through these movies, but when you are raised on them, it’s difficult to see where your desires end and the cultural messaging begins. For example, do I want a romantic relationship because I really want that specific form of partnership, or because I’ve been taught to value that above all else, or a mix of both? It’s uncomfortable to contemplate those questions because if the answer is different from what I’ve believed my whole life, it requires a reevaluation of my past and my plans for the future. Thus, I strongly related to Christensen’s student’s discussion of the dissection of dreams.
However, I also grew up on movies like Mulan, which challenged gender roles in a multitude of ways, and Frozen, which explicitly placed sisterhood and familial love over romantic love. Those are the taps on the class that demonstrate the importance of challenging, unconventional art in moving society forward. More recent Disney movies have also moved into unpacking complex parental and familial relationships beyond the stereotype of an evil stepmother (who is usually contrasted with the princess in a tale-as-old-as-time example of the Madonna-Whore Complex). Encanto is an example of that. Ultimately, when characters are treated as “just people” is when (I believe) we get the stories that stand the test of time. Not as boys or girls, not as a caricature of a certain race, but just as people experiencing life. Of course, the exception to this is when a person from an oppressed group wants to tell the story of their oppression, in which case identity does matter.
Hi Annika! Thanks for the insightful post! You pull a lot of important points that often hide beneath the surface out into the light. Your list of deeper lessons about romance and love from older Disney movies was illuminating to me, especially point 4. I just read that comment to my wife and 4-year old daughter, we're sitting and eating breakfast at the time of writing. Thanks for starting a conversation! We don't spend as much time watching the old movies - mostly because their are scary scenes for really young kids. And the newer films just sit more palatably with not just us as parents but the kids as well.
ReplyDeleteI had a similar reaction to point 4 as Dana did - great conversation starter.
ReplyDeleteI love your point/pondering question about where our desires end and where messaging begins! While I see Disney becoming more progressive in its feminist approach, those older films still have their roots deep in the soil of our media garden, so to speak. I also appreciate the link to the Madonna-Whore Complex because I was not familiar with this before!