Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from Inside Out
2002; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 79; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2161-430X
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
Resumo* Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from Inside Out. Sean Griffin. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 292 pp. $18.95 pbk. In the last seventy-plus years, the cartoons, movies, television shows, radio programs, and theme parks created by The Walt Disney Company have collectively been marketed and probably construed by most consumers as solid values. Sean Griffin interprets the Disney Company's values image as part of a white, middle-class, patriarchal, heterosexual mentality that suffuses Disney product-from the earliest cartoons of the 1930s; to the television shows of the 1950s; to the motion pictures of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Yet even from its earliest days, Griffin argues, it has been possible for homosexual viewers to what he categorizes as lesbian, gay, and queer themes into Disney characters and plots, deriving enjoyment and a sense of pleasure in alternative identity-maintenance from these subaltern readings. As Griffin puts it: animated shorts, feature films, documentaries and television series promoted a specific version of gender, sexuality and the body-'naturalizing' the heterosexual patriarchal family structure and replacing sex with romance. Yet ... not every viewer at all times accepted and endorsed Disney's representations of the conventional norms . . . (opening) the possibility that gay and lesbian subjects watched and enjoyed Disney product from a completely different standpoint than was usually discussed in popular journals and newspaper reviews. Griffin's central goal in this frequently insightful but conceptually disparate book is to document how gay, lesbian, and nonheterosexual (queer) readings of largely heterosexually-themed Disney products have been possible over the years. Griffin also shows how these alternative readings have changed over time, as Disney productions have themselves matured and become more welcoming of gay and lesbian content. Griffin demonstrates Disney's growing interest in snagging a lucrative gay and lesbian market, as well as a genuine sense of acceptance of the creative contributions of its own lesbian and gay employees, and how these resulted in more diverse (if repressed) depictions of gay and lesbian characters and themes. But Disney productions reflecting more openly homosexual themes were still largely entrenched in an overall heterosexual master theme, meaning any lesbian or gay subtext still had to be problematically poached. Griffin, who teaches film and television courses at Florida Atlantic University, employs close readings of the themes, subtexts, and characters; political-economic, historical, and critical-cultural analysis; a range of documentary and scholarly evidence; and personal interviews to make his case, while dropping in the standard social-constructionist qualifier that his own textual interpretation is ultimately neither more nor less valid than other readings. Each of the five chapters works to show how the studio produced contrasting discourses of hetero-and-homosexuality, both before and after Walt Disney's death. The book progresses in a way that demonstrates how Disney product could be read for alternative sexual messages, and finally how political-economic transformations within the company worked to benefit homosexual employees and to construct more nuanced notions of homosexual content-but always against a heterosexual master theme. As critical history and qualitative textual analysis, the book offers much of value in understanding Disney-the man and the company-as more than just a mom-and-- apple pie corporation, although the often-- sluggish historical background takes up nearly the first fifty pages, unnecessarily delaying the larger, more compelling theme of the book. …
Referência(s)