Abstract
The moment for complaining about Disney’s ignorance of ethnic diversity seems to have passed when the release of Aladdin in 1992 proved to mainstream America that Disney’s protagonists are not always white. In the years since, Disney films and television have continued to disavow themselves of their reputation for presenting racially selective characters and culturally exclusive subjects. The question of Disney’s racial politics is especially pertinent to the Disney Princesses, who (since 1992) stand shoulder to shoulder on Disney advertising materials like a mixed-race sorority whose philanthropy consists of cheerfully role-modeling a racially diverse America. Disney’s nonwhite Princess movies— Aladdin, Pocahontas, Mulan, and The Princess and the Frog—have yielded a variety of critical responses, from arguments that Disney represents non-white people and non-Western cultures only in pursuit of an economic bottom line to more critical assessments that find an abiding racism in Disney’s representation of minority cultures and races. In considering Disney’s presentation of young female protagonists and their racial and cultural identities, it is important to note that all Princesses come from their own specific fantasy pasts that are symbolically “medieval” in the sense that, for all of them, the modern world has not yet arrived. Even The Princess and the Frog, the most “modern” of the Disney Princess movies, is set in a fantasy version of New Orleans-of-the-past: an American medieval fantasy where a prince, an evil wizard, and a mystical shaman are as likely to appear as a jazz band or a steam boat.
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Notes
For example, Scott Schaffer, “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories,” Postmodern Culture 6.3 (1996): 1–34.
Erin Addison, “Saving Other Women from Other Men: Disney’s Aladdin,” Camera Obscura 31 (1994): 5–26.
Henry Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999),
and Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Williston, VT: Blackwell, 2001).
Lee Artz, “Monarchs, Monsters, and Multiculturalism: Disney’s Menu for Global Hierarchy,” Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions, ed. Mike Budd and Max Kirsch (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), 75–98, is a good example of this kind of criticism.
Dorothy Hurley, “Seeing White: Children of Color and the Disney Fairy-Tale Princess,” Journal of Negro Education 74.3 (2005): 221–32, at 226.
Leigh Edwards, “The United Colors of Pocahontas: Synthetic Miscegenation and Disney’s Multiculturalism,” Narrative 7.2 (1999): 147–68, at 151–52;
and Gary Edgerton and Kathy Jackson, “Redesigning Pocahontas: Disney, the ‘White Man’s Indian,’ and the Marketing of Dreams,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 24.2 (1996): 90–98, at 94–95.
Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, “The Princess and the Magic Kingdom: Beyond Nostalgia, the Function of the Disney Princess,” Women’s Studies in Communication 27.1 (2004): 34–59, at 53.
For example, see Scott Schaffer, “Disney and the Imagineering of Histories”; Henry Giroux, The Mouse That Roared; Wasko, Understanding Disney; and Heather Neff, “Strange Faces in the Mirror: The Ethics of Diversity in Children’s Films,” The Lion and the Unicorn 20.1 (1996): 50–65.
Mia Towbin, et al., “Images of Gender, Race, Age, and Sexual Orientation in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films,” Journal of Feminist Family Therapy 15.4 (2003): 19–44, at 40.
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© 2012 Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein
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Mitchell-Smith, I. (2012). The United Princesses of America: Ethnic Diversity and Cultural Purity in Disney’s Medieval Past. In: Pugh, T., Aronstein, S. (eds) The Disney Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137066923_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137066923_12
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