The World of Disney Extends Far Past Disney World

I've only been to Disney once, and I wasn't enchanted by it then. I didn't fall in love with Prince Charming or want to wear a sparkly dress with a beautiful tiara because of it. I didn't want Timon and Pumbaa to be my best friends and I didn't pretend to wear a seashell bathing suit and comb my hair with a fork by the pool when we came home. No. These little pieces of me already existed long before that family vacation we took when I was in second grade. I was Cinderella for Halloween three years in a row, and then had to pick someone else to be because the costume no longer fit. In fact, we still have at least twenty VHS tapes of my favorite Disney movies, rewound and re-watched so many times I could recite every single one today, twenty years later.

The first time I was ever asked to critically analyze one of my beloved Disney movies was during my freshman year of college, in an Introduction to Literary Study course with Professor Joseph Zornado. The choice of what we wanted to analyze was completely our own - and I figured what better reason would I ever have to watch Disney's new movie Enchanted over and over again for an entire weekend - as an adult?! (Little did I know that a few summers later I'd get to watch TWO Disney movies in TWO days in a graduate-level course....an actual dream come true!) I'm not so sure I "resisted" the critical analysis, like Christensen suggests many students do upon first viewing (193), but I'm also not so sure that I was overtly critical of the film, rather just analytical. The fact that the film tied in several aspects from different Disney princess narratives in a story about Amy Adams as a princess in real life had me hooked from the start. My very naive and very weak attempt at "critical analysis" was merely a commentary on the differences that Disney was starting to make in regards to the princess/heroine narrative.

It wasn't until I started to study education with Dr. August the following semester that I finally started to question the "social blueprints" embedded within these beloved Disney texts, in turn questioning my own upbringing and beliefs. Much like Christensen's student Justine, I felt some "discomfort with prying apart [my] identity and discovering where [I] had received [my] ideas" (192), but I also knew that I wanted to teach my students to question the world around them...and in order to expect that of them, I knew I would have to do the same, starting with the world I had grown up in. This past semester, I asked my students to analyze several of the cartoons they were familiar with and had grown up watching, using a gender lens. Many of their responses were similar to those of Christensen's students: "I will never be able to watch TV the same way again," commented one of my students, while others were appalled that they had never noticed or been asked to notice/think about/question gender stereotypes...and now they couldn't stop noticing them everywhere. Like Christensen, however, I wondered where I could then take them...

As a group, one of the most interesting things we came across in our critical endeavor was an article about a woman in Sweden who was sick of the narrative that princesses and superheroes impose on young children. What did she do? She created her own set of coloring books, "Super-Soft Heroes" and "Super Strong Princesses," to redefine what it meant to be a hero or a princess (or both!). My students loved telling new stories to go along with the new images they were presented with, and they didn't stop there. I had one student explain gender stereotypes to a worker at Build-A-Bear when her younger brother picked up a pink bear and was told to "go get a blue one because that's the boy bear." Another student came running up to me in the hall to talk to me about the gender stereotypes he noticed in the book he was reading.

Over the years, especially now that I am an adult (and more removed, teaching in a middle school setting), I have come to appreciate Disney's attempt at creating narratives with true heroines, like in Frozen and Brave, fighting for more than a Prince and a sparkly tiara - fighting for, rather, a sister and a mother, fighting to protect the kingdom and individual freedoms. Merida was one of the spunkiest and most genuine princesses I have ever seen (although I think I may still like Frozen a teeny tiny bit more - sorry, Dr. Bogad!), and I felt my heart smiling when I thought of how inspired I felt at 25 watching her stand up to her mother (and tradition) for her independence, imagining how much more influential she would even be in the life of a young child.

I'll admit...I will always love Disney, especially the princesses, and cherish the part of my childhood that they belong to (or, truthfully, that belonged to them). Cinderella is still my favorite princess, and I still get sappy when I think of romantic fairy tales. Blame the romantic in me. On the other hand, I think having conversations with our students and asking them to pick apart these narratives that are so comfortable and familiar to them is crucial to helping them grow as learners and as critical consumers in today's world.