Walt Disney: Gender And Gender Roles In Disney

I. Introduction

Disney is one of the biggest powerhouses in the media world through its control of many television stations, motion picture studios, and ABC, which has this influenced much of the cultural learning that goes on today (Giroux & Pollock, 2010, p.156). This control gives the Disney corporation a very influential position and has allowed them to develop an ideological hegemony by selling “Disney Magic” to children. Parents are coerced into letting their children watch Disney films due to the prominence of the films in our culture but also because of how this corporation has become ingrained into the socialization of children. In particular, Walt Disney movies are one of the main ways that children unknowingly are taught the values,

The movie begins with a female, who longs for more from the life that she is living. There is then some sort of conflict that leads to the entrance of the male figure into her life and they begin to create a relationship. This relationship is in some way threatened by some external force, in which, the female needs the male to save her from. At the end of the movie, the female and male live happily ever after, after resolving the conflict. This repetitive plot line is in the first Disney Princess movies, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella and in more recent releases like Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and Tangled. Through these media images reinforces the gender binary of heteronormativity to young children (Palczewski & DeFrancisco, 2014, p. 228). Heteronormativity is how social institutions, such as Disney, “reinforce the presumption that people are heterosexual and that gender and sex are natural binaries” (Palczewski & DeFrancisco, 2014, p. 16). Thus, the formulaic plot line that Disney Princess films follows communicates to children that the normal and only sexual orientation is heterosexual and more specifically, to young girls, that marrying a man is the only way in which her life can be