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Children's Literature in Education

, Volume 46, Issue 2, pp 127–144 | Cite as

“Nearly Everybody Gets Twitterpated”: The Disney Version of Mothering

  • Lisa Rowe Fraustino
ORIGINAL PAPER
First Online:

Abstract

This essay makes the case that during the American cold-war era, Disney’s animated film classics worked in tandem with their True-Life Adventure series of nature documentaries to reproduce traditional mothering ideology under patriarchy. The animated films do this not by animating the realities of marriage, childbirth, and mothering work for girls to model after but instead by idealizing the dream of romance that leads to the making of the traditional patriarchal family. Through the use of anthropomorphism in the True-Life Adventures, scripts of manhood and motherhood are represented as natural and essential rather than socially constructed. Because of their continual promotion as “timeless masterpieces” and their widespread popularity, Disney animated films and documentaries produced before the second wave of feminism therefore continue to seduce girls toward their own erasure and disempowerment under patriarchy.

Keywords

Disney animated films Disney True-Life Adventures Disney mothers Reproduction of mothering Feminine mystique Ideology 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of EnglishEastern Connecticut State UniversityWillimanticUSA

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