Event Title
Gender Construction in Disney's 'Beast Fable': Judith Butler's Theory of Performativity and Bambi
Location
Panel 13: Kearney 325
Start Date
27-10-2012 10:15 AM
End Date
27-10-2012 11:45 AM
Description
According to Louis Althusser, cultural discourse is informed by ideology and perpetuated by the institutions—the ideological state apparatuses--with the power to publish an idea in the public domain that then informs the conscious and unconscious “imaginary relation” one has to the “actual conditions of material existence,” including one’s idea of oneself. Without doubt the Walt Disney Corporation is one of the dominant ideological state apparatuses of the last eighty years, though in fact Disney’s influence begins as early as the late 1920s. One of the ways in which the Walt Disney Corporation naturalizes a particular ideological value system is in the animated feature film’s representation of gender. Using Judith Butler’s work on gender representation as the critical framework, I attempt to analyze and interpret key representations of gender in anthropomorphized animal protagonists within Disney “beast fable” films from 1942-2003. This essay takes Bambi (1942) as its primary focus. With little representation in this area, the animal films present an opportunity to extend a gender and ideology studies which will examine moments of ideological resistance with regards to sexuality and gender normativity in Disney animated features.
Additional Files
Gender Construction in Disney's 'Beast Fable': Judith Butler's Theory of Performativity and Bambi
Panel 13: Kearney 325
According to Louis Althusser, cultural discourse is informed by ideology and perpetuated by the institutions—the ideological state apparatuses--with the power to publish an idea in the public domain that then informs the conscious and unconscious “imaginary relation” one has to the “actual conditions of material existence,” including one’s idea of oneself. Without doubt the Walt Disney Corporation is one of the dominant ideological state apparatuses of the last eighty years, though in fact Disney’s influence begins as early as the late 1920s. One of the ways in which the Walt Disney Corporation naturalizes a particular ideological value system is in the animated feature film’s representation of gender. Using Judith Butler’s work on gender representation as the critical framework, I attempt to analyze and interpret key representations of gender in anthropomorphized animal protagonists within Disney “beast fable” films from 1942-2003. This essay takes Bambi (1942) as its primary focus. With little representation in this area, the animal films present an opportunity to extend a gender and ideology studies which will examine moments of ideological resistance with regards to sexuality and gender normativity in Disney animated features.